I have a question. A DI is like a raw track right? Without any amp on it. Should we get all the DI's for the full song (record everything raw) and then put on an ampsim? Or should we make a clean DI, put on an ampsim and tweak the sound until we like it and then record the song with the sound?
What's the best method?
DI means "direct input". It's the raw signal of your guitar/bass. when you track, the daw is recording your guitar/bass DI. What people usually do is tracking with the amp sim on to have a reference, then you can tweak the amp sim sound when everything has been already recorded.
In the case that your computer hasnt enough "power", you'll discover that there's a delay in your guitar signal while tracking. Welcome to the latency world. You'll need a better interface (soundcard) in that case (or maybe to optimize your drivers to get the better perfomance out of your computer).
Then you'll discover that your guitar tone isn't good enough, so you'll think about tweaking it with compressors, eqs and saturators. If your guitar is a cheap one, you'll think about getting a better one with emgs pups on it.
At this point, you realize that your guitar tone has nothing to do without a bass. Mute the guitars and mix your bass with your drums first. Then glue the guitars with the bass (there are tons of ways to do this, search).
Your mixes will sound muddy and bad in general. Time to buy a pair of monitors.
Monitors won't be enough, so you'll treat your room.
After some time, (years, maybe) you'll discover that the sims and the plugins combination waste your time by tweaking them to death and not giving you the tone you're looking for. You'll think about micing a real amp. Then you'll discover the shure SM57, the peavey 5105 and the mesa cab.
Your computer input will not be good enough, so you'll wonder if some mic preamp will give you a better sound to your guitar/bass/voice. Then you'll get a better interface (see foucsrite saffire for example).
You'll start thinking about the idea of recording local bands to make some money.
After some time, you'll want to record real drums. Then you'll want to have more mics and more inputs in your interface. So you'll buy a new interface.
The raw sound of the drum set will impress you because it'll sound like shit. You'll come back to samples or discover the blending samples with your drumkit.
After some time you'll realize that plugins don't give you what you're looking for. At this moment you start to discover outboard units.
From here on, you'll think:
A - I'll build a proper recording studio
B - Why I didn't spend the money at the time to record my demo in a recording studio?
Good luck.
