Was just typing questions that came to my head at the time.
That's how I answer them. We're going to get along just fine.
I want to use my effects pedal with this...
Baby steps. Once the basic recording system is up and running, you can branch out into many options. The player who makes us nuts gets out the new boxes, plugs it all up, it doesn't work and then wants us to troubleshoot all six thousand wires at once.
Audacity doesn't deal with MIDI particularly well, so we can go around those connections. MIDI is machine control. "Press the fifteenth key from the left very hard, hold it for three seconds and then let go. Play it in a 'Grand Piano' sound."
That's like a MIDI command. It's not actual sound. It tells the keyboard how to make the sound. The thing that's weird about it is the sound will change depending on the keyboard. If you email me a MIDI "song" that calls for a Grand Piano and my keyboard Grand Piano sounds awful, then the song will sound awful. One up side is you can choose the instrument at the time of the performance. It's perfectly valid to MIDI perform a delicate violin sonata on a sackbut. In a different key.
People treat MIDI like it's just another sound channel and it's not like that at all.
So leaving off the pedal for a minute, did everything else work? Were you able to get the green lights on the mixer when you played the guitar? Could you hear it in your headphones plugged into the mixer? You do have headphones, right?
As a fuzzy rule, you should avoid turning any of the three sound controls: Gain, Mic, and Main Mix all the way up. Start with each control about 12 noon and I'm expecting you to have to turn them down. Having those controls really different from each other can cause noise problems.
You are messing with three different sound signals. Line-Out and Line-In are close cousins to Headphone level. Many machines can cross those three very easily. Then comes guitar pickup level which is quieter than Line-Level, but it's much more powerful than Microphone level.
Then there's Microphone Level which is atomic-level tiny. I call it the delicate butterfly of the sound world. You usually need special cables, electronics and considerations to make a microphone work without problems. You only have one "real" microphone connection on your mixer and that's the one far up-left. You might well ask how you can plug a guitar into a microphone connector when I said they were very different. Yes, that did get my attention, but the instructions are very clear that you can do that with no harm as long as you adjust the three volume knobs as needed.
Give it a shot. You know you got it wrong when either you can't get rid of the red overload lights, or you do get the green lights and the guitar sounds like fuzz but you didn't want fuzz.
See, this is all the stuff you have to iron out
before you throw the pedal into the mix.
Koz
Thanks!