Splitting Guitar Signal

What is "best" would be a high-quality active DI box, although a cheap passive DI box or even a simple "Y" cable works fine for electric guitar, and those simple solutions are widely used in commercial recording studios for that purpose.

Cheers.

An Avalon U5 is great for this. Rapco makes cheap DIs that are ok and can be had really cheap. I wouldn't go for a y cable if I didn't have to.

For price/performance I use Behringer http://www.behringer.com. Here's some devices that will do the job. I found them at Musician's Friend ranging from US $20 to $30

ULTRA-DI DI400P
ULTRA-DI DI20
ULTRA-DI DI600P

Why not just go line out of your amp? Surely your amp has a line out of some sort.

What I've noticed is that what often gets degraded with different guitar cables is the dynamic range ... attack ...
...sensitivity to touch.

Active DI as others have stated will be best for this.

Alternately, if you have two inputs on your amp, you should be able to plug into input 1 on the amp, then run out of input 2 into "other". Fenders work this way, as do many others. It's pretty much a 'y' cable arrangement electronically, but may or may not have some resistors between the two inputs depending on the amp.

Thirdly, if you've got any stereo stomp boxes (or tuner) that have a dry output, these will be electronically buffered and suitable for this purpose. If you don't want the sound of the effect, just turn it off.

I often use 3 channels for my bass. One direct, and a splitter sending 2 others to a clean amp and an overdriven one.
I use a standard 1-3 'Y' cable and have no noticable signal loss.

The preamp would be an active DI, just make sure that you can get a pure, unaffected signal through.

One of the neat things about such a primitive, electrically simple instrument as the electric guitar is that "degradation" is a highly relative term. Guitar cables that are produced to audiophile-grade specs are widely-known to cause complaints by guitar players that they kill the tone. Monster cable, for one, has absurdly produced a line of high-grade $50 cables specifically designed with higher impedance and capacitance to recreate with technology what simple cheap guitar cables do for $5.

The thing about electric guitar is that "signal quality" has almost no relation whatsoever to "sound quality," and the overlap is almost completely random. If you wanted to get a pristine transduction of the "sound" of your electric guitar, you could leave it unplugged and put an earthworks reference mic in front of it, and amplify that not through a guitar amplifier, but through a high-quality reference-caliber amplification and speaker system. Save yourself the trouble-- it sounds awful.

The fact is, the "sound" of electric guitar is the sound of super-primitive transduction technology, and there's almost no telling what will sound "better" or "worse." Guitar players have been known to complain that alkaline batteries kill the tone from their stomp-boxes, and it is absolutely true that the most popular amplifiers and guitar cabinet designs and speakers are worlds away from ideal, in terms of signal transmission.

A simple "Y" cable would almost never be used in even a moderate-budget recording session for a vocal mic, but I assure you, no self-respecting million-dollar studio would be without one for guitar.

The Y cable is not the ideal way to transmit audio signal, but with a guitar sound, you might like it even better, and given that meaningful electric guitar signal kind of tops out at about 11kHz anyway, there's little fear of losing high-end "airiness," just fizz. Of course, the best way is try all of these options, but the differences are going to be minimal, and nothing worth losing sleep over.

Cheers.


Yeah! Rock'n'Roll Y cables!!!!
Oddly

Use a good DI Box. I use a Countyman to split the signal so I can combine the mic'd sound with a clean sound that I can run through an amp plug like Guitar Rig or Amplitude. This can be a real session saver if a guitar player just has to use "his sound" even if it sounds like crap in the mix. Most of the time I can use an amp plug in and in the mix they don't even know. Or if I show them, then they start to understand that what sounds good coming out the front of an amp may not always mix well with other instruments.

ORIGINAL: yep

What is "best" would be a high-quality active DI box, although a cheap passive DI box or even a simple "Y" cable works fine for electric guitar, and those simple solutions are widely used in commercial recording studios for that purpose.

Cheers.

Actually the guy from Little Labs suggested a simple Y cable for this situation over at Gear Slutz.
Also, I read somewhere that Stevie Ray Vaughan preferred cheaper cables over the more expensive ones because he preferred the way the cheaper cables sounded for electric guitar.

ORIGINAL: bermuda

ORIGINAL: jamvanman

ORIGINAL: yep

What is "best" would be a high-quality active DI box, although a cheap passive DI box or even a simple "Y" cable works fine for electric guitar, and those simple solutions are widely used in commercial recording studios for that purpose.

Cheers.

Actually the guy from Little Labs suggested a simple Y cable for this situation over at Gear Slutz.
Also, I read somewhere that Stevie Ray Vaughan preferred cheaper cables over the more expensive ones because he preferred the way the cheaper cables sounded for electric guitar.

SRV liked a certain old Electric extension cord.....when he didn't use it, his sound just wasn't right

Which makes perfect sense once you understand the physics of playing a Strat through an overdriven vintage tube amp.

The "signature sound" of the crunchy blues guitar comes from the compression/distortion characteristics of a vacuum tube amp with a vacuum tube rectifier in the high-voltage circuit. As the player hits the strings progressively harder, the peaks of the signal cause the amp to attemp to draw progressively more current through the rectifier. But that heats it up, increasing its resistance (lowering its conductance) which has the effect of rounding off the peaks of the waveform going through the amp, since the power output tubes can't amplify as much the more the current is squeezed off from the rectifier. This isn't the flat, absolute clipping of the waveforms common to transistor behavior, which makes the signal sound like broken glass falling on cement, nor even like the effect of tube amps using solid state rectifiers, which don't choke off the power tube current in the same way. Nor is it like the broad reduction in gain that occurs in a compressor, which reduces gain in accordance with the average signal level as stored in a capacitor with a fairly long time-constant (multiple wavelengths in any case). In the case of the 'classic' sound, it is a reduction in gain that happens on each and every cycle of the waveform going through the amp, changing constantly as the waveform does. It's kind of like a rubber bumper pad at the top of the signal that gets progressively stiffer the closer the signal gets to the limit, and never actually flattens the top of the wave, since there is not enough conductance in the rectifier at the those induced temperatures to power the signal to that level.

When SRV used an old, feeble extension cord to get the juice from the wall, he added its heat/resistance properties to the effect. The more current the amp drew, the hotter the extension cord got, and the lower the voltage that was delivered to the amp, causing a reduction in the current through the rectifier tube, and thus, to the power tubes. It requires a condition that is very delicately balanced once everything heats up to its long-term operational point. At that condition, very small changes in current draw produce corresponding changes in resistance on a signal-wave-by-signal-wave basis that produce audible changes in the waveform shape. The strings are responsive to very sensitive changes in the pressure of the guitar pick, so one gets crunch in direct proportion to effort in a logarighmic scale that makes it increasingly harder to change the sound, as the pressure and loudness increase. The inductive reactance of the ouput transformer, that chunk of iron they call a boat anchor nowadays, also plays a role. I know of no other way to get this sound. It is fundamentally a heat-related phenomenon, and cannot be reproduced any other way, to my knowledge, the many claims of manufacturers and transistor fanatics notwithstanding.

In this case, relevant to another comment above, it is precisely the inefficiency of the vacuum tube rectifier and its heat losses that creates the 'vintage' sound. Those super efficient solid-state rectifiers ruin most of the sonic potential of an otherwise all-vacuum tube amp. That's kinda-like putting a lawnmower carburettor on a big Chevy V-8 engine.

(I thought some of you that don't know what a 600-volt current-laden shock from a wayward screwdriver feels like might want to know about these things. A static discharge at the tip of your finger from a wool carpet in winter may be 20,000 volts, but it doesn't have the current to kill anything bigger than a fly. 350 volts will melt your skin nicely. Trust me. Don't try this at home, kids, because it can very quickly kill you all the way dead and past that. But it also does something wonderful for music that you can't get any other way. Something truly amazing happens when electrons get that excited and are allowed to travel in droves.)

You see, serendipitous accident is not the same thing as random chance.

--thndrsn