Any advice on how to connect an electric guitar to a mac?

i'm sure there's not much difference between pc and mac as far as hardware goes so if you have a half decent sound card you should have a "line-in" jack so i have a korg distortion processor and i connect guitar>korg>pc but if you have any kind of peddle, like and overdrive or something that'll amplify you can use that i never tried straight from the guitar, i'm sure it'll work but may be very low volume so you'll need something to amplify so if you have that you'll need a 1 quarter inch to 3.5mm adapter, example, plug that into sound card and you can use Audacity For Mac to record and it has a few filters and search google for "free" VST plugins, quite a few will work in audacity just make sure the vsts are for mac. good luck.

i have found over all my years on the net that free, open source applications are in abundance and something can be found for no matter what you do and 9 times out of 10 the "free" software is usually far superior than high end commercial software but that's my experience and opinion.

reply to post by athousandlives


I can't speak for a mac, but you can purchase converter dongles that convert your guitar patch chord to a standard line in headphone jack. slam that into your line in on the computer and you are good to go.

Should be good on a mac. On a windows machine, with onboard audio, you will have latency issues when recording, and possibly distortion.

You can purchase a little 2 port recorder that takes 2 patch cord inputs and plugs into your usb, will work on mac or windows, and resolves the latency issue as the sound card is the dongle, bypassing your built in crappy audio.