I currently have a QC on order and the wait is killing me. I’m thinking about using my MacBook Pro with the plug-in suites for band practice to get a jump start in the digital amp world. I have a Powerstage 170 that I can use to power it into my cabinet. My question is, how exactly would I make this work? I have an Apogee Jam interface, but I can’t think of a way to go from my computer to my power amp. Do I need a new interface or something else to make this work?
In essence, what you’re looking to do is very similar to Re-amping, except you’re doing it live rather than with a pre-recorded guitar signal, and using an already ‘amped’ signal rather than the raw DI.
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to do this with an Apogee Jam - you’ll want an interface that has an output that can be a 1/4 inch jack (guitar cable), even something like a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 would work in theory.
In your DAW/Plug in you’d want to have your guitar’s signal run through whichever amp software you’re using, such as one of the Neural plug ins, but then disable the cab sim. From there, you’ll want to send the signal from the plug-in through to a dedicated output from your interface. You’ll want to make sure you’re using a mono track and sending to just 1 output. You should be able to just then plug this output into your Powerstage, then in to the cab
Something to consider is that you may experience a little bit of latency with the whole round trip, depending on your computer hardware and settings, but realistically, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t work nicely!