Severe static when trying to record electric guitar

I've been trying to record a clean electric guitar and every recording is just covered in heavy hissing static sound. This didn't happen when I recorded an acoustic guitar through a microphone. I have an electric guitar going into a small amp, with the amp level set on the clean channel at a very low setting, then the headphone/output is running directly into my M-Audio FastTrack USB interface, which is connected to the computer. I have adjusted the "recording level" in garage band so that the signal never gets close to the red in the individual instrument track. The "output" knob on the FastTrack is set relatively low also, about "4" out of 10. When I play back the recorded track, the master level meter never goes into the red either. Yet no matter what volume I record at I'm getting this strong crackling/hissing as if it was extremely overdriven.
Related question: When I play on the electric guitar, is it supposed to show an indication in the LCD box, as it does when I'm playing on my midi controller? It doesn't have the little indicator light showing signal, nor does the master level indicator, when I'm recording. Only the individual track level indicator shows the signal coming in. Maybe this is normal...
Any help is greatly appreciated.

OK, well I solved my own problem through trial and error. Rant: I switched to GB from ProTools on the theory that GB was supposed to "just work" and I want to be a musician, not an audio engineer. Here is how I fixed the static: one of my garage band books told me I could set the Garage Band audio preferences to "System" default, and then set my computer's audio preferences to my audio interface for the ins and outs, because I wanted to play all of computer's audio, whether in garageband or not, through my reference studio monitors. Well doing it this way results in massive static when recording a real instrument, for no apparent reason. So to fix this, you have to set Garageband's own audio in/out settings to your audio interface, NOT to the system settings. This caused the static in my recordings to completely disappear. Go figure.

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