There are basically 3 ways to do guitar-DAW stuff.
1. you plug your guitar into your amp. you plug the output of your amp into the scarlet. configure protools to use the scarlet as it’s audio hardware device (this is a very confusing step because very protools is confusing). add an empty “audio” track to protools. Set the input of the audio track to the channel you plugged into.
if your amp does not have a headphone output or aux out (or you dont have an amp), you can’t do #1.
2. you plug your guitar into your amp. you plug the usb cable of your amp into your computer. configure protools to use the guitar amp as it’s audio hardware device. add an empty audio track to protools. set the input of the audio track to guitar amp.
in this situation, the amp is the interface. but again if you have no USB capable amp, you can’t do #2. If you can do #2 someday, which is my favorite method, and if you have a mac, you can create an audio device in macos called “aggregate device” which will group both the guitar amp’s usb audio channel and the scarlet device, so you can have multiple hardware devices under one software group, to record or playback to/from any of them.
finally the one you will probably do (no amp, just interface):
3. you plug your guitar directly into your scarlet interface with a guitar cable. (this will result in 100% clean guitar tone). you might need to hit a toggle button on your scarlet which says “instrument/mic” (it adjusts the signal level). configure protools to use scarlet as it’s hardware device. add an empty “audio” track to protools. set the input of the audio track to be the proper scarlet interface channel (“1” or “2”). arm the track for recording (i.e. red button) and set record monitoring. at this point, verify you have clean guitar sound into the track by watching the level meters, you should see them bounce (if not, check all preceding steps). Now listen for your guitar in the headphones, if you do not hear it, play with all the knobs on the scarlet front panel until you hear something (scarlet’s are different from each other, some have monitor-mix switch, and volume knob). If you dont hear clean guitar in headphones, check all preceding steps. Now to add distortion: on the audio track there will be some small icons like “empty slots”, if you don’t see them, go to the view menu to show them, right-click them to add an inline plugin, choose some guitar amp/distortion effect plugin (depends which protools you have, for the bundled ones), etc. This should also popup the small plugin window with all the knobs etc to tweak sounds. In summary the clean guitar will go into protools, then through that plugin to give you the amp sound, then out to the headphones.
Once you get all of this working, save the protools project, also you can save it as a “template” so you can load it up in the future and all the settings will be there, ready to start something new.
It sounds like you will be using method #3, so that’s the general idea for how it works. I can’t stand protools so I have tried to forget everything I learned when having to use it last year 😀 youtube has lots of walkthrough videos to clarify each of these options, especially on #3, try searching “protools guitar vst tutorial” or something like that.
The most important thing to know about protools is that there are 2 application windows (also, protools is totally confusing and broken, so if you find yourself lost, consider that normal). When you open protools and start “New project”, you will see the main window, “Edit window”. But there is a second big window which you can shift to, called the “Mix window”. Obviously, having 2 app windows for a single workspace is totally broken software design, which no other app does, but that is how protools works. You toggle back and forth between these windows using command-= shortcut. So if you find that everything disappears like “wtf just happened to all my work! it’s gone!” then try that.
Note, when you add tracks in protools, you do not want “instrument” track, you want “audio” track. (One of a thousands ways protools is broken/confusing)
Save/print this for protools shortcuts.
http://resources.avid.com/SupportFiles/PT/Pro_Tools_Shortcuts_2019.10.pdf
Finally.. when you are done with all protools projects, uninstall the app, delete everything from avid on your computer (including the awkward/broken license manager), and switch to Reaper.
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