Jesse Moraga

My Home Studio Setup — The Metal Rig I Record On

THE WOODSHED

My Home Studio Setup — The Metal Rig I Actually Record On

One laptop, one interface, and a short list of plugins I trust. No rack of gear I never touch. Here’s everything in the chain — and why each piece earns its spot.

Ableton Live
Scarlett 2i2
Neural Amp Modeler
Home Recording

Record the guitar clean, shape the tone after

The single best habit I picked up: I don’t record a finished guitar tone. I plug straight into the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and track the dry DI signal — the raw, un-amped guitar — then build the heavy tone inside the computer with an amp sim.

Why this matters: a DI is a clean slate. If the tone is too muddy, too bright, not heavy enough — I change the amp, not the take. The performance is locked; the sound stays editable forever. That’s “reamping,” and doing it in the box means I can chase the right tone at 2 AM without waking anybody. Commit the playing, not the tone.

The rig — everything in the chain

Ableton Live 12 — the room everything happens in. I write, track, arrange, and mix here. Session view for catching ideas fast, Arrangement view for building the actual song. Ableton.

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 — the door from the real world into the laptop. Guitar in one input, mic in the other. Clean preamps, low latency, basically the default for a reason.

Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) — my whole guitar tone. It runs “captures” — profiles of real high-gain amps — so the DI I tracked turns into a wall of distortion. This is the only amp sim I keep; it’s that good. NAM.

Gamma Vocal Suite — screams and vocals. Nine vocal effects in one plugin — compression, saturation, de-ess, EQ, doubler — tuned for heavy vocals. It’s what turns a raw scream into something that sits in a metal mix. Gamma.

Loopcloud — loops and one-shots. I audition samples in sync with my tempo and drag the ones I like straight onto a track as audio. Fast way to find a drum break, a texture, or a layer without leaving the session. Loopcloud.

Serum + TDR Nova — Serum for synth layers and low-end under the guitars; TDR Nova (dynamic EQ) for cleaning up the mix so the guitars, vocals, and drums all fit without fighting.

Guitar Pro — where riffs get written down before they get tracked. I sketch the part, export the MIDI, and bring it into Ableton to build around.

Small rig, on purpose

None of this is the most expensive setup on the internet. That’s the point. A short list of tools I actually know beats a giant one I half-use. Learn the chain cold, and the gear stops being the thing in the way — it’s just the path from the idea in your head to the file on the drive.

I’m still building. New tones, better takes, a full band’s worth of arrangements. But the setup is dialed, and that’s what lets me show up and just play.

Available for work

Fill-in / session guitarist · metal & alternative · California. Tracking, layering, or live.

jesse@jessemoraga.com

@jessemusicusa

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Jesse Moraga · Guitarist · Fresno, CA
Updated 2026-06-22