Delay?

[Captain Redbeard]

Hey,
when using a pre-made drumtrack as 'metronome', I noticed that, when I record guitar parts over the drums, the guitar isn't playing simultaneously with the drum track upon playback. The guitar seems to be off-beat, even though, while recording the guitar, I am absolutely sure I am on beat.

This is confirmed by the fact that I also noticed that it doens't matter what I use to keep on time, upon playback the recorded track always is a little off-beat compared to the track I used to keep on time (f.e. when singing over a pre-set click track, the singing is slightly off-beat). When I record two tracks over a click track however, the two tracks both have the same amount of delay compared to the click, so when I mute the click the two tracks do play simultaneously.

It also seems that the longer the recording is, the bigger the delay gets, so with a track of 0:30 seconds, in the first 10 seconds the delay is barely noticable, but when the same riff with the same drum beat returns in the last 5 seconds, the guitar suddenly is totally off. Does anyone recognize this?

Thanks in advance.

[kozikowski]

<<<Does anyone recognize this?>>>

Sure. I'm guessin' the digital clock in your sound card is off leading to digitizing errors over time.

The solution is to play the drum track on something analog and re-record that to your machine using the same digital pathway that you use for the live guitar performance.

So, push the drum track over to your iPod and then play the iPod headphone connection into the Line-In of your PC instead of the guitar using a simple 1/8" to 1/8"shielded audio cable. This is assuming your PC has a Line-In connection. If you're on a laptop, this will suddenly become very much harder.

Since the "new" drum track is recorded (digitized) with the same electronics as your guitar, the slight timing difference should go away. I don't know any purely digital way to get out of this. Your drum track was digitized on a very different machine than the one you have there (I'm guessing).

Koz

[Captain Redbeard]

Thanks for the reply,

I made the drums in the program Drumkit From Hell and to record guitar tracks I just position a mic in front of the cabinet.

So what I should do is, get the audio file containing the drums on my Mp3-player, then connecting the mp3-player to the line in of my pc, and then record the file using the 'record via line in' option I guess? But since I use a mic to record my guitar the drums are not recorded through the same electronics as the guitar, and I can't simply play the drum tracks and hold the microphone in front of the speaker (this will ruin the sound quality of the drums, and I guess the fact that the sound quality of my guitar tracks is already sub-par because I don't have decent recording equipment is already bad enough).

Also, what should I do after I recorded the drum tracks? Record the guitar parts in a separate file and place them over the drum track later on? In this case what should i use to keep on time, because the drums are full of tempo and time signature changes..

[Captain Redbeard]

No one?