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3 • 5

Direct Injection

First thing to do to play the send/return game is get your guitar to deliver a direct 
input to your recorder or mixer, or the input of your computer-based audio system.

How about just plugging the guitar’s output into a mixer channel? Guitar pickups 
like to feed into a high impedance load – at least 300 KOhms impedance; 
1 MOhm is ideal for the best results. Most mixer inputs are relatively low 
impedance, and therefore don’t deliver ideal guitar tone; you will tend to get a 
darker, “squashed” sound if you plug the guitar in directly. To avoid this, we 
recommend buffering your guitar’s signal before the mixer with a quality DI box or 
tonally “transparent” instrument preamp. Look for a unit that delivers clean, 
uncolored sound. Steer clear of amp simulators. You can use a guitar preamp, as 
long as it is clean, with a flat frequency response – no tone shaping.

With that said, you can sometimes get acceptable results plugging direct into a 
line level mixer channel if you have a guitar with hot, active pickups (since the 
active electronics’ output can have relatively low impedance). For instance, we’ve 
sometimes plugged a guitar right into a channel on a Mackie 1202 VLZ, cranked 
up the trim, and gotten acceptable results. Don’t try to plug into a microphone 
level mixer input if you’ve got active pickups, because the extremely low 
impedance of mic inputs will load the active circuitry down too much.

Return to Sender

Next, we’re gonna look at how you’d connect your POD to a send and a return 
from your system. Which you don’t have to do, but it gives the flexibility we talked 
about in the ‘Changing History’ section a page or two back.

Configure things the way you would with a reverb: you want to be able to track 
your guitar unprocessed, and audition the POD processing as you are playing or 
tracking. So, for instance, if you have a mixer with direct outputs from some or all 
of its channels, along with a separate tape or disk recorder, you’ll do something 
like this: