Alan Ratcliffe wrote:
I gather by "overloading", you mean distortion?
I think the mic and/or soundcard are likely to be the weak links - I Googled it quickly and discovered it was the mic included with certain Soundblasters, so I doubt it's built with the ruggedness of a more stage-ready mic.
Check your levels in your soundcard driver to make sure you are not clipping the mic preamp - you can get quite a hefty signal from a miked amp. Otherwise, if the levels are within limits but you are still getting clipping, you will have to turn the amp way down. You ideally need to be miking as close as possible to get less room noise, but if you have to back off the mic too then do it.
Well this is exactly the process my father and I went through last night. I'm running Guitar - amp - mic - mixer/preamp (for the mic) - Roland interface - laptop - Sennheiser 'phones.
From our fiddling, it seems to be a case of mic overload. My interface has an LED to show when the card is clipping, and the settings on the mic preamp are pretty low down.
Yeah I also saw the info on the mic, the fact that it's from some Soundblasters (made in China, and all...). Neither my dad nor I quite know how we came about it... It also doesn't have the greatest frequency response, you can hear it cuts the bass from the guitar...
