How To Record Podfarm's High Gain In A Daw

[T_dubbayew]

  Well, I got some help on here so I figured I would return the favor by explaining the capturing process of Pod Farm's high gain amps in a DAW.  I never really found that info on here in just short of 3 years working with it.  So I am going to save some person the hours of frustration and massive clipping that will make you troll the boards here and call for Line 6's heads to roll.  

 

  Its really quite simple and when I finally figured it out I felt kinda stupid.   So, open your DAW.  Make sure the master channel's output is set to whatever you are using as an interface so you can hear sound.  Find any standard track on the rest of the mixer.  Name it GUITAR IN and give it a color if you like.  On that channel make sure it is set to "Line 6 UX2 1"  Or "Line 6 UX2 2" on the IN of the channel depending on what port you plug your intended instrument in.  Don't do anything to the out channel, the signal is sent to the Master channel which then produces the output.  If you enable the guitar's out channel to be heard on the interface you will get a double signal which will result in clipping and the generation of several curse words and then you will be back here resuming your quest for Line 6's heads.  Once you have the GUITAR IN established you will then route that channels signal to another channel which, as you might have guessed, will be called GUITAR OUT when you rename it and possibly give it a lighter shade of the GUITAR IN's color.  I use FL Studio so you will find a knob that decides how much of the incoming signal is allowed to pass from the channel.  You want to disable this and enable this knob on the GUITAR OUT channel WHILE THE GUITAR IN CHANNEL IS STILL SELECTED.  By default the channels send everything to the master track.  Now the signal is is being passed to a separate channel and out the Master.  We will come back to this later.  Bring up POD Farm in standalone mode, NOT AS A PLUGIN INSIDE THE DAW.  If you try to run from the plugin inside of the DAW you will consume massive amounts of resources and rarely get a reliable take on your recordings.  Since you enabled "Line 6 UX2 1(or 2)" You will hear whatever you have Pod Farm set to showing a signal in both guitar channels and the master channel.  Now all you have to do is tell the mixer in Pod Farm to send a DRY signal from its SEND channels (the ones in red).  That allows you to hear the crunchy distortion from Pod Farm, but only register a clean dry signal to the DAW.  So, until you mute the GUITAR OUT's output, you will hear the "thunk-thunk" of the dry sound behind your distortion.  When you mute the GUITAR OUT channel all that is left is the distortion from Pod Farm.Since you routed the SIGNAL to the GUITAR OUT channel, the sound from the GUITAR IN channel can not be heard, but the DRY SIGNAL still exists in its own, in the un-muted channel.  So all that is left now is arming the GUITAR IN to record and pressing play.   You will be able to play to your drum beats in the DAW with the Standalone Pod Farm as a reference of sound externally.  On playback you unmute the GUITAR OUT channel and you will hear a dry version of what you just played.  That is the goods right there.  Now you can save and close the standalone and then go back to the GUITAR OUT channel and SELECT POD FARM AS A PLUGIN.  If you have the plugin and the standalone open at the same time you could run into resource problems.  With the plugin in the out channel, you can load any configuration of amps you had and then pass the SIGNAL from the IN channel through the amps of the plugin and then on to the master.  With this method you can playback your riffs in the DAW while tweaking the amps to the desired tone.  You can even apply effects directly in the channel or from the send channels while your riff is playing.  In my experience, this method produces an exact copy of the sound you achieve in Pod Farm standalone.  

 

Hope this helps somebody.