Electric Guitar Direct Connection

[DJ Rae C]

Hi Guy's this amy sound like a daft newbie question but I wanted to ask can a electric guitar be connected directly to a 96 i\o interface as audio input or not or would an another interface be required...

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by DJ Rae C

Hi Guy's this amy sound like a daft newbie question but I wanted to ask can a electric guitar be connected directly to a 96 i\o interface as audio input or not or would an another interface be required...

The term you want is "DI" aka Direct Input (or Direct Injection... a term I wish folks would not use :-(). There is a wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DI_unit

What are you trying to do at a high level? And if you are taking DI from the guitar are you planning to run that through an amp sim plugin or reamp though a live amp/cab? Some amps/heads have line level outputs, if you are just trying to capture that outside of a mic/preamp. Again what are you trying to achieve?

What pickups do you have? Passive? Active? Some Active pickups may have enough grunt to drive a line level signal, but you may not want to even if they could (e.g. may be better to get to a balanced close to the guitar).

Normally you take an electric guitar in via a DI (direct input) which classically is a DI box in front of a pre-amp. The DI box does impedance matching, and turns the single sided pickup signal into a balanced preamp input, and may provide extra gain/gain control in front of the preamp.

Some preamps will provide that DI input as a feature in the preamp.

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What preamps do you own? If you don't have any yet what are you looking at? Lots of really nice 500 series preamps have DI inputs. Lots of rack mount ADAT/analog out preamps also have DI inputs.

If the preamp does not have a DI input you will use a separate DI box in front of a preamp. The leading manufacturer of DI boxes is Radial. And they have stuff on their website that explains the different options. https://www.radialeng.com/product_category/direct-box

Lots of books in audio engineering will cover using DIs, the different types etc. Including say The Recording Engineers Handbook by Owsinski (even if he uses Direct Injection). It's not the questions you think to ask, its the questions you didn't even know to ask that will bite you. So a book like that can be a huge help.

[the.engineer]

The 96 I/O is balanced line level only. If you plug a guitar in, you’ll get little to no signal.

As Daryl has said you’ll need a DI interface, either a DI box going via a mic input (a preamp) or a specialist guitar interface.


James Welch
Recording Engineer | Producer
Masterlink Productions

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[jeam25]

Hi as a guitarrist myself i use an Avalon 2022 preamp for my DI electric guitars . I love the preamp on guitars and it is a good DI . Also the bass DI goes through it . It is quite expensive but you can find the mono M5 version and it is very cheap in comparison . This is a pretty good preamp and DI for guitars . Its hard to sound bad with it . You can record everything .

The are a lot of cheapers options out there that would do the work fine
Just giving my experience as guitarrist too .

[JFreak]

Focusrite ISA1 is also good