How To 

How to Connect a Guitar to Your Audio System

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Have you ever felt the need to ramp up the volume of your guitar strumming? You can connect your electric guitar to your audio system to truly ‘hear’ your own music during your home practice sessions. It is as safe as it is easy. This tutorial will walk you through the steps required to connect a guitar to your audio system.

Step 1
Switch on your audio system

Turn on your audio system. Your system is now ready to be connected to your guitar.

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Step 2
Ensure that your speakers are connected to your player

Check the back of your audio system to make sure that the speakers are connected to the right output ports. This will ensure that your guitar’s sound can be transmitted through the speakers.

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Step 3
Connect the Y-adapter

Take a 0.25’’ Y-adapter with two 0.25’’ plug-to-RCA cables and put the RCA cables in the two ports of the adapter. Now, you are ready to connect the Y-adapter to your audio system.

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Step 4
Connect the RCA cables to your audio system

Insert the other ends of the two RCA cables connected to the Y-adapter into the left and right input channels at the back of your audio system. This finishes one part of the pairing process.

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Step 5
Connect the Y-adapter to the guitar

Insert the male plug of the Y-adapter in the output port of your electric guitar. Your guitar is now paired to the audio system.

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Now, you can strum that guitar and enjoy the sound through your audio system. It’s time to have your own mini concert at home!
 

chris661

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Oct 30, 2019
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Sorry, but due to serious impedance mis-matches, this won't work well, if at all.

Electric guitars want to see an approx 1Mohm input impedance, and acoustic guitars with piezo pickups will want more like 10Mohm. HiFi equipment is usually somewhere in the 10kohm range, which is a factor of 100 out. The result will be very low signal levels, lots of background noise, and awful tonality.
Active pickups might (might) save you. Maybe.

It's possible to purchase the right device to do this job, but it is NOT as simple as the kludge of adapters shown above.

It's great that you're enthusiastic about sharing this stuff, but you've pretty much filled the forum with stuff which, having read a few, is often either incomplete or outright wrong.

Chris
 

gasolin

Well-known member
Why do you make all of these How To threads, is it important for you to let us know How To..... ?

Most easy way is to buy a studio soundcard like this
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chris661

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Oct 30, 2019
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Yep, that Mackie one would do it - the high-Z bit is the important bit for guitars.

That said, I'd look at something like the Vox Amplug (other brands are available etc etc etc). They plug straight on to the guitar, and provide a 3.5mm headphone output. There's volume, distortion and tone controls for the guitar, and a 3.5mm input which is mixed with the guitar so you can play along to tunes.

Something like that would avoid all of the problems that Ruchi decided to introduce, and actually provide a useful level of control for the guitar.

Chris
 

Dom

Well-known member
You could always use the computer's ADC inputs to record the guitar's sound. You could then output via the USB or optical jack of your computer to your DAC and amplifiers, but then you would then a program like Fruity Loops to record the wave data. This potentially could lead to lag issues but the computers OS's are faster now. Anyway, just a thought mate.
 
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