I seem to have a problem with recording my guitar that I didn't have a week or two ago...
I have an Ashton electric (pretty cheap). It's maybe about three years old, but has been played *very* infrequently until about three months ago. Aside from the build quality and other "features" one expects of this calibre of guitar, it's always worked okay. I set it up half decently when I bought it...
System setup (only where it concerns this guitar / situation) is: guitar into Randall RG40R practice amp, back out of line out jack into Behringer MIC2000 preamp, out of preamp via unbalanced TS jack into analogue channel of Delta 2496. Jack 1.9.8 (512,2,96000) and Ardour3, latest SVN. Studio monitor system is not great but is okay, does the job and is certainly not at fault here.
A few days ago, I noticed that a track in Ardour (from this guitar - clean amp channel, straight into Ardour clean, no plugins, etc, etc) had a kind of "crackly" sound intermittently - mostly (but not always) on harder attacks, and seemingly random. I've popped an example up to http://mattts.net/crackle-example-1.flac. The tune is just one that happens to invoke the problem a lot. The strings are (brand) new - hence the tuning problems. Whatever :p In Ardour, the range tops out at -4.5. Nothing in either the analogue or digital domains is anywhere near clipping.
I've done a lot of isolation testing, originally firmly believing I had a clipping or equipment problem somewhere. At the end of the day, I can directly swap out the Ashton for a ~35yo Fender Precision bass with very old strings (and all the same leads, amp and preamp settings, etc, etc) and not reproduce the problem. I can't really hear it out of the amp, either (although on the same clean channel / settings, it sounds like it could maybe be "cleaner" than it is...), although mic'ing the amp and feeding that to Ardour instead incurs the same, flawed result (despite an interesting tone I'm keen to explore later - but, I digress
). I also booted to W7 (which I've only ever installed then booted one other time), installed the M-Audio drivers and the supplied demo version of Pro Tools, left default settings in place and observed exactly the same problem...I went over the guitar's electronics and setup again when I replaced the strings yesterday - the electronics look about as expensive as they should, but are in good shape. The pots, pups (HH), switch and output generate *no* noises whatsoever, ever (when the instrument is not being played...).
Any ideas? It's obviously the guitar, but nothing (that would cause this to suddenly become an issue) has been changed lately.
Cheers,
Mattt.
