Daily Blog - July 1st 2021

This is one of the most common questions we get. People wonder how to reamp with the gear they have. And many of them have one of the popular bus powered portable interfaces. So you want to try reamping with a hardware amp or pedals but all you have is a small 2-channel interface? Read this first!

You need dedicated outputs, separate from your main outs to be able to reamp properly.

That's basically it. The problem with small 2-channel interfaces is that they have, well, two channels. And you need those two channels for your monitoring (the main out of your DAW), or else you won't hear what you're reamping.

The line outs on the back are for your speakers and the phones are typically fed from the same source. So you can't send your DI out the back and monitor your reamped sound through the phones out at the same time.

Also, even if you sacrificed your monitoring and sent the DI out the main out, you would send it through your interface's volume control and you'd have to make sure you have all master bus processing off, etc. A lot of things could go wrong here and the signal path would be coloured by the output/master section of your interface.

So, again, long story short: If you want to reamp, your interface needs a dedicated output for that. 

This means you need to get at an interface with at least 4 output channels. Two for the main out and another pair for outboard gear, reamping, etc.

-Benedikt

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