I want to talk to you all about how my little netbook turn itself into a guitar amplifier. Not just an electric guitar amp, but a receiver and effects amp for acoustic guitars as well.
My netbook has 2GB of ram, and a 1.6ghz processor; it's barely enough to handle sampling software, but somehow it does the job thanks to a very helpful software and hardware combination.
Here's how you can turn your PC/netbook/laptop into a guitar effects amplifier:
You'll need some hardware first, and luckily I made a post with all the added hardware you'll need besides a computer.
- a 3D 7.1 USB sound Adapter
- 3.5mm Male to 3.5mm Male Line
- 3.5mm Female to 6.35mm Male Stereo Jack adapter
GuitarFXBox is the main program, it'll handle the effects of the guitar. There are other programs that do a similar job (like Revalver) but GuitarFX Box beats them all in my book (the only problem would be the price, but you can find older versions of the program for free if you google it.)
Here's what I did; after installing my adapters, and the Asio4All drivers, I opened GuitarFXBox went to settings and selected the USB Audio device as the Input and output of the program. On my PC I had to select the USB Adapter as Input and the sound card of my motherboard as the output so that it would play directly out of my speakers.
The order to make everything work is simple, you connect the sound line to the 3D sound adapter and you connect the other end to the guitar (or if you're using an acoustic guitar you use a mic and put it inside the guitar hole). Then you open the software, fix the settings to your liking (input and output should be USB Audio Device if you connected external speakers to the USB Adapter). After fixing the settings, turn on the amp by clicking on the Start button on the top left and then go back to setup and play with the "max i/o delay" until you can hear the sound at the same time that you play the strings.
Then you're done.
The advantage of using this is that you get a tuner, a full fledged list of pedal effects and full volume control. Some PC's can't handle the delay. The disadvantage is that it's very dependent of your PC resources, if you have a very old pc with less than 1.6GHz processor you won't find a "good" delay number. Normally modern laptops/desktops won't have a problem so if you have a adequate pc and need an Amplifier this is a great alternative.
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