You set up to record a guitar part
over a song you had been mixing.
The playback was fine.
But the moment you started playing,
something felt sticky.
You were behind the beat,
then ahead of it,
then fighting it.
You blamed yourself
and did forty takes.
Every one of them
sounded slightly nervous.
It was not you.
It was the buffer.
When you play into a computer,
the sound you make
goes in through the interface,
waits in a buffer
while the software processes it,
and waits in another buffer
on the way back out
to your headphones.
While you were mixing,
somebody turned the buffer up
to 1024 samples,
so the heavy plugins
would stop crackling.
At 48 kilohertz,
that is about twenty milliseconds
in each direction.
You were hearing every note
forty or more milliseconds
after your hand made it.
Musicians feel lag
long before they can name it.
Somewhere past ten milliseconds,
your hands start trying
to correct for a delay
that is not in the music,
and you play early
to make the late sound
land on time.
That is the sticky feeling.
So keep two modes,
and switch on purpose.
Recording mode.
Buffer down to 64 or 128 samples.
Heavy plugins bypassed or frozen.
And if your interface
has direct monitoring,
use it,
so you hear your own playing
straight from the input
with no computer in the way.
Mixing mode.
Buffer up,
every plugin on,
nobody playing along.
Put the setting
on the first line
of your session checklist,
because you will forget it
on the day it matters.
Then check
that the recording lines up.
Run a cable from an output
back into an input,
record a click through it,
and see how far
the recorded click lands
from the original.
If it is not on top,
set the offset in your software
until it is.
You do not need a faster computer.
You need to hear yourself
when you play,
not a moment later.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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