Swindon Music

What I normally do is either add a distortion effect, turn the gain up but turn the drive down so it just the clean channel goin up.

I don't know what they were teaching you but you definitely won't blow the Mac up!


Never used Garageband (Despite having a Mac), but yeah, a preamplifier, compression, limiting, normalising and TURNING EVERYTHING ELSE DOWN.

If the input on the interface isn't specifically a mic/instrument level input (usually labelled mic or hi-z) then it'll need preamping. Which interface is it?

It could be any number of things, but as you're using a microphone with a jack lead, it sounds like you've plugged your microphone into a line-level input on your interface - if your interface doesn't have a mic-preamp, you'll want to plug your mic into a preamp and then into the interface (most interfaces these days have mic inputs with built-in preamps). If you don't use a preamp, then the signal you're sending to the computer will be very quiet - simply normalizing the recording will most likely introduce horrendous amounts of noise.

In really simple terms, your signal flow should be something like this:

Microphone > Pre Amp > Audio Interface > Garageband

When it comes to blowing the Mac up - unlikely. What you were taught is probably to do with speakers/power amps, if you don't match the power/ohms on them then you can run into problems. As the audio interface is most likely a USB or a Firewire device, it'll be sending an line-level signal to the computer. A mic preamp will essentially boost a mic-level signal up to line-level - as the output is will be an unpowered output, it is highly unlikely anything will blow up when you plug it in to your interface.

Oh, and M-Boxes are fairly good bits of kit, but WAY WAY overpriced for what they are. You can get much better hardware with more features for less money. They're also quite ugly:

Mbox 2 Pro
VS
Fast Track Pro

The fast track is MUCH MUCH cheaper, has more features, is prettier, equal in quality - also both will allow you to use a version of ProTools (which is equally expensive, but also is beaten on features and price by competitors. Ahem, COUGHLOGICSONARABLETONLIVECOUGH).