TH3 Amps and Pedals are noisy

[SWright]

I’m pretty new to home recording and even newer to amp, cab, and pedal sims. The first song I recorded with Cakewalk used a guitar and overdrive pedal into my M-TRACK SOLO interface and it sounded okay. I found the TH3 plug-in and thought I would give it a try.

The problem I’m running into is that pretty much every head has unwanted noise. Think bad instrument and patch cables with a cheaply-made pedal. The high-gain heads are worse. I’ve tried different guitars (all humbucker), getting further away from my computer (suggestion I read online), the noise gate pedal, and just turning down the level and/or gain. The latter helps the most, followed by the gate pedal. The other two steps did nothing. I’m not a fan of the gate pedal, so I’m hoping someone in here has had the same issue and resolved it.

The computer is Windows 11, has an i5 processor, 16GB of RAM, and almost nothing on the hard drive. I’m only using it for recording. There was no noise when I just recorded without TH3. 

[scook]

Was the TH3 input level set as described in page 7 of the manual?

[Byron Dickens]

Real amps make noise. High gain amps make a lot of noise.

 

[SWright]

8 hours ago, scook said:

Was the TH3 input level set as described in page 7 of the manual?

I’ll double check that tonight, thank you. 

[fret_man]

Does the noise go away when you unplug the guitar?

[John Vere]

2 hours ago, fret_man said:

Does the noise go away when you unplug the guitar?

The OP said 

13 hours ago, SWright said:

There was no noise when I just recorded without TH3. 

Therefore it is just a setting in the plug in. I always have to turn the Amps WAY down. The default is a red line with a modest -10.0 db signal. 

[Lord Tim]

15 hours ago, bdickens said:

Real amps make noise. High gain amps make a lot of noise.

^^ This.

Metal guy here, and I typically have a crap-load of distortion for what we do. Any high gain amp, plugin or pedal, or anything that boosts up a signal dramatically will amplify ANYTHING that's connected before it, be it a dodgy cable, noisy pickups, bad preamp hiss, EM noise... you name it, you'll have more of it than you'll ever want. Bad power is another thing - some places have really dirty power that causes hums and crackles that you otherwise wouldn't hear because it's below the noise floor of your music.... unless you boost the hell out of it with an amp sim.

TH3 isn't really much more noisy than any other amp or sim I've used, but you definitely want to run at least one gate on it. What I'd suggest is to run one before the TH3 (even the one built into the TH3 itself will do) at a fairly lenient threshold, just to get rid of any low level crud before it gets boosted by TH3, then I'd run another tighter one after the preamp/amp stage, just to catch the noise of the amp itself. By using two gates, you can get a fairly natural sounding decay and substantially cut out a lot of noise.

But definitely check your chain first - if this is more than just amp noise, you may not hear it, but this sound is going into ALL of your audio recordings, and if you want to process them more later (say like boosting the gain or applying a fair bit of compression) you'll hear it there too.

Edited March 28, 2022 by Lord Tim