Your recording chain?

[Pete Martin]

Anyone care to share their recording chains? I am especially interested for non pedal players but am interested in pedal players as well!

If possible could you state in your answer if you play pedal or non pedal? Thanks!

[Paul Seager]

I only record at home, mostly sketching ideas or arrangements for my band-mates. I use a Zoom R8 "portastudio".

For acoustic instruments (dobro, acoustic guitar, upright bass) I use an SM57, straight to the R8. I'll add any effects post recording.

For electric instruments (lap-, console- or pedal-steel) I use the SM58 in front of the amp. Most effects will between guitar and amp.

I recently acquired a Tonemaster Twin Reverb which has a DI-out with speaker emulation and I think that will be my electric solution going forward.

Electric bass gets plugged directly into the R8.

To reiterate, I'm not making an album, just ideas so my preference is to get things done with minimal fuss!

[Slim Heilpern]

In my project studio, I have a very simple input chain as I do all effects, amp sim, etc... inside my DAW. I do it this way because I prefer to shape the sound at the mixing stage to best fit it into the mix. I might take a different approach if I didn't trust the audio engineer to make it sound good, but since I'm the audio engineer...

My recording chain:

Pedal Steel (Alumitone pickup) > Telonics VP > BBE DI > MOTU 8pre-ES > Cubase Pro DAW

As for pedal vs. non pedal, when I record my lap steel, I do it the same way.

I've been super happy with this setup, produces a super clean track that I can then play around with using a wide variety of plugins.

- Slim