Hi, I present my self.

I'm emitremmus and I'm italian.
I work on sound abouth three years.

Weel, I've decided to buy a little electric guitar (Hamer - Slammer 2 humbuker 1 single coil) for make heavy sounds with pc.

Now, I know very well how to use Propellerheads Reason 3, but my audio card is not support properly to make live registration.
My friends say that Cubase can do it. But I've no money at the moment for that program (I used it some year ago running a demo).

So I've try Audacity that is totally free, but my audio card (Edirol FA-66 Firewire) register the sound only monoaural... and I don't know why.

Can you said to my something about this problem?

What kind how audio card/program do you use to register sound from external resources?

(Sorry for the language)

moved to general audio.

Without knowing your music equipment, I will hazard the guess that you are getting monaural because there is only a single (i.e. monaural) source. This is completely normal, expected, and proper. Stereo requires two non-identical inputs. Stereo (or multi-track) recordings of a guitar use two (or more) microphones, properly placed to produce a stereo image. Unless your guitar has two independent pickup in two different locations there is no stereo to record.

You can record the single input, then create a two channel file from it. This will take up all the disk space and computer processing power of stereo but it will still not be stereo. It will, however, play from both channels. Audacity should be able to do this post recording processing easily.

Well, maybe I understand what you said Andy...

My Audio soundcard is the Edirol (Roland) FA-66 Firewire, and have 6 in/out

the first in is raccomanded for the microphones only, while in the second input is raccomended to put guitar/bass or another microphones... in the other mixer and other stuff...

But I don't understand. My guitar have only a plug, the cable in the chassis that goes in the amplificator (Marshall), when I play live. But when I want to recorder I must attack it into the second input of the EDIROL FA-66 (how is raccomended), but the sound is only monoaural...

Is there a cable that start from the guitar and it reaches the audio card in two separated parts? (A sort of splitting with 2 output left and right)

thanks however

No, there is no other cable. The guitar is only one source. It is supposed to produce only one track. It is inherently monaural. It is not supposed to be stereo. The only way to make true stereo is to record with some microphones -- multiple sources from different positions around the guitar.

You would get exactly the same results if you alone were speaking or singing into a microphone. One person, one voice, one source producing one track.

You could get stereo if you recorded both the guitar and your voice singing along with the guitar (guitar as now, voice via a microphone) . You would have the guitar on one channel and your voice on the other.

You could also achieve this by recording the guitar as you are now doing, then playing back the recorded guitar track through headphones and singing along with it, into the microphone You would end up with with two tracks: the first run guitar track and the second run vocal track.

If you want the one track guitar recording to play back through two speakers
record the one track as you are now doing it
use Audacity to
copy that one track to both tracks of a stereo file
OR convert it to stereo within the program.
In neither case will you get true stereo but you will get playback sound from both speakers.

You could also create some stereo effects with the appropriate effects software. This is the sort of thing you see on the jacket of some old phonograph records -- "electronically reprocessed for stereo" It isn't true stereo and it doesn't generally sound so great, but it sometimes satisfies people who can't accept that true stereo only comes from two properly positioned microphones.

Okay. Thaks very much Andy.
But there's no other way, without use software? Ahhh... Damn...

Thanks again.

Hi emitremmus,

I also record guitar on my PC, here's what I do, the guitar goes into the line-in of my SB Audigy, then I record with Cakewalk Guitar Tracks Pro 3 using some fancy plug-ins like Amplitube and BBE Sonic Maximizer. I get pretty good results, considering the sound card. I'm sure you could easily find a demo of some instrument oriented software, that's how I found Guitar Tracks, then I bought the complete version.

The suggestions of the previous post may give you a sound that you like, or allow you do accomplish various effects and transformations. They are not a route to stereo from your single input, however. I write this just so you are not further confused.

It is also possible to record two tracks at once by using a Y connector between the guitar and the soundcard. One source, the guitar, split into two identical streams, fed to two inputs of the soundcard, creating two tracks for playback to two speakers. This is still not "stereo", but it will not require duplicating the track after recording.

I mainly use CoolEdit, so I don't know about the details of Audacity and most other software, but I suspect many programs have a similar capability to the following. In CoolEdit, on the device selection screen, where I tell the program what inputs to use for recording and what outputs to use for playback, there is a checkbox for "limit playback to mono." Selecting this causes the program to mix all tracks to mono and send identical data to all outputs. When there is only one track (such as you are achieving with your guitar recording) this one track goes to all (both) outputs and the audio comes out all (both) speakers.

This is fine for playback from the computer, but should you want to write the recording to audio CD-R you must first create a two track file, as I described earlier. A two track file is the only type that a music CD can accommodate.

Oh thanks so much guys. I'll try some program you mentioned.