Guitar Rig recording technique

[fastfourier]

Hi there,

 

I hope someone out there will have a use for this! It's kind of a "solution looking for a problem", but I thought I'd put it out there anyway.

 

I use NI Guitar Rig MFX as an instrument plugin so I can access parameters via MIDI. I've got a Behringer FCB1010 foot controller (UnO firmware, natch) which gets routed through a bunch of stuff in the Environment to make it work how I want, and then straight to the instrument object. I've made 5 "go to" presets and the stompbox buttons turn different effects on and off, the expression pedals do wah/volume, etc. Guitar Rig takes the DI guitar signal straight from an audio input via the sidechain. The output of the instrument channel strip goes to a bus, which is selected as the input of an Audio track.

 

In this way it records like a "real" bunch of pedals and an amp: all the amp sounds, FX etc are printed to the track. This isn't usually a problem as I try to get the sound right the first time! Also it saves quite a lot of CPU as you're not running an instance of Guitar Rig for every guitar part.

 

However, it would be nice to have the clean DI signal recorded as well so I could "re-amp" it at a later date if needed. I could record the clean DI as well as the Guitar Rig bus, but then you end up with two tracks and that's a pain when editing, as you have to edit both at the same time. My solution:

 

Here's what's happening:

 

"Guitar Rig" is the Guitar Rig instance (duh). It feeds Bus 7 (a surround bus). It's panned 0° with the LFE muted.

"Guitar DI" is an Audio track which is always in input monitor mode. It also feeds bus 7 and is panned -180° with the LFE at +6dB.

"Git Rec" is the channel I use to record on - the "target" if you like. The input is from Bus 7 and it feeds the outputs. To record more guitars I just clone (Cmd-D) this track.

 

To get the Down Mixer plugin you have to make a new Surround Audio track, instantiate the plugin on the surround Master that appears, and then Cmd-drag it across. Then you can delete the Audio track you just created.

 

To get the Guitar Rig sound in the audio track, turn up the "L-R Level" in the Down Mixer. To get the clean signal, turn up the LFE. Then you can insert a Guitar Rig and re-amp to your heart's content. You could also save a couple of settings in the Down Mixer: "Guitar Rig output", "Clean DI" for example. As you can see the take folder swiping thing works fine as well.

 

In Audio preferences -> I/O Assignments -> Output, I've got all the outputs set to "---" (off) and using 5.1 (ITU 775) surround settings. This will likely be a huge pain in the ass if you work with surround normally. Also I have to admit I haven't used this in anger yet, although it seems to be working OK at this point.

 

Here's the file - it's set up to take the guitar input from Input 1. Guitar Rig Surround Demo.logic.zip

[Eric Cardenas]

Very nice tip!

Thanks for sharing.

[cnse]

That's a clever technique.

 

You said: "I could record the clean DI as well as the Guitar Rig bus, but then you end up with two tracks and that's a pain when editing, as you have to edit both at the same time."

 

As an alternative, what about this workflow:

Record the DI and the Guitar Rig output at the same time (as normal, non surround tracks.)

Assign them to a group and enabling the group's phase locked editing.

Mute/hide one of the tracks and edit the other.

 

This way, you'd have both tracks, you'd only have to edit one, and your arrange window would be as clean as if you only had a single track.