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Does anybody use guitar effects pedals in your DAW?

I'm wanting to experiment with my plethora of pedals on other sounds besides guitar. You know, get them off the floor and twist some knobs. Use my El Cap to delay some synths, use my SMMWH to do some crazy backwards samples, my Organizer on a piano sample, my Freeze on some horn samples, my Rainbow Machine on who the hells knows what but I bet the results would be magical!

Am I alone or have others trudged this path of audio bliss, or disaster before?

yep, all the time. live's "external effect" module makes this super easy, but you can do it in just about any daw. just need a multichannel audio interface. awesomeness ensues.

when i had the eventide space, i probably used it more as an insert effect in live than i did as a pedal with my guitar.

in short, doooooo iiiiiiiittttttt!

Yay! Glad I'm not alone. I use Reason as my main DAW and I've got the external hardware interface to make it happen. You've encouraged me to proceed. Not looking forward to tearing my pedalboard apart (because I don't want to plug in the entire chain but...). Okay, I'm gonna do it!

plug in the whole chaaaaaiiiiinnnnnnn!!!! it will be superfunawesome!

Believe me, that is tempting.

Have definitely used the send and return on mine. Good times. The only thing that I don't like about doing that is that I play differently depending on my signal chain, so some of those dynamics are lost when I'd record, say, a clean guitar track, and then route it back out later through a bunch of effects.

Yeah, that can be tricky. You can monitor with the effects on but just record a dry signal and then re-amp that later if need be (not always practical and still playing consistently over several takes is hard, at least for me). Recording is definitely a different beast than playing in a live setting. Lots of nuances that can affect things.

Yeah man, I know f-all about recording really. Haven't done much of it at all, but it is definitely a different animal than just jamming out or playing live.

Practice makes perfect. Glad other people are using their effects on other sources. Kinda helps justify prices sometimes by saying 'hey I can use this pedal on more than just guitar!' That's the lie I tell myself anyways, haha.

That's what my bouzouki teacher always tells me when I say I can't get a certain lick. "You want to know a trick for getting that? ... PRACTICE." And then we laugh.

Nice! Practice is the answer to everything. I'm trying to get my hardware and software setup and it's frustrating!

Back when my interface was better than my amp I'd record clean then add the effects later. Easier to twist knobs and find sweet spots that way.

Haki wrote:Back when my interface was better than my amp I'd record clean then add the effects later. Easier to twist knobs and find sweet spots that way.

Definitely. Re-Amping can help along those lines. I've read about some producers who will record a dirty signal from the amp but also record a clean signal direct and then re-amp it later if the need arises. Lots of creative applications for adding effects and like you said really trying things out to find the sweet spot.

seems like that'd be an ideal way to work if you've got the interface/multi-channel capability...then you could potentially track something with your regular amp/setup and also split the signal to an unamplified/clean track which you could mangle as necessary. once i have my setup with a proper I/O interface i plan to try using just about everything in my bag of tricks...running vocals through the PodXT, drum tracks through the pedalboard, fuzz on the piano/clavinet patches on my Casio keyboard, reamping stuff through filters to get the Boards of Canada thing happening, delay on a toy piano, anything i can think of.

dubkitty wrote:seems like that'd be an ideal way to work if you've got the interface/multi-channel capability...then you could potentially track something with your regular amp/setup and also split the signal to an unamplified/clean track which you could mangle as necessary. once i have my setup with a proper I/O interface i plan to try using just about everything in my bag of tricks...running vocals through the PodXT, drum tracks through the pedalboard, fuzz on the piano/clavinet patches on my Casio keyboard, reamping stuff through filters to get the Boards of Canada thing happening, delay on a toy piano, anything i can think of.

The possibilities are endless. Creativity is the only roadblock.