Using guitar pedals for vocals
Here’s a quick tip on how to use guitar pedals on your vocals, using one piece of affordable gear. We can’t connect our microphone directly to our guitar pedals using a simple cable adapter, unfortunately, because the result will be an unusable signal that’s way too soft, and very noisy.
Instead, we need to place an impedance matching transformer in-between the microphone cable’s output, and the guitar pedal’s input. This will turn our microphone’s output into a guitar output, which is what the guitar pedal is expecting to see.
How to connect your microphone to your guitar pedals
The connections look like this:
Connecting a mic to your guitar pedal effects
The steps
Connect a dynamic microphone to an XLR microphone cable. You could use any unpowered dynamic mic, like a Shure SM58, or better yet a Sennheiser e835.
Connect your XLR cable to an impedance matching transformer. I like the Audix T50K, which is under $50 at time of writing.
Connect your impedance matching transformer to your guitar pedal, or chain of guitar pedals.
Now, you can use your guitar pedal effects on your vocals, or anything else you can point a microphone at.
Other options
An impedance matching transformer is probably the simplest way to make this connection for a home music writing situation, but there’s other ways to do the same thing. Using a passive DI box would also work great, or an effects loop set up using a mixing board would do it.
Electrical Audio has a great video out on the basics of using different types of DI boxes:
Electrical Audio’s take on using DI boxes in the studio
These alternative solutions would require additional gear, more cables, and a slightly more complex setup. Also, high-quality passive and active DI boxes are often more expensive than an impedance matching transformer made of similar quality, so it’s not the most cost-effective solution for the home recording setting.
But, these different setups might be a bit more flexible when working inside a professional recording studio situation, depending on exactly how you’re going to use the audio after it’s recorded.
Using an impedance matching transformer for re-amping
You can also use an impedance matching transformer to re-amp audio; that’s where you’re taking a line-level piece of audio that’s already been recorded directly, and then re-recording it played back through an amplifier. This can be a useful technique, especially for recording bass guitar with a full band in a home setting, and the impedance matching transformer works for both getting audio in and sending audio out.
More info on how re-amping works using an impedance matching transformer can be found here.
And, even more tips on home music production can be found inside of our series on Home Recording Basics.
