My son won an electric guitar at the county fair this past summer. It cost him $5 to buy 50 rings at the Ring Toss game. He rung 2 bottles in only 12 tries - I have never won at that game. I was given an electronic tuning device from a friend (and was shown how to use it), and bought him an inexpensive amp ($40). The amp does have line-in and headphones-out. Could I plug in the guitar to the amp, and then plug the amp from the headphones-out port into my audio line-in port on my Mac? I was thinking of this:  . Or should I go with the Griffin iMic option listed there.

Or are there any another (inexpensive) options?

Headphones to line-in isn’t going to make you happy. BTDT.

The best method is to connect line-out from the amp (if it’s available) to the line-in. The iMic’s preamp (mike setting) has a noticeable amount of white noise — I’ve had some success using Audacity to remove the noise, as long as the audio itself was reasonably strong.

If you’re just noodling around, the iMic should be OK. You could probably even stick some tracks on MySpace, because you’ll want to compress the heck out of them before uploading anyway.

The guitar cable is probably going to be the best way to get *some* signal into the computer, unless your son wants to record lyrics as well. In that case, you might as well spring for a 3-channel mixer (which *will* have line-out).

I have a Blue Snowball USB mike (not cheap), which is handy for recording the screaming metal stuff my son likes to play because it has a built-in attenuator.

Thanks for the input Dirt Road. He (and me) are just noodling around at this point. If he (or me) gets more involved with it, then I’ll spring for better equipment. I’ll take a good look at the amp in the morning and see exactly what it has.

Well, I went cheap and bought a 1/4” to 1/8” cable ($3.99) and hooked it up headphones to line-in (no line-out on the amp). That is totally useless!! I think I’ll go for the 3-channel mixer next. Thanks again Dirt Road.

Yup, like I said, headphones to line-in wouldn’t make you happy.

Good luck with the mixer, that should work much better.