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Recording the Guitar with or without effects?
Should you use hardware compressors, distortion or other effects before you record the signal? It is your personal preference. If you can’t live without “that special sound,“ then you should prob- ably record it that way. But when it comes to compression, EQ, reverb and other special effects that could be produced in software, then you should produce it in software and not in hardware. That way you can always change your mind afterward.
To truly access all of the incredible tone shaping that ReValver® allows, you should take advantage of a process called “re-amping.” In a nutshell, re-amping simply means to record the Guitar dry as and then use the ReValver plug-in to change the tones. In this way, you will have unlimited access to all of the amazing tones ReValver can offer. Of course, as in the paragraph above, if you can’t live without a certain distortion tone, you can still use ReValver’s effects modules as a rack of effects. The sky is the limit and it’s all at your fingertips! There is one “effect” you generally should use before sampling the signal, namely “limiting.” It is a function which keeps the signal from clipping digitally in case you happen to use a too strong signal. Some audio interfaces have a soft limiter built in; however, when you are recording a dry Guitar the presence of distortion means you are sending too hot a signal to the computer. If you are recording a dry Guitar to re-amp, there should be no distortion whatsoever.
Using 16 bit or 24 bit sampling?
Many sound cards today offer 24-bit sampling at high sample rates. While the CD audio standard is only 16-bit and still sounds quite good, it makes perfect sense to use as many bits as possible during recording. In general, it is always good thinking to use more bits than you will need in the very end.
16-bit audio gives you about 96 dB of dynamic range. 24 bits gives you an additional 48 dB. A high gain preset in ReValver MK III amplifies the signal a lot, probably 40 - 80 dB, and with those levels you would start to hear the sound card “quantization noise” (bit noise). With more bits there is less digital noise. You will still hear electrical noise, but that is usually significantly less.
Using 44.1/48kHz, 96kHz or higher?
The higher the better, normally, but in ReValver MK III, all vital parts are oversampled to the double-sample rate to make sure there is a minimum of aliasing noise. Aliasing noise, simply put, is an unpleasent background noise that can occur with any modeling software or amplifier when the CPU is asked to do more than it can do. You should also consider that most good Guitar sounds are very bandwidth-limited and you probably don’t need the high frequency range that even 44.1kHz sample rate offers.
