Re: Guys: RECORDING HELP!!!!!!!!
+1 to the little Focusrite Scarlet or the Scarlet Studio set up that Chris have already suggested. They sound awesome and work fine. You can feed guitar direct, guitar preamp or microphones, it's up to you. A couple of hours with it and you can master it.
For a DAW, Reaper is still one of the best bangs for the buck I think, in many aspects it outperforms ProTools and some others. If you cross the 2-months limit it still won't reduce itself in any way but it's such a nice swiss army tool that one can't resist buying it. I used one as a backup, to run the studio without hiccups when some bigger system failed then I realised that I started to use the backup much more often than I intended so finally it became my main production DAW. You can throw entire album projects in it, no probs.
http://www.reaper.fm/
Maybe for an iron wood & wires type of guy (as a guitarist I'm that, too) using some preamp cab sim out -> into the interface line in is the most straightforward way to record a decent guitar sound. A lot of stuff work, beginning with Line6 kidneys (UX and present stuff are also fine little audio interfaces), old H&K Access, ADA MP1 through some H&K redbox, a steal-priced used Marshall JMP1, a SansAmp Tri-ac or so. Even an ancient Korg G1 can bring good sound.
As for me, I'm an AMT guy, these little preamps sound killer when recorded direct. All these tones were set in 5 seconds then go.
(all are AMT M1 + P1 cab sim out)
Well not as if anything was against using a microphone before an amplifier
For a mic, I'd suggest a good old Shure SM57. There are classier, there are trickier, cleaner, warmer and meaner ones, but it's still a "1 shoot - 1 score" mic when it comes to guitar recording. It is brill for voc, bass (snares, toms, hihats, blow instruments...), too.
