Musical Instruments Supply

guitar adapter for computer

Casio AD-1 Power Supply for SA75 $24.00 The Casio AD-1 is compatible with Casio SA-39 and SA-75 keyboards.Extend your battery life by using this optional AC adapter while you are at home or near an electrical outlet….

Can you plug an electric guitar to the mic jack of your computer and record what you play?

If you have a 3.5mm adapter to plug your guitar into your microphone jack of your computer, can you record your guitar in a program that way? Or will there not be enough power to pick up a signal from the guitar?

Howdy, Seiko–

Yup, you can definitely record that way. However, bear in mind that as Jimmy mentions, plugging straight into your sound card from your guitar will give you little more than a crappy-sounding clean tone to record.

Going through your amp, gaining/distorting your tone, THEN plugging into your sound card can be done, but make sure your amp’s OUT jack can be regulated via a volume knob, as most amps, especially all-tube ones, will generate enough output to effectively fry your sound card.

I’ve gotten the best results from one of either of these two scenarios. (1) Plugging my guitar into my pedal setup (Boss Metal Zone and a whole string of others including an effective noise gate), and from there plugging straight into the sound card and monitoring yourself with some pro-quality headphones, keeping your sound card’s volume control window open and adjusting as necessary. (2) If I just need a straight-up distorted tone throughout, I plug into a Sans Amp distortion/amp modeler pedal, which automatically regulates the amount of gain leaving the setup and effectively gives you a flat waveline input, so you don’t have to worry about cooking your sound card; you only need to adjust the amount of output going to it, again via your sound card’s volume window.

To give you a sample of how this can effectively be used to record, check out my band’s material at the URL below. All of the guitar and bass tracks were recorded using primitive Cakewalk software and using the guitar-to-effects-chain-to-soundcard approach. If you’re interested in the specifics, drop me a line and I can send you some pics of how I have the hardware set up, which pedals I use, knob settings, etc.

Best of luck!