Kenneth R. said:
One thing to remember about amp heads: never ever run them without a load, or you'll fry them.
He's using a solid state head, which is fine to run without a load. There's no output transformer to fry. I've seen solid state bass heads racked up in studios used just for the direct outs. A tube head is a totally different beast- you can damage the output transformer if it's run without a load- cab or attenuator set to line level- for any significant length of time.
That being said, if you're gonna record direct: don't ever connect the speaker outs of your amp to your recording gear. That's a powered signal- a very powered signal, and that
will damage whatever you ran it into pretty severely. :zombie:
There are a few choices as to where to take your direct signal from. You'll have an effects send, which is straight from the preamp. Guitar speakers have a limited bandwidth compared to most speakers, and the signal straight from the amp without them will have a crap ton of fuzzy highs and boomy lows you wouldn't hear through your amp. Unless you play industrial music and want an ultra-fuzzy sound, you'll want some sort of speaker emulation.
Since you have a new Marshall, you'll probably have a "speaker emulated" direct out. IIRC, this is post-effects loop, so if you have any effects in the loop, they'll be in this signal. The "speaker emulation" isn't so hot- it's basically just an EQed output minus the extreme high end and maybe some bass as well- it's been a while since I tried hooking one up to anything. It's better than nothing, I suppose, but you can probably do just as good a job, if not better, by severely EQing the signal from your effects send.
Your best bet, if you want to record your amp direct, would be to find a speaker emulation plugin for whatever recording software you use. I'm sure there's someone around here who can direct you to something. Since you're using Cubase SX, I'm pretty certain there's VST plugins floating around with convolution impulse models of guitar cabs you could use.
In a pro studio context, you're not gonna see a whole lot of direct guitar recording. Bass is another story, but guitars are almost always miced cabs. When someone goes direct with a guitar, more often than not they're using a modeler- a Pod XT or similar- or a very expensive speaker simulator like a Palmer DI.
