No effects when recording with multi effects processor?

[louriec]

Hey All, I'm new to recording. I have a vox Tonelab and was trying to use it to record in audacity. Does Audacity not allow the effects you use on your stomp boxes to get transferred to the computer? Whenever I record and everything seems to be on, all I hear is my dry guitar signal, no effects or anything. Are there certain settings that I have to have in Audacity to recognize it or what? Thanks

[steve]

Audacity will record whatever the computer sound system sends to it.
How exactly have you got the equipment connected and the software set up?

[louriec]

I have my guitar going to the input of the effects processor, then the mono out of the processor going to the microphone input of my computer. Audacity is basically set up with the default settings. It's recognizing the guitar playing, just don't know what I have to do for it to recognize the effects. Does Audacity have the ability to understand the signal with the effects or is it a software thing? Thanks.

[steve]

then the mono out of the processor going to the microphone input of my computer

That's probably not ideal. Microphones produce very tiny signals (about 1000 x smaller than a line level signal) so you are probably starting with a massive level mismatch.

Does the "mono out" have effects applied, or is that a "clean" output for plugging into a guitar amp?

[louriec]

Mono out has effects applied when I plug it into my amp. I'm not doing anything different than what I do with my amps, just plugging into the computer versus amp, that's what I didn't know if there was some setting in Audacity I was missing or something. Thanks for any help you all can give me!

[steve]

Audacity does not have an "effect removal" setting - it just records whatever it is receiving from the computer sound system.
If you are playing the sound recorded by Audacity on little computer speakers, it will sound nothing like the sound from a guitar amp.

Is your computer a laptop PC?

[louriec]

Yes

[steve]

In that case you may be best to get a USB audio interface that has stereo line-level inputs.
Laptop PCs usually have poor quality microphone inputs only, and often this input is mono.
There are some sound card reviews here: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9477

[louriec]

So that's the reason it's bypassing my effects processor and I'm not hearing the effects when I play the recording back?

[waxcylinder]

No, as Steve says above Audacity will record whatever is sent to the PC dry or processed. Without knowing how you've configured the effects processor and what its outputs are it would hard for us to ascertain.

The reason that Steve has suggested an external soundcard is that you are taking a line-level output from your guitar/effects processor and feeding that into a microphone input on your laptop, The two are mismatched by an order of about 1,000 normally. With an external soundcard you will be able to feed that the line-level signal and have it digitized and sent on to the PC via the USB.

WC