sound doubled in sonar...

Uladine

Uladine

New member
Hello,

I was recording drums the other day, and on random takes I would playback the performance and it would sound doubled, almost like my talkback mic was picking up the sound from my monitors and recording it with the drums. However I had my talkback mic muted when recording and it seemed to occur totally at random. I also tried recording with the monitors off.

We would finish a take and play it back and we would hear the effect. Then we'd try it again just messing around with drums and it would work fine. It seemed every time we would attempt to do a real take, the noise would occur, and everytime we'd mess around to test the system out it would work fine. We got to the point where our drummer said "ok, 'wink-wink', lets just mess around on this one" and we would actually do the take for real and it worked flawlessly.

Every time that it would fuck up after that we would say "lets just mess around on this take" and it would work fine every time we said that. We were recording at my dads house in the mountains which was rumored to be haunted, but I'm thinking it was more of a technical problem than a supernatural one. I mean if you believe in ghosts then maybe you could believe that something was playing a prank on us trying to screw up our recording, but I dont think its too likely. But then maybe that could explain the weird rubbing noise that seemed to play hide and seek with us in our audio equipment. I dunno.
 
What mixer and recorder?

Chances are that you were creating a loop between playback tracks and the inputs on the recorder. This only happens during playback because when you are recording the other old drum tracks were probably muted or being recorded over.

When you playback make sure that you mute the inputs to the recorder. When you record make sure you mute any channels that are coming out of the recorder and being sent back in the recorder inputs.
 
Zoom in on the wave files looking at a snare hit or something that is picked up to some extent by all the mics. Are they all lined up? If one is delayed by any substantial amount from the rest, it will sound something like what you mentioned. It happens to me with my Gadget Labs 8/24 and is intermittent. The misallignment varies from being quite noticeable like you mentioned, to just a few mS and is different every take. I assume there is something wrong with the sync on my card, but if I drag the files around until they match up, you can't tell so I live with it.
 
Hmm..

Seems like it may be a sync problem perhaps. A playback loop also sounds likely, but then that wouldnt explain why it would happen at random like it was. If it happens again I'll contact the the software and soundcard manufacturers.
 
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