DIY Recording Guys · Vadim Kharaz and Benjamin Hull

54: What Latency is and How to Deal with it

January 25, 2021·1 hr 13 min·5 clips

Ben shares a vocal recording trick that uses latency to create a natural reverb pre-delay effect.

They come back a little out of practice. The intro almost becomes the lesson for a minute, with Vadim and Ben laughing about how a recording setup still needs a plan after a year away. Then the episode gets into the useful stuff. Vadim remembers seeing that a laptop, a DAW, and a guitar amp head could make his computer act like a live setup. The problem is the lag. The guitar has to enter the system, turn into digital information, run through amp sims, plug-ins, EQ, and come back out as analog sound. That trip takes time. You can make it short enough that a player barely notices, but the computer still has to carry the load. That is why latency matters. Vadim moves from the guitar example to the plain question of what creates the delay and what helps. Recording is where it gets ugly. If a keyboard comes back late, the player starts chasing the delayed note instead of the performance. Timing drifts. Feel goes with it. The episode stays focused on the path audio takes through the computer, and on the tradeoff between quick monitoring and how much processing a DIY setup can handle.

As heard by us

A practical DIY recording episode on why latency ruins tracking feel, and why extra delay can help once recording is done.

Vadim and Ben take latency out of the abstract and put it where home recordists actually feel it: playing a part, hearing it come back a split second late, and slowly losing the pocket.

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Why you'd press play

If latency is making your playing feel off, this episode explains why.

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