First time reamping, 2 little questions

[marsdrums]

Hi guys, this is my first post here!
Tomorrow i'll have to track guitars and i'm then going to reamp them. I already read all the material i found on this forum about it, and i know it'a a quite obvius and tedius topic, but there're still a couple of question i've to ask.

1) First of all, i'm not going to use a DI, i'm going to plug the guitar directly into the input and then use an amp simulator for monitoring. Should I use for this the instrument input of my firewire (a Motu 828mk3) or the instrument input of my valve preamp (a Focusrite ISA 220)?? Should the guitar chain be as clean as possible or the sound could benefit the valve preamp coloration?

2) Once recorded, the signal comes out from the DAW, passes throught the reamp box, and then it goes to pedals, guitar head, wherever i want... My question is how to be shure the volume of the signal coming out from the reamp box matches the volume of the one coming out from the guitar. Sould i leave input and output always to 0db? Is this accurate? should i match those empirically? Does it make no sense at all because if you're going to distort the sound as hell you're going to crank the gain up?

Thanks in advance

 

[Firaxis]

Pretty sure this has been covered before but hey ho,


1) You probably want to keep the signal as true to the guitar as possible so don't use a tube pre.

2) Tough to say, it should be relatively easy to hear if you are used to how much saturation your amp has at different gain settings. Just make sure it isn't clipping at the output of the interface, maybe use a boost before the amp if the level isn't high enough.

Use the sneap search on google from now on dude, there is a ton of information in the back pages of this forum

 

[marsdrums]

Pretty sure this has been covered before but hey ho,


1) You probably want to keep the signal as true to the guitar as possible so don't use a tube pre.

2) Tough to say, it should be relatively easy to hear if you are used to how much saturation your amp has at different gain settings. Just make sure it isn't clipping at the output of the interface, maybe use a boost before the amp if the level isn't high enough.

Use the sneap search on google from now on dude, there is a ton of information in the back pages of this forum

Thanks a lot!

 

[Nimvi]

+1 to what Firaxis said.
You want the recorded DI to be as clean as possible, because you want the reamp to sound as close as you can to just plugging the guitar into the amp directly and hitting record. It's going to sound a little bit different by the way (especially the top-end), but imo it's negligible.

It's also pretty common to lose some signallevel through the reamp-box, but it has never given me any real problems. For reference, I'm using one of those radial pro rmp boxes, and they lose a pretty substantial amount of level if they are unmodded. Still, I'm running my 6505 at only 4 pregain or so (with a TS), and getting more distortion than I would ever need. In case it does bother you though, I've heard that doing a mod to it isn't very hard.

Oh, and use this for search: http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=007593470310830667409:4qw46y8lnza
So much better than the inbuilt one