Recording With Plugins

Is anyone else out there doing this? I have a very limited amount of outboard gear at home and end up using at least one plug-in everytime I track, sometimes even four of them, but I've never heard anyone else even mention this as an option.

Personally I never track with plugins....you loose a lot of the sound quality and it lags the computer while tracking in additioin, there is a chance of you having to realign. I don't see why you can't record and then put the plugins later...once you change the original sound to begin with you can't go back...record it clean and then effects...remember its not an outboard...

Yeah... but what about guitars that are using plugin technology like Aplitube or Amp Farm? Where the plugin is the sound? You'd almost have to record with plugins.

in that case, you're using Amplitude as a plugin insert on the guitar track, which doesn't print to tape. It's not the same as playing your guitar through an effect and recording that signal into ProTools. Using a plugin as an insert is post-disk, so if you remove the Amplitude plugin, your dry guitar track is still there.

If you want to record with plugs then they really should go in a bus otherwise its not going to disk, only the dry signal. I track alot of things using compression from the start, mainly for colour, ie a vocal take I may record one dry while recording the same take thru a compression bus to an external comp, however you must be sure that this is the way you want to do it, tracking with plugs may not be as desireable when it comes to adding other effects and once it is down.. it is down with the effect for good. aj

I've done it a lot, with a mic in on an Aux-track with slight comp and deesser and directing it to the Track adding more "heavy plugins" that can be changed afterwards. The gain is that you get a "hotter" signal on your track. Now I've got myself a good micpre and don't need this option anymore, but it worked very nice at the time...

Mentalmusic, you are not getting what PlugInJunky meant... By saying that a plug in it's not outboard gear, he means that when you connect, let's say a mic, to a hardware FX processor and then record the processor's output, you can't really try something different to the voice after that, unless you make a new processed recording. That's not the case with plugs. If you record your voice to Pro Tools, you can try as many plugins as you like without affecting the original recording. That's what he meant. He also says that in many cases is not necessary or recommendable to use the plug ins while recording cause it affects the overall system performance, and I agree. Standard practice is to use RTAS plugs to tweak the FX, save the settings and then process the signal using the Audiosuit plugs, eliminating the need to have an active RTAS plug... unless you need automation, of course. Some advice... when you are feeding the signal to Pro Tools, don't use any RTAS plug ins for compression, EQ, FX, etc. to fix the input gain, cause they mess with the readings of the input levels, and you don't wanna have by any means the wrong levels in your original recorded audio signal. Do a search for a recent topic posted here that talks about why your input signal must be fed at around -16dB and not 0dB when going to PT.