A couple of months ago John Nathan Cordy published a video in which he explained that we set our input level for guitar on our interfaces in the wrong way. To make a long story short, according to Cordy we need to set the gain on our interface at the lowest level possible.

A couple of days later he published another one:

“tone your gain all the way down to zero”, Cory said.

I could not believe it. Why on earth would you set the input level to zero?! That causes the pre-amp on the interface to sound way noisier that it should! And a guitar is a rather noisy instrument so adding more noise is like a super crazy idea!

People in the comments section didn’t agree with me saying things like:

“Regarding noise, the background EMI/RF noise into the pickups and unbalanced cable will be significantly higher than the self noise of any converter or interface. So boosting preamp gain closer to clipping won’t really give any benefit at all- it’s easy to test for yourself you won’t be able to notice the noise of the converters.” – @eds4754

Rabea Massaad also made a video of this. Funnily enough in the first couple of minutes you hear him talk while his interface seems to produce a serious amount of noise… Massaad advices the same thing as Cory: set the input gain to zero.

Rhett Shull also joined the club with the same advice to set the gain to zero.

These players can be considered as huge influencers. Many people will believe the things they say. But they got it all wrong.

Then on the 25th of October 2024 Valdemar Erlingsson of Ghost Note Audio published a video explaining that it is best practice to set the input level of your guitar just a tiny bit below clipping for the ultimate input level. He also did a noise test to prove that setting the input level at zero causes way more noise.

I don’t understand why Cordy, Massaad and Shull got it all wrong. This has been common practice for many years. And this has been proven over and over again. Setting the pre-amp way too low will result in more noise.

UPDATE (October 26, 2024): Cordy did an update today as a response on Erlingsson’s video but got it all wrong again…

UPDATE (October 27, 2024): because some people on YouTube claim “with modern interfaces noise is not an issue” I did a test. Check it out: