 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with Musicteacher.com. In this video I'm going to show you guys how to use your Blackstar Amp2 as a recording interface with your PC. So my Amp2 is on the desk in front of me as you can see here. Now I've just got a sound dialed in which is just a standard kind of rock sound. It's an EL34 British style sound which is great for just kind of classic rock sort of playing. So my guitar is connected to the Blackstar Amp2 but you'll notice there's actually nothing else coming out of any of the outputs. The only thing you see here is this USB-C cable right here. This USB cable is going to my studio PC. Now when you plug your Amp2 in for the first time it will automatically download some drivers from the internet and then your computer will notify you that the Amp2 is ready. Then you need to set it up in your computer ready to use. So I'm doing this on a Windows PC as you can see. If you're going to do this on Mac there will be a similar process but you may find some of the menus are slightly different. So on Windows the first thing you should do is come down here to this little speaker icon. Make sure that this is selected as Amp2. This isn't really that important to do but it's always worth doing just to make sure your computer does recognize that the Amp2 is the device you're using. Then you want to come over to your DAW. Now I'm using Reaper but again the same principles will apply whatever DAW that you are using. So you want to find in this case it's my preferences menu which is under options. You'll have a similar menu in whichever DAW you use but inside here you'll have all the settings for your DAW. So if you're using Reaper the first thing you'll see is this preferences menu which will start on general. You want to come down to audio and then device. Now like I said whatever DAW you are using there will be a different look to this but the idea is going to be the same throughout. So if you're going to be using the Amp2 with a PC it doesn't run on standard ACO drivers. It kind of has its own driver set. So you're going to need to download this free driver called ACO for all. It's a free driver. You just type it into Google and you will find it. I'll also put a link for that down below in the description. Once you've downloaded that you select that as your driver type. So ACO driver should be ACO for all V2 being the latest version. So you select that. Then you need to configure it to recognize where you're sending your signal. So my setup is going to be slightly more complicated because I've already got an audio interface plugged into my studio which is connected to my studio monitors which you can't see because they're off camera. So I'm using those for monitoring back but the Amp2 has a headphone output which you could connect some headphones to. You could also use a Y cable to split that output and go to two different speakers as well if you wanted to monitor that way because when you're recording you need to be able to hear back what you're putting in. So the way I've got this setup is so that the Amp2 is set as my input and my other interface going to my monitors is my output. To do this once you've selected ACO for all you go to ACO configuration and it brings up this menu. So this is just a list of all the devices that are connected to my computer. You can see I've got focus right device selected and the Amp2. Now if you're going to just use the Amp2 and you're going to utilize the headphone output to connect headphones or speakers this is the only thing you need to worry about make sure this is selected and all of its subcomponents the ins and the outs. I have these selected as well because I'm actually running a separate set of outputs. So you can see here my inputs are Amp1. This is first and last input so this is set up to see a range of inputs. You can set just one if you want to. I've got all the inputs selected there so it sees input 1 to 4 and output range that is just handling my speakers but if you were using the Amp for that you do the same thing there. Then once you've done that you create a new track in your DAW. Inside that track you should have an option to select the input source so you want to make sure that's Amp2 and then whichever of the input channels you're using I'm just going to use one because that's the default one. Arm your track for recording and turn the record monitoring on because without that you're not going to be able to hear what you're doing and then once you've done that you are ready to go. Now if you have a PC that is perhaps a little bit older or lower spec you may find you get some latency issues which means when you play you hear back what you're playing a little bit later than what you're actually playing. It's not as direct as playing with Amp. There's a really simple way to rectify this. Come back into that screen that you were just in to set up your inputs and outputs. Open up your configuration and here we have the buffer size. Now mine is set to 320. What you want to do is you want to bring this as low as you can to reduce the latency. You can see when I hover over it it actually says lower latency or reduce glitches. So the lower the latency is the faster the response between your playing and what the computer gives you back but if you've got an older system this can also cause glitches. So you want to try and find the sweet spot where you get minimal latency but no glitches. If you've got a more powerful system you will be able to bring this much lower. I have quite a powerful PC so I could get this a lot lower if I want but I've always just set things at 320 because I find that works great. But if you've got an older PC you may need to set this slightly higher and there may be a tiny bit of latency but that's something you can just play about whether you'll know when it's wrong because it will glitch. So now that I've done that I can just hit record and I can play. So when I play everything will go via the amp 2 out of the USB cable straight into my DAW. If I do any patch changes such as turning on modulation or reverb or whatever I want to do that will automatically happen to the track that gets recorded. So there you go that is as simple as it is to get the amp 2 set up as a home recording device. Now if you don't want to use this as a USB interface in its own right like I've done in this video and you already have a USB interface you can simply take an XLR cable or a jack cable out of one of the outputs on the back feed that straight into your existing audio interface and there you go it will work in exactly the same way. Let me know down below in the comments how you guys are using the amp 2 in your own home recording setup so I'd love to hear how everyone out there is using their amp 2 in their own setups. Don't forget to check out Blackstar Amplification on YouTube for more free video lessons just like this. If there's anything you guys want to see us doing with the amp series please let us know down below in the comments and don't forget to check out MusicKitchen.com it's a great network of teachers out there waiting to help you guys take your playing to that next level. Thank you so much for watching as always and I'll see you soon.