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Why is my vocal track way behind the guitar track – could this be latency?

Posted on October 2, 2011

You’re recording happily into your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) application,

guitar part done, vocal done and on playback the vocal line is dragging behind the guitar, this could well be a good example of latency.

The delay is milliseconds but it might as well be a minute as your track starts to sound quite weird. Add a few VST plugins and you quickly end up with one giant out of sync mess.

So what is actually happening?

Your DAW application processes your analogue audio input into digital audio via the use of analogue to digital converters. To do this takes a small amount of time and this time becomes the amount of latency you are experiencing.

Now if you are experienced with digital audio you’ll know that bit rates make a difference, your analogue source is effectively sampled into a digital signal, the higher the bit rate the better the quality of your audio, there are things the computer needs to do and do well.

Bit rates, sampling rates, the type of software and hardware (computer processor speed and RAM) all figure in latency. Because we all have slightly different recording setups, individually we have differing latency issues.

So what can we do to solve this dreaded latency thing? A good thing you can do is buy a soundcard that has built in DSP (digital signal processing) so that effectively you are making the soundcard do more of the work as opposed to the computer. A computer is regularly working hard to keep itself operating efficiently and the extra work required to process audio data can lead, amongst other things, to your severe latency issues.

Steinberg developed the ASIO driver (audio stream input and output) which lessened the delays by communicating with the soundcard directly as opposed to going through the computer. ASIO drivers are now written by the companies for their soundcards and are used on both the Apples and PC’s; they were developed originally for the Macintosh.

The advantage of a good professional soundcard, a computer with a fast processor and adequate RAM are many and lead to a much better quality of sound for your recordings. Making sure your soundcard supports ASIO drivers and has DSP onboard may sound like icing on the cake but really they are essential in this world of digital audio and VST and will stand you in good stead avoiding many hours of frustration.

A lot of people go the digital hardware route, a dedicated digital recorder with built in DSP, hard drive etc, designed to work as a unit on it’s own. This solves the latency issues that can come when using a computer to record audio.

Oh there is one thing you could try if digital becomes too tasking and that is record using analogue equipment as there is scarcely any latency.

Lose all the pleasures that come with digital recording? well that’s not for me but I still have a strong love of analogue and from time to time it will be part of my work and I’m also happy to say I havn’t had latency problems for many years.

Avoid losing your songs using Digital Audio Workstation software (DAW)

Posted on September 27, 2011

by Calum MacDonald

One of the problems with recording digitally to a computer using DAW software is that you can lose work in an instant if you haven’t been making regular backups. There is nothing worse than after just getting that guitar part right and working on it for (put your own time in here) it disappears, the computer has frozen and a restart is required.

What can also happen is that you can end up with a corrupted file. Say you have been working on “song one” all morning saving to the same file, what do you do when this file ceases to work, start again? well I guess you have to.

I have become somewhat paranoid about this and now make a point of saving within my DAW software to a new file name at least every half hour or so. Every half hour I’ll have a file “Song 1 two”, “Song one three” etc plus add the date to this file. This does add up to a few files by the end of a song but at least they are all there, unless of course the whole main drive of your computer goes down and that is why I save the files to a second drive and only run my audio recording program from my main drive on the computer.

A backup to a USB memory stick, a good 16gb (or larger) is also a good further backup to cover all angles after all this is your heart and soul we are recording for posterity here.

Recording using one of the many audio programs (I use Steinberg Cubase) involves a lot of data being saved to that one file. Along with your song are all the plugins that you have used, your mixer settings, VST synths etc. By the end of a session you have a lot of data all hinging on being loaded up tomorrow from one file.

So why do files corrupt and computers go down? Your operating system can lose it’s connection to where that file is, it may not remember the files number (allocated by the computer) anymore and that’s that. Audio requires a fair amount of computer grunt, the more memory the better and I always use an external sound card (I have been using a Focusrite audio firewire interface for a few years now) but there are many very good audio interfaces available. These interfaces give you a much more professional sound via the high quality audio they produce through good circuitry, you have more choice in the amount of input and output jacks, microphone preamps and are usually from my experience, quiet.

A computer checks constantly for the mouse, the keyboard, all your different plugins and the myriad of other processes it needs to function. Recording audio is processor and memory intensive, if anything is going to make your computer hit the wall then recording your audio tracks will.

An internal sound card can also pick up noise and affect your recordings but more importantly the computer is working harder using an internal soundcard instead of letting an external audio interface do a lot of the work. This may be OK if you don’t use many VST plugins but your computer memory will be sorely tested once you start to pile them on and the dreaded freezing screen may not be too far away.

Now I don’t want to sound too scary about all this, but losing hours of work using your DAW software is never fun and a few little simple methods put in place can save a lot of heartache and make the creative process just that little more relaxing.
Let the music flow.