Have you ever been making a recording and hearing small delays in what you are doing versus what you are hearing back?
Sometimes these delays can be relatively subtle, but sometimes they are long enough that it can get distracting and makes it hard to play along to.
The technical term for these small time delays is ‘latency’. There are different kinds, some come up in recording with audio devices, and others come up when working with a controller using the midi protocol.
If you’ve ever run into challenges or frustrations with small time delays, this article is for you. We’ll look at different kinds of latency, and we’ll explore how to take better care of latency issues when connecting different devices. If you are dealing with delay related to live performance or a midi controller you might want to skip to part 2 (forthcoming).
You may already have some experience with latency from recording with an audio interface. Here, we’ll start with the basics and also hopefully cover a few things you might not have realized.
In fact, latency can have a tangible impact on the quality your sound work, and in some areas, such as synchronization within DAWs it is often overlooked. It’s an important consideration when making a professional quality recording as latency issues can quickly add up and start messing around with the time precision of your track, particularly rhythm oriented music. Latency is also super important consideration when of planning a live performance that involves a complex setuip with a lot of digital equipment.
Why do these delays happen?
Something that is not always obvious about digital audio is that it’s never perfectly in time. Delay happens every time a digital signal is processed, or is converted. Even just having a plugin activated and not doing anything patched takes up a delay of 6 samples?.
It makes sense when you think about it… every time the computer has to do some work, it can’t do it instantly. IF you think of the flow of digital signals as a stream of data, a device needs to take this data from the stream. It needs to borrow that data for a bit of time to make the calculations before putting data back into the stream.
This is one of the main features of the digital environment, and it is also one of its greatest drawbacks. In the world of analog electrical signals travel at the speed of light [ insert figure ] which is pretty darn fast, fast enough travel through piles of outboard gear and through a studio, and onto a tape machine with without major issues [verify?].
Music is all about time
Things we’ll look at
- time delays and why are they important
- Audio delays.- How does delay show up in recording equipment?
- how important is it to regulate the delay
- delay between channels, and calibration (spat manual approach)
- Midi delays
- how do DAWs deal with delays?
- How does delay show up in performance?
- How to optimize delay issues, and choose correct gear
- How to work with delay issues that you can’t overcome
- Example of troubleshooting delay with diferent
Why are delays important?
- important for the bedroom recordist to get tracks accurate to the music
- over time added delays and time imprecision can add up
- timing rhythmic music - essential in groove
- important to consider when doing electronic music with outboard gear, particularly when performing
Time delays and why they’re important
What delays sound like:
30 ms is an audible difference
Delays and frequency behaviour
- delays have frequency behaviour - create filters.
- [show an example]
Delays and rhythmic material
Audio latency
How does latency show up in recording equipment?
Latency is related to the
Interestingly, using higher sample rates (such as 96000 or higher) reduces the amount of latency (and it also improves sound quality — yay!) . This is because…
but it also demand more processing power from the computer.
Time delays in music software / Digital audio workstations (DAWs)
So wait a second, if delays are added every time we add a digital plug-in does that mean that my music will start to get out of alignment with lots of plugins ?
[ image of lots of plug-ins]
This is a great question. Music software and DAWs have built-in systems for mananging delays.
How much latency is created by recording to a separate track in ableton?
Are different DAWs more accurate?
- Ableton
- Logic
- Protools
- Reaper
Does it make a difference whether the plugin is on / off or patched?
And do they do this correctly or can they make errors? When should this be something you think about?
In the next part we’ll look into delays associated to live performance. If you thinking about ways of creating a live performance and you are planning to invest in new equipment, this info could be very helpful.
We’ll also take a look at midi connections if you’ve ever run into delay issues working with controllers and midi instruments this could be a good read for you.
