How can I record a guitar direct in and just hear the amp sound through an amp sim without hearing the direct-in clean guitar sound as well? Does that make sense? I don't to hear the clean part, just the part with the amp sound. 

Here's how I have my setup:
I plug the guitar into an ART Tube preamp, this feeds into my Mackie 1202-VLZ Pro mixer. The mixer channel that the guitar is plugged into is unmuted. All other channels are on Mute/Alt 3-4. The main outs on my mixer feed into the L and R channels of my Gina 3G sound card box. Outputs 1-2 from the Gina box go back into my mixer on one of the channels set to Mute/Alt 3-4. The control room strip on my mixer is set to: Main Mix - ON; Alt 3-4 - ON; Tape - OFF; Assign Main Mix - OFF.

Any ideas for how to accomplish what I want to accomplish. Surely there's a way. Thanks!

Mark

Can you please take another stab at explaining what you are trying to end up with?

It sounds like you have a pre-amp boosting your guitar signal, passing through a mixer, and then into your sound card to get it into Sonar.  So far, so good.

But the rest is a bit murky.

Whatever amp sim you are using is most likely an audio effect, applied to the track that is picking up the guitar signal.  That being the case, Sonar will record only the clean signal coming in, and then the amp sim is applied as an audio effect, just like any other.  The advantage of this is that you can tweak your amp sim to your heart's content without having to re-record the guitar this way.

If you are hearing too much of the clean guitar sound, it sounds like you need to adjust the amp sim effect to be 'wetter' - more of the processed sound.

Or, perhaps tweaking the effect or picking a different preset on the amp sim.


If I have misunderstood your original post, please explain it again and I will try to better assist you.

Bob Bone

Wow, that's a lot of routing. What amp sim are you using? Are you wanting to record the dry signal and then play it back through the amp sim plug for furthur tweaking (re-amping), or are you wanting to record the actual processed sound of the amp sim itself? I'm thinking this could be done a little simpler.
 
JTW

My best guess from what I get out of your situation

You will have to monitor from the Main Outs out of Sonar after everything runs through.

I believe the signal Sonar captures will be what is input and not the processed sound but you should be able to monitor with the processed sound.


If you have a good clean recording, you can always tweak or change sims later if you want to. 

If you try to capture it already processed, it will greatly limit your options for that track later

  I'm not familiar with your Gina sound card , If it has direct monitoring you may be hearing the dry signal coming into the Gina along with the processed sound out of Sonar. 
 If this is the case you need to mute or pull the fader down on the mixer for your sound card

In other words

Guitar plugged into your tube amp
Tube Amp to Gina Input
Gina into Sonar
Amp Sim Plug in FX bin
Turn on your Input Echo
Then Monitor from Gina from the Masters Main Out

You might have to play around with buffers if your hear a bunch of latency

Is this what you are looking for

And you need real low latency or the whole thing will be delayed making it hard to play in time. 

I am SOOOO glad it was not just me that got confused. :)

I do not know why he has all of that stuff in the chain of guitar into Sonar.

Perhaps the OP will read our collective confusion and sort it out for us to better help him with his quest?

Bob Bone

Sorry for the confusion. Here's my goal:
Record a clean guitar signal so that I can find just the right amp sound later when mixing. But while I'm recording the guitar part, I want to hear some kind of amp sound that's close to what I'm looking for, and not hear the clean signal, so that it "feels" right while recording it, if you know what I mean.

The whole mixer/soundcard routing setup is just my standard setup for recording vocals and acoustic guitar, using the preamps and phantom power on my mixer for both of those things. So the Art Tube preamp addition is just to boost the clean electric guitar signal going into my mixer, since straight into the mixer doesn't boost the signal enough.

So for the electric guitar track, I insert a favorite amp sim plugin on the track and click on Input Echo to hear the effect live. I can hear the effect while recording, but I also hear the clean signal, which overpowers the amp effect, and makes it almost pointless to use the amp effect while recording.

Hope that clears up my intents somewhat. And thanks for the responses!

Mark

Hmmm  If you have all tracks muted except for the guitar track and it is routed correctly, you shouldnt hear anything other than what is sent through the one track and plugins comming out the other end on the master. (Your amp sim processed signal)

To keep things simple, Id just plug guitar directly into your gina.  If it needs a boost you can use the Tube in-between.