The short answer: most definitely. There's only one time a direct signal from the guitar into the board is acceptable, and that's to record a pure clean signal from the guitar. Jeff Baxter very famously recorded pure clean tracks for sessions when a clean guitar was required. Just check out what he says about equipment in the following video:
Here's a simple riff I recorded back-to-back, the first without speaker emulation, and the second with a 4x12" cab emulation from my Korg Pandora:
The...
