Do I need to adjust (nudge) my guitar tracks to compensate for latency?

[cmorris975]

Just picking up recording again and I am forgetting some of the basics. I just recorded some scratch tracks along with a technical metal drum beat and I am wondering of recording latency might be making my performance not as in time as it should be, or if it is just my sloppy guitar playing(!).

As far as I understand it, my audio interface is just recording the dry guitar signal and then pushing it through my digital amp plugin, so the latency shouldn't really affect playback or mixdown?

Thanks for any help, I swear I used to know this stuff .

Chris

 

[Farview]

Latency should only affect how you hear the guitar when you are performing it. It should record exactly where you played it.

What sort of interface do you have that doesn't have zero latency monitoring?

 

[ashcat_lt]

There aren't many interfaces out there that will let you hear the amp sim without latency. There's no fucking way I'd bother recording any guitar - especially metal guitar - listening to the clean sound right off the pickups.

Every decent DAW nowadays compensates for latency automatically on playback. As long as your interface reports its delay properly and they both agree on how long it is, it just fixes it for you. It is at least possible that is exactly the problem, though. It might be that you are instinctively compensating for the latency while playing, and when it gets "corrected" it ends up off.

Or maybe you just suck.

 

[Farview]

Somehow I missed the entire paragraph about it being an amp sim...

 

[cmorris975]

There aren't many interfaces out there that will let you hear the amp sim without latency. There's no fucking way I'd bother recording any guitar - especially metal guitar - listening to the clean sound right off the pickups.

Every decent DAW nowadays compensates for latency automatically on playback. As long as your interface reports its delay properly and they both agree on how long it is, it just fixes it for you. It is at least possible that is exactly the problem, though. It might be that you are instinctively compensating for the latency while playing, and when it gets "corrected" it ends up off.

Or maybe you just suck.

I figured Pro Tools would compensate automatically, thanks for the great reply! I just wanted to make sure before I spent hours practicing up a tune to really nail it. Thanks again.