How can I use a single line input on a sound card to record two tracks simultaneously?
You can do this as long as your computer has a stereo line input. Many laptops no longer have stereo audio inputs, only a mono mini-plug for a web microphone. However, almost all desktop computers DO have a stereo line-in. If you have a laptop that doesn’t have stereo inputs, the following description will also work with external PCMCIA, USB, or Firewire stereo audio cards. Assuming you have a stereo input available, for sake of example assume we want to record two guitars: • Plug Guitar 1 into Channel 1 of your external mixer (via direct, direct box, stompbox, amp emulator, mic, whatever). Plug Guitar 2 into Channel 2. • With most mixers, it doesn’t matter what channels you use, but some mixers have special use on some channels. For instance, you can find 16 channel mixers which have 12 sliders– 8 mono channels (one input per channel), and then 4 stereo channels (two inputs per channel). In that case, it is probably simpler to use 2 of the mono channels, which gives you independent E
