Be careful with resource-heavy plugins while tracking

[paperhatrecords]

I have a standard preset vocal chain I like to use and right at the top is Soothe (the De-Shadow preset cleans up the bottom of my voice nicely). I like to track with what has been done before relatively mixed and both Soothe and Spiff were used multiple times throughout the mix, on drums, bass, etc. I like to be able to mix down as soon as I am done tracking, with minor tweaks.

But when I started using the preset vocal chain while tracking, I started noticing audible timing issues. There was latency and I was singing in ways to compensate for it. I thought it was just my computer being slow or laggy.

It wasn't until I spent a long time trying to fix drum and percussion not synching up even though they looked basically perfect on the grid that I figured the problem out: I had a version of Soothe on the conga/percussion/drum machine bus and more Soothe and Spiff on the drums. When I removed them, voila, no more audible latency.

Then I realized it was likely Soothe in my vocal chain and elsewhere in the mix causing the tracking timing problems.

High CPU plugins should never be used while tracking. Stick with stock if you must use them at all. Lesson learned.

 

[Steenamaroo]

Good info to share!
What DAW were you using, though? Most I'm aware of automatically compensate for this.

ProTools, for example, has ADC - Automatic Delay Compensation, where if a plugin introduces X ms of latency it applies the same latency to all other tracks to keep playback sounding correct
then anything that you record under those circumstances is automatically offset on the timeline to compensate.

Maybe you've got that option but it's disabled?