How to Make a Guitar Foot Pedal Work With a Line in on a Computer
- 1). Take your guitar, two instrument cables, effects pedal, and guitar amp and set them up for normal use. Do not worry about plugging anything into the computer yet.
- 2). Adjust the effects pedal to your liking. You want to dial in the perfect settings on your guitar pedal while playing through an amp because most consumer-grade PC sound cards do not allow you to hear what is being transmitted through the line-in jack in real time. Setting the pedal up with an amp saves a lot of time versus recording something, playing it back, adjusting the effects pedal and re-recording until you find your sound.
- 3). Plug the 1/4-inch female to 1/8-inch male audio adapter into the audio line-in jack on the back of your computer.
- 4). Unplug the instrument cable from the guitar amp. Plug this lead into the 1/4-inch female jack that is now feeding in to your computer’s line-in.
- 5). Find the knob on your effects pedal that controls the overall output volume. Depending on the type of effect and manufacturer, this may be labeled like “Output,” “Gain” or “Level.” Because the line-in on a consumer-grade integrated sound card cannot handle as “hot” of a signal as a guitar amp can, you want to dial the overall tone down to avoid clipping and distortion. Dial the output level back about a third of the way from where it sounded good playing into your amp.
- 6). Open your recording software. A freebie or shareware product (Windows Sound Recorder or Wavosaur) will work just fine when you’re first starting out. When you get to a point where you want to start layering tracks and doing post-production, you may want to invest in a more robust program like ProTools or Cool Edit. When that time comes, you'll also want to upgrade from your 1/8-inch line-in jack to a dedicated breakout box or USB recording interface.
- 7). Press the “Record” button on your software and begin playing. You are now recording the signal from your guitar effects pedal. Play back the clip and make additional adjustments to your effects pedal as desired.
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