I have an acoustic mandolin, and I'm wondering if I buy some pickups, if I can get some software to use with my SB Live! Platinum 5.1 card to amp and apply guitar effects. Anyone have any information on doing this?
Yes, I plug my guitar directly into the livedrive, you can use the included EAX control panel to add and edit some effects right away. Cakewalk, Cool Edit and SoundForge are some programs you can use for recording and applying effects as well.
The trouble with playing live into a computer and adding software effects (such as with Cakewalk SONAR) is that you are going to run into latency problems. With a SoundBlaster Live card the latency is most likely going to be noticable. However, you won't run into this problem with the SoundBlaster Live card's built in effects. You should be able to apply Enviromental audio effects to your Line input by opening up the Creative Labs Enviromental Audio app, clicking on the Source tab, and selecting "Line-in". Because these are hardware based effects the latency won't be a problem. I would highly recommend the Oktava MC-012 microphone for recording mandolin. If you pair that with a decent preamplifier with phantom power, you should be all set. That microphone is only like $150 and is a steal for that price. If you think the SoundBlaster Live effects are limiting you'll want to switch to Windows 2000 if you aren't running it already and install the default WDM drivers (i.e. off the CD) for your SoundBlaster Live card (they won't work with a SoundBlaster Live 5.1). This will get you around 10ms latency which is reasonable. You may want to check out the ReValver software for guitar effects at: http://www.alienconnections.com/ You can use that with CoolEdit Pro, Cakewalk, etc.
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