Record Zero Latency Vocals With Reverb/Effects?

I might be being stupid, but is there a more elegant way of doing the below tutorial than what I’m currently doing??

http://therecordingrevolution.com/how-to-record-zero-latency-vocals-with-reverb/

Track 1: Line Input -> Send (Routed to reverb), send amount controls the overall reverb volume affect. This still doubles the signal when reverb is applied

Not sure if I understood correctly what you are trying to describe.

You wish a singer to monitor himself without latency, but with software reverb? The idea seems quite good to me. You need a soundcard with direct monitoring and a mixer built in for this, and route the input to the headphones or whatever in hardware. The trick you are trying to achieve with the reverb is a good idea. I would try to only record the 100% dry signal, not the reverb you put in just for the singer to feel some space around his/her voice. Add a 100% wet (and leveled in to taste of the singer, but not passing any dry signal) reverb to the headphone channel. You probably need to mix direct monitoring and the software reverb somehow in the sound card, I’m not sure if every device is capable of this.

Also the reverb WILL have a slight delay, but if you keep it 100% wet so it passes no dry signal (which will come from the hardware mixer) it probably won’t be noticed by the singer - and feel kind of like a slight pre-delay in the reverb, with maybe only the early reflections being a bit odd feeling if the reverb is advanced.

As for trying to monitor zero latency forget about any software mixers inside the daw. There is already delay by the audio buffers in it. You really need a sound card with a low latency hardware mixer inside to do this. Of course normally this is controlled with software, a mixer applet by the sound card manufacturer. Also it won’t be total zero latency, but very low if the soundcard is of good quality & built for recording.

Another trick is to really tweak and tune a pc hard for realtime performance to be able to operate with sub 3-4ms buffer roundtrip latency dropout free for recording. Then the delay will be so small that it is almost unnoticable, even for singers. And you will be able to monitor with realtime effects at leisure, even affecting the “dry” signal. If they don’t add a lot of latency, but they will probably use quite some more cpu than you are used to the lower the latency is tuned.

But I think renoise wasn’t built for this. I’d use other software for recording. And I haven’t yet managed to make it really stable at ultra low latencies, while other progs on my box can do the tight stuff after lots of tweaks applied.

Maybe one of those UAD thingies lets you do ultra low latency with (their proprietary) plugin processing. Beyond that, Oops’s suggestion is spot on

*nvm I can’t read :slight_smile:

Thanks guys. The concept of having latency when monitoring via software was alien to me, before I dug a bit deeper into why my drum machines/synths were out of sync during realtime playback (and in the case of the drums, recording)!

Great points Oops, I use a Focusrite gen 2, at around ~7ms RTT (Ableton reported) and 3ms in Renoise for stability, which is fairly low but still drifts. For home recording it’s perfect, since the margin of error is lower when recording back triggered devices (I find that it works much better than high latency devices).

But yeah, processing the sound via an external bit of hardware would near eliminate any software latency for the same effect (if passing straight in).

Generally speaking, recording via Renoise is pretty swish, but it doesn’t always behave itself when using ‘sync’ to determine the start of recording a sample (presumably from unknown latencies, but even adding extra can still give a ‘cut off’ sample). I’ll probably have a look for another DAW to handle recording for these types if need be.