I helped a friend install Ardour on Windows. He has a scarlett focusrite and we have the guitar to scarlett, then scarlett plugged into USB of laptop. The mic, I believe, is needed to be able to get a signal from the scarlett into Ardour, at least when we don’t mute the mic we see levels on a track and when we do mute the mic, we do not see levels on the track.
The issue is that it also picks up voice and other sounds in the room. This is on a Windows laptop with Ardour 7.4. Is there a way to mute the mic from picking up external sounds and still get levels from the audio device? I am not familiar enough with Windows to figure out if there is a setting in the OS or if possibly Ardour has one.
So you are running from the Guitar direct into the Scarlet? You do not need a mic in that case, you should be able to route straight from the appropriate input of the Scarlet to whatever track you wish to record on. The fact you are apparently hearing other sounds, tells me this is where your problem lays, either you aren’t using the Scarlet for input (Window>Audio/MIDI Setup), or you do not have the appropriate input routed to your tracks (See the button labeled ‘3’ here… The Ardour Manual - Audio/MIDI Mixer Strips )