first time recording guitar

[mojobone]

Pro Tip: only rookie guitarists leave all the guitar controls full up all the time; for instance, on Strats, Teles and most Gibsons, (plus a few other models) rolling back the guitar's volume knob can also reduce the highest, harshest trebles, and often in a more organic fashion than when deploying an actual tone knob. (you reduce gain at the same time, and a quality front end [even including some digital/virtually modeled ones] can pay dividends here, in finding not only the right tone, but the precise amount of crunch that a given electric guitar part requires)

On some early Teles, rolling back the volume reduces bass frequencies. (but only for the first two pickup switch positions on the earliest, 50s examples; the bass/rhythm position sports a capacitor intended to better balance the 'both pickups' switch position, on those models) Controls on real guitars and amps tend to be more interactive than with plugins, and can attain sometimes surprising results. In other words, it pays to explore gain structures, particularly with electric guitars and amps.

This is just as true for the virtual pickups in an emulator like Line6's Variax, because they modeled both frequency and volume response to string output, (organized by string) and referenced it by the time domain in order to replicate the profiles of a number of guitar/body/hardware/pickup combinations. This means that it's no accident that sampled electric guitar and amp sounds were among the first to be successfully modeled; electric guitar has been featured in American music for more than half a decade, yet it has a very narrow and therefore easy to emulate response. (hence the advent of Variax and similar technologies)

Boiling it down, what I'm saying is that if you consider the signal path, anything between your fingers and the recording medium will affect your sound, and it's crucial to take control of them all, when recording. (even if the goal is only to attain a consistent result, let alone a really awesome sound.

[ochaim]

Guitar's volume knob level, that's a golden nugget right, mojo!

I did manage to play around with that and all the other controls like the 3 way switch etc, and the amp itself. I found the amp would imparted a distortion, even with OD turned off, that would make anything in guitar rig sound really harsh.

Instead of tinkering with all these moving parts, I plugged the guitar into the 6176 and into guitar rig standalone. Boy what a difference! I ended up playing around longer than I was supposed to going through the presets.

6176 is the most expensive piece I own, recording a $100 amp was probably not making the most of it.

I'm using an epiphone LP studio, anything I should know about how the sound is effected by its knobs/switch?

[mojobone]

It's based on a Gibson, and those are pretty consistent, unless they've been modded; most will lose a little treble when you roll down the volume, but humbuckers don't tend to get icepick-y when you play high on the neck, like with a Strat, so instead of cranking the volume back to take the edge off, just set everything about halfway; you can then use your volume knob to control distortion/overdrive. As you turn up the wick, you'll get more harmonics along with the dirt, so you can dial back the trebles (tone knob) to compensate, though sometimes the taper of the potentiometers (the knobs) on the budget/import models won't give you much effective range, so you'll have to experiment.

Yeah, I don't imagine a recording of a miked amp would sound too great, fed through an amp sim; (chaining guitar amps, as opposed to slaving, is not something you see guitarists do much of in real life) direct thru 6176 fed to Guitar Rig should sound better. Slaving involves a single preamp and multiple power amps, usually driving multiple cabinets. I don't see as much of that, since the Big 80s.

You might have seen something that looks like chaining; on vintage Fenders, Marshalls and Voxs (Voxes?) you often have more than one preamp channel, and each channel has parallel inputs, which allows you to mult the guitar signal before it hits the preamp. In this way, you can send your guitar's output to more than one amp, but each split halves the amount of signal, so it's not very efficient; most vintage guitarists didn't use this feature, though they might let Keith Relf use their extra channel in the event he forgot to bring an amp for the harmonica mic.

The other common usage was with certain overpowered vintage Marshalls; players often jumpered the channels together, halving the signal on purpose to create more power section sag, or to blend the sound of two differing channels, balancing with the respective channel volume knobs. For instance, the Vox AC30 has non-identical channels with fewer tone knobs on the tremolo side. Some amps had bright and normal channels, so you'd jumper to get a sound that's between the two. You hardly ever see Fenders jumpered in this fashion, cuz give or take a midrange knob, the channels on most Fenders sounded pretty much the same, though some had a "bright" and a "normal" input for each.

One brilliant example of back-end chaining was Joe Walsh's early rig: Two Fender Super Reverbs on folding chairs with the speakers from one combo amp patched into the external speaker output of the other, halving the (Ohms) impedance and thusly sending the rig into sweet natural overdrive. As a bonus, the other amp served as a sorta built-in spare. Sometimes he'd push the front end with a clean boost. Joe, btw was the guy who turned Peter Frampton on to the Heil Talkbox that's all over Frampton Comes Alive; I still remember the giant display at the local mall music store with a Frampton mannikin in a life-size coffin...good times.