Good LOW NOISE guitar interface for heavy distortion?

[Sackvillenb]

I play a lot of electric guitar, and all the interfaces I've used always have a TREMENDOUS amount of background noise when I use high distortion settings. Granted, I do like using tons of distortion (for metal), but this happens with multiple guitars on various set-ups of mine.

I've had some success fixing this with a noise gate, but I'd like to reduce or eliminate the problem at it's source. I often use a light-snake as my guitar interface. But I get this problem using various DAW's (Logic to Ableton to Garageband).

So I'm looking for an interface that sounds good but won't have such terrible background noise when I use high gain high distortion settings. Also, ideally, I'd like this interface to be cheap! Not because I'm that cheap, but I am planning on getting the Apogee Duet 2, but this will take me a while (I get a discount on it through my job but it makes the process to get one very very slow). So I don't want to spend a lot of money on this since I'll be getting the duet at some point... Thanks everyone!

 

[dj-anon]

The Lightsnake is good for getting ideas recorded quickly. But what you really want is a professional quality DI box, an interface with some kind of pre-amp and a noise reduction plugin.

http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/DI20.aspx
+
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/FastTrack.html

Adding this could really help a lot:
http://www.presonus.com/products/Detail.aspx?ProductId=16

Stuff like Guitar Rig have intelligent, guitar specific gates that reduce noise a lot. It seems Native Instruments provides a free version:

http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/products/producer/guitar-rig-4-player/?page=1502

It is also very important that all of your guitar hardware runs on batteries as that can reduce the noise considerably. That includes the DI box and your pedals.

 

[M87]

I play metal and have no problems with my Apogee One. I don't even use a noise gate. I recently switched to EMGs and they seem to help as well.

 

[Sackvillenb]

Just wanted to say thanks for the suggestions! I do appreciate it. I was considering the apogee one... but it's pricey for a single channel input. I might get a Mackie Blackjack. But DJ-anon your suggestions are great too, very helpful. Gives me food for thought... I'll get an upgrade soon enough! Thanks again!

 

[Sackvillenb]

FYI, bought the onyx blackjack and it definitely works much better. There's still some noise with really high gain settings (which I'm fond of using) but it's much much better. I'll probably still buy the apogee products eventually though!