[LAU] Making great guitar sounds on GNU/Linux

Darren Landrum darren.landrum at sbcglobal.net
Mon May 12 13:33:34 EDT 2008


Arda Eden wrote:
> Hi there,
> I made a project to show that without using any proprietary software and 
> no hardware processing, it's possible to create powerful guitar sounds.
> Follow the link below to see an article and some examples about the project:
> 
> http://www.ardaeden.net/gnuitar/

Hello!

I noticed you dealt with the issue of how to plug one's guitar into the 
computer. I thought I would expand on that explanation a bit.

A large part of the reason why so many people have such problems getting 
good guitar tones out of software is because of impedance mismatch. The 
guitar has a high-impedance output, and going into a low-impedance 
input, which is what typical sound card inputs are, will... Well, it 
either rolls off the lows or the highs, I can never remember which (I 
think it's the highs that go away). Either way, the point is, it does 
bad things to the signal.

The solution is an inexpensive DI (direct inject) box, which has an 
high-impedance (also labeled hi-Z) unbalanced input for the guitar, and 
a low-Z output for the sound card. The vast majority of commercial DI 
boxes satisfy this requirement. Oftentimes, mic preamps also have hi-Z 
unbalanced input so as to double as a DI.

Just thought I'd try to contribute something to the cause. :-)

-- Darren Landrum



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