I have a Kemper Profiler for electric guitar and bass - and it’s amazing!! I hardly ever even power up my Marshall and Vox valve amps…
But what’s the best way to track with these things? I wanna record 3 channels of audio: the stereo Main out and the mono DI (i.e., before any processing). I’ve played with a few different ways, but none are completely satisfactory:
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two audio tracks: one stereo for Main, one mono for DI. The problem here is that now, instead of 5 guitar tracks in my project, I have 10, making it that much more busy and cluttered. Also, any cut/paste/duplicate editing has to be done to both, or they get out of sync and you might as well throw the other one away.
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put the two audio tracks in a Folder. Makes the clutter problem a bit better, but also makes navigation and workflow a bit clumsy - now I have to make three tracks for each guitar part I want to lay down. Yeesh!
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use one of the 3-channel audio track formats in Cubase, LRC or LRS. I haven’t quite figured out all the routing steps here to make this work for reamping, but I have recorded this way. It does have the desired effect of putting the entire performance into one single track, which is what i want, but it also puts Cubase into “surround” mode, where all the panners on all the tracks now have to deal with that. Stereo tracks seem fine - they can be panned left and right - but Mono tracks now have no panner at all. and I have no idea how much burden this puts on the audio engine, even tho I really am working on a stereo project.
Honestly, it seems like what i really want is a new Cubase audio track format: one that records three tracks at a time, but plays back in stereo - and has a mono send/stereo return using the otherwise unused DI track for re-amping. In some ways, this is similar to what I’ve been asking for wrt Instrument tracks, where I want them to be “chameleons” of a sort: switch between MIDI and (Frozen MIDI) audio modes. Here, I want a guitar track to be either the mono DI track or the stereo “(re)amped” track; I never need both at the same time.
So that’s the “New feature” request: a 3-channel audio track type that switches from either mono (DI) mode, where it sends the mono signal to a (external) processor, and a stereo ((re)amped) mode, which is literally the output of the processed raw mono DI track. So the workflow is this:
- record the performance using all three audio signals at the same time, with some amp model processing dialed in to produce the stereo signal
- use the performance as stereo, e.g., sending to stereo effects, busses, etc. cut/edit/process like any other stereo audio track
- should re-amping be necessary (who among us has not recorded guitars with too much distortion?
, switch modes on the track, such that it is now a mono track (of the DI signal), with a mono-send/stereo-return Insert FX to the re-amper. Play the track, adjust the re-amper to please your wimpy producer that wants less distortion, then hit Freeze on the track to render the mono DI to stereo re-amped and switch the track back to stereo mode.
How cool would that be?
– jdm