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Post subject: Fender Passport 500-do i need an additional mixer to record
Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 3:49 am
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Joined: Thu Feb 07, 2013 3:42 am
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thanks for help on this.

I'm a guitar player and want to some how utilize the Fender Passport 500, to get a crisp recording of me playing through my Marshall Amp. reason ..i want to maintain my Tone. that's Most important to me. But, when i record myself using my Boss .. i get Too much external interference... Thus want to use this new Passport i got to use at the Open mics i host; for my recording wants .. if i can. can i ? what else, if any thing do i need? Thanks!


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Post subject: Re: Fender Passport 500-do i need an additional mixer to rec
Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 6:49 pm
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The ability to record onto a FLASH drive is not the strongest feature of the Passport 500 Pro. It's nice to have, but it's definitely a side-feature added to a product with a different focus. There's no master volume control for the recording. It just sums up the track volume levels and you get what you get. Maybe it's too loud or not loud enough. You just have to experiment until something works.

If you use a 1/4" TS "instrument cable" (don't confuse that with a "speaker cable" that may look almost identical, though the cable is typically fatter -- the actual wires in the cable are quite different and have different physical and electrical properties and do not substitute well for one another) to connect a "line out" port on your guitar amp to the "line in" of any of the channels on the Passport, you will get the part of the tone in the recording that the pre-amp in the guitar amp gives you, but then if you are into really fine quality of sound, the physical speaker on your guitar amp is also part of the sound.

So, you might want to mic the guitar amp instead of using the "line out" connection. But then, of course, there's the characteristics of the mic you are using. Every time you go from the physical world to the electronic world or back, it affects the tone. The string wiggles the physical guitar responds to that and changes the wiggles, affecting the tone, and the pickups make electricity wiggle, and the construction of the pickup affects the "tone" in the wiggling electricity. The pre-amp changes the tone. The amp changes the tone. The speaker changes the tone. The diaphragm of the microphone changes the tone. The wiring of the driver in the microphone changes the tone (or the construction of the condenser). EVERYTHING affects the tone.

So, if you really care about the tone of your recording, you just have to decide whether you like the tone you get with whatever gear you are using. If the Passport pleases you with a "line level" connection from the guitar amp's "out" to the Passport's "in", great. If it doesn't, try a mic. If that doesn't do it for you, try a different mic. If that doesn't do it for you, try a different recorder. Maybe a dedicated recorder, or maybe a digital interface to a computer.

There's no such thing as pure right and wrong here, and it's very subjective. You might love something someone else thinks stinks and vice versa.

If you use a mic, make sure to isolate it from the floor with a thick towel or something. A mic stand can carry the sound up through the floor and hurt the quality of the recording. You want to isolate any kind of physical connection between the mic and amp so you record the air, not the floor. Put it close enough that the amp is the only sound you record, but keep the level low enough that you don't saturate the physical range of the mic.

Sound is the alternating high and low pressure waves in air. Your guitar amp's speaker pushes and pulls air, which affects pressure in your ears to make the sound you get. The microphone has a diaphragm in it that gets pushed back and forth with those pressure waves, and if the pressure is too great, the diaphragm slams into the edges of how far it can travel, or the electrical wiggling similarly hits the edge of how high or low it can go, and you get "clipping". It's ugly. Unless you like it. I don't, but you might.

The thing is that for recording, the stuff your fingers do on the strings is just one little piece of a long string of factors that end up with the recording you are left with. Professional recording engineers typically don't go to some special school to learn what they know. They just experiment and learn from the experiments. You pay for their experience and their investment in gear. It's not magic.

So, if you aren't going to pay for a professional, you have to be willing to experiment. Maybe you'll stumble into something great. Or not.

But you'll probably have a lot more fun and become more interesting by playing around with this stuff than you would watching TV or playing video games. You already got more interesting just by taking up the guitar, right?


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