AmpKit and GuitarJack—Better Than Me

Sometimes a Blog title just works for more than one simple reason. Luckily for me, this is one of those instances. One reason, is that the technology that I am lucky enough to have at my disposal—AmpKit for recording and GuitarJack for connecting—is better than me. The technology is almost flawless. My guitar playing skills are not. Another reason the title of this article works is that I'm writing about how AmpKit and GuitarJack allowed me to record a song I wrote titled Better Than Me.

The rest of the article goes downhill from here. Sorry about that.

Recently I wrote about my attempts at recording guitar on the iPhone. In that article I mentioned that I had ordered the GuitarJack. Well, it has arrived and I love it. It's allowed me to get a really clear connection between my guitars and my iPhone. It also has one advantage over the other connections I have—I've not used this feature yet—because I now have the ability to record from two inputs at once. I'm some way from working that out though. I can barely carry a tune on the guitar as it is.

Knowing I could connect the guitar to FourTrack—one of the supported apps made by Sonoma Wireworks who happens to also make the GuitarJack—I wanted to know what else the GuitarJack would work with. I was pleased to discover it also worked with AmpKit. And it worked well.

I should point out I also own the AmpKit LiNK which Agile Partners made as the perfect companion for AmpKit. And it is also awesome. But today I didn't use it.

So knowing I now had another way of connecting my guitars to my iPhone I decided to try something I'd not tried before. I tried to connect my Magnum semi-acoustic guitar to my iPhone. Now I love my Magnum semi-acoustic, but it's nowhere near a high-end guitar. I didn't hold high hopes for the output of the guitar. But with the GuitarJack and some minor adjustments to the settings of one of the AmpKit presets I ended up with a sound I really liked. A lot.

So let's have a look at my AmpKit preset shall we in the black and white glory this website is almost famous for.

Scary Reverb Chorus

The preset is based on the Dreadnought Delay preset. What I changed was the output volume—on account of the quality of the electric component of the Magnum semi-acoustic—and the effect type. I wasn't looking for delay. I was looking for an enhanced acoustic sound. I chose Reverb/Chorus B.

Scary Reverb Chorus settings

I did tweak some of the other amp settings, but not too much. The Dreadnought Delay preset is impressively awesome already.

So that's everything I did in AmpKit. All that was left to do was record the track (twice). From there it was a simple matter of exporting the tracks and pasting them into FourTrack using the same techniques I mentioned in my previous article.

So, like in my previous article, this would now be me sharing my track with you as uploaded to SoundCloud. Enjoy.

Better Than Me (Acoustic) by Scarebear

Interested in the AmpKit preset I created for this track? Well here it is. Complements of my DropBox account.