Into Home Recording? Book Some Time In The Omni-Studio

If you get involved with home music recording on your PC, there's a word that will become increasingly important to you as progress in your endeavors: latency.

Latency is the lag time between when a note is played or sung and when the computer records it. To put it in layman's terms, it's a combination of the delay of the computer's processing speed, and the circuitry of the soundcard. The lower the latency, the more powerful and more transparent the recording process is.

Why more powerful? Because if the latency is low enough, it's possible to do real time monitoring while a voice or instrument is being recorded. If not, you have to wait until recording's done to hear what something sounds like.

And if latency's low, it's possible to add real-time effects to the monitoring mix. So the singer can hear what she sounds like with a little echo or reverb on her voice. The guitarist can hear himself though a distortion plug-in.

Incidentally, we're talking milliseconds here: a 20-millisecond delay is just enough to throw off a musician's timing. Ideally, it should be under five milliseconds to make the recording process as transparent as possible.

The Soundblaster Experience

One of the most popular soundcards is Creative Labs' Soundblaster series. They're great for gamers, but not so great for those like to make music on their PCs.

As I found out the hard way.

I had my Soundblaster Audigy soundcard installed in a brand new, bitchin' custom-built 2.8 GHz PC late last year, for the express purpose of recording music using my Sonar recording program. But for whatever reason, the latency of the card in the new system was abysmal. I had to constantly slide tracks around to line them up to get them in time. And forget real-time monitoring of performances. It also made my USB-based guitar synthesizer track poorly.

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

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