Didn't know this was possible...?!?

Recording, Mixing and Producing
#1

Like most people, I have experienced latency. I was unaware that I could experience ANTI-Latency!!

I imported a wav file into Logic today, set up a bass track and tried to write a bass line while monitoring the file. For some reason, every time I tried to record my bass along with the song, the timing was off, it was not late though, it was early, every single note. My first assumption was that I was just playing really poorly but after many attempts I figured I couldn’t be that bad (hopefully?). Out of curiosity, I set everything up again in Garageband and tried again, no prob, right on time.

This has never happened to me, I assume my DAW is auto shifting everything early but I really don’t know why and not sure what to do to fix it! Any ideas? Hopefully this is just an embarrassing minor mistake to correct! I know Logic has a flex-time feature, might I have triggered that somehow? I’m confused, frustrated and yes, even mildly amused somehow. Help!!!

Cheers!
Daniel

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#2

I’m kind of dying to hear what that sounds like.

#3

Hahah No, no you don’t! It was not pretty. Fortunately for all involved, I kept nothing from that session :slight_smile:

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#4

Now I REALLY want to hear it.

#5

I’ve had this problem before. Your DAW’s got the idea that there’s more latency than there actually is so it’s over-compensating. You’ll need to go into settings and see if you can work out why, or if there’s something you can do to manually offset what it thinks is happening.

I’ve found it sometimes is latency dependent - when the problem occurs I can change to a different latency and the issue goes away.

My DAW of choice, Mixbus, has an option to manually measure latency by plugging an output to an input and seeing how long the round trip takes. Don’t know how common that feature is.

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#6

Yep. it’s either that or you are compensating for the latency in addition to your DAW compensating for it. If it takes a few milliseconds for your instrument to make sound when you play it, you subconsciously start playing it earlier so that it feels like it’s timed right.

Think of it like hitting a drum. You start your swing before the beat so that the drum gets hit on the beat when it actually makes its sound. You are starting your motion of hitting the drum quite a bit of time before you actually need to hit it, because you know when you need to start so that it will make sound at the right time.

We tend to do the same thing when playing instruments. If there’s a bit of lag from the time we move to the time sound comes out, we adjust our start time so that the instrument hits at the right time.

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#7

BINGO. Thanks guys, not sure if I did it or my machine ‘burped’ but somehow in my settings the ‘recording delay’ slider got shifted all the way to -5000 samples. Weird, that’s never happened before… now onward to bass line writing glory lol

Cheers!

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#8

Does your DAW have a flux capacitor? Perhaps you own a DAWlorean?

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#9

I wonder how many youngsters on this forum wouldn’t get that? That movie came out 30 years ago… now I feel old :smile:

#10

no. it came out 60 yrs ago, in the fifties, I was there… I saw both of them, by the clock tower…

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#11

But’s such a classic and still holds up well. My kids have seen them all and love them! Good parenting right there!

#12

wait… whats a classic, nowadays?

Ive worked with at least 4 of these guys, that I remember… and Im just a spring chicken. Most are prob nearly dead, I’d imagine.

#13

Nice! My kids will see them someday, mine are 2,4 and 6 - a wee bit young still :slight_smile:

#14

I’m not sure what defines a classic?! The first time I heard Nirvana on classic rock definitely made me feel old though! And that happened about a decade ago…

#15

We were saying the Back to the Future trilogy is a classic. They feel like they came out a long time ago to me and I’m someone who often thinks something happened last week and it turns out it happened 10 years ago!