How To Eliminate Guitar Echo?

[Dr. Varney]

Here's the set up:
0404 card running DSP Patchmix
Guitar pre-amped and into mixer; routed to alt bus; FX loaded into signal from mixer.
PCI analogue outs to line level input on mixer.
Monitoring on control room/phones output which picks up the main mix and the bus.
Alt bus to PCI analogue input on card. DAW is FL Studio 8 Producer Edition).
Signal from alt bus ends up on a free record channel of the DAW's mixer.

Problem:
The echo occurs when I push up on the line level slider, which carries the DAW's output - I can hear the mixer's FX bus bleeding into the monitor mix through the strip. My first thought was to isolate the PCI input to another amp to seperate the DAW's output from the guitar... But then, wasn't that the whole point of having a mixer...!?

Okay, okay! Hands up! I was advised not to load the FX into the chain and instead apply them post-recording... But to be honest I don't think the effects sound as good in FL Studio as what my mixer cooks up.

I think I must be making a mistake somewhere. Anyone got any advice?

Dr. V

 

[gecko zzed]

Do you still get this echo when you run with no FX?

What I am trying to figure out is whether what you're hearing is actually "the mixer's FX bus bleeding into the monitor mix", or whether it is some other artefact (such as latency-affected montioring).

 

[Dr. Varney]

Actually, turn the FX off and it's worse....

But hey Gecko! I've solved it!

That's really stupid of me. All I had to do was turn the monitoring off in the DAW's record channel and your suggestion prompted it, so thanks. It was feeding back into the ASIO.