Hey, I recently started using Cubase to record electric guitar, but I’ve been having some issues. My setup is as follows: Stratocaster (3 single coil pickups) to my Apogee Duet 3 interface (via Mogami gold cable) to my laptop (connected to wall with grounding prong), listening with in-ear monitors with software monitoring via Cubase 13 LE AI. With my guitar volume knob to ~3 and audio interface volume at ~4 (in the low range), I can hear myself play clearly with next to no humming. However, the Cubase meters show that I’m playing in the -50 db range with the audio waveform being a flatline (I’m assuming from the very low volume), and listening to the exported audio in .WAV format is just silence. I can increase the gain on my Strat and audio interface such that the meters go up to about -20 dB for example, but this results in a very loud hum. Interestingly though, if I right click the waveform and hit “play” in the taskbar list that shows up, and then hold down the speakerphone icon over the waveform, I do hear it as I played it /except/ there’s some humming that wasn’t present during monitoring. But if I hit play over that waveform through the taskbar at the bottom that has the “transport record”, “activate cycle”, etc. icons, then I hear nothing.
Hello and welcome.
I am going to summon a fellow guitar player, hopefully he has some nice tipps.
@MrSoundman
The first thing that comes to mind : I don’t think that the Apogee Duet 3 has a Hi-Z input, which is almost mandatory to get a good guitar sound with enough level when recording a guitar (especially a Strat) without an amp or an effect board.
It does.
Ok. What I have seen until now about it is that the unit has “2 instruments” inputs, but they could have been line level ones. This, until I found its specifications in the Apogee site itself, where indeed, a Hi-Z input feature is clearly mentioned.
So, I stand corrected. 
The spec of the Hi-Z input on the Apogee should be well able to handle the full output of a strat, so I’d start by turning this fully up. Levels can be adjusted further down the signal chain, most likely in the “Apogee Control 2” channel (I’m reading from the manual, I’m not familiar with the device).
The idea is to hit the input with the full signal from the pickup, and adjust the level after the conversion to digital. I think this is probably the “Analog 2 IN” channel:
You should be able to see a healthy level here.
The next step is to ensure only this signal is being recorded. It’s a mono signal from the guitar, so you’ll need to set up a mono input in Cubase – Studio | Audio Connections | Add Bus.
Set the device port on the newly-created bus to the “Analog 2 IN” of your Apogee.
Now you should be able to set that as the track input and this will ensure that only the guitar signal is going to be recorded. The level of the recorded signal should be the same as what you see on the level meter of the “Analog 2 IN” channel in the Apogee Control 2 panel.
Thank you so much for that response. I figured out my mistake - on Apogee Control 2, I had my headphone gain turned waaay up apparently, which is separate from the instrument gain. I turned the headphone gain down which let me go up a lot more on the guitar volume and audio interface instrument gain, so the meters go up to about -10 dB now and there’s practically no humming.
I am seeing proper audio waveforms on Cubase now. I do hear audio playback clearly when I right-click the guitar track, select “Play”, and play it back.
However, when I hit play at the bottom of Cubase, I don’t hear anything. I also don’t hear anything when I listen to the exported audio mixdown (making sure that the left and right locators contain the track). I tried changing the Windows speaker setting from my laptop speaker to my audio interface, but I still don’t hear anything. I attached a screenshot of the export settings I used (basically just accepted the default ones offered).
Here is what my Cubase looks like just before I try to export the audio, in case that helps (the forums won’t let me upload multiple pictures).
Nevermind, I figured it out. I had to turn off the “monitor” setting on the track. Thanks everyone.