Ableton Forum

Guys,

I have been using Live for a while and generally love it. I used to use it mostly for myself for electronic music, but have decided to try it this year at an annual show that buddies and I do, that is usually mostly acoustic, and am running into latency problems with the guitar.

What I'm doing is, having the bass and drums sequenced into Live (using Battery 3 and a few other Komplete plug-ins) and maybe a pad track or some other synth track to fill things up a bit. Probably nothing like some of you guys here are running, I'm sure. =) Anyways - I get no latency problems on anything, even myself when playing Akoustik Piano (or EP, or Absynth, or whatever), but there is a delay on the guitar track that is preventing the guitar player from playing as tight as he could. It is noticeable to us and hampers playing.

The hardware is a brand-new Mac Mini (bought it three weeks ago) at 2.53 GHz, 500 Gb 7200 RPM HD with 4 GB RAM. I'm running 8.0.9 and Snow Leopard. The setup I usually have for the guitarist is to turn the track's monitoring to "On", and feed his audio through a compressor and an instance of Guitar Rig, then to the Master Track. Interface is a Focusrite 24 DSP Pro.

I think I have pretty much optimized my system for audio (turned off Wireless, Bluetooth, Dock options, etc.) and CPU load rarely goes above 40% - usually hangs around the 30% mark. Like I said, everything is usually very good, except on guitar =.

We have tried turning off the compression and Guitar Rig - that helped very little. While we do have the option of bypassing Live altogether for our live performance (and I realize that we could use the Saffire's built-in DSP to save a few CPU cycles), we would love to keep it for the effects processing and the mix (we use automation on track volumes for solos, etc. quite a bit). I have also tried freezing a couple of tracks, but that didn't do much either.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

JS

did you do any adjustment of the buffer settings?

Do you have Delay Compensation turned on?

Have you run the "driver error compensation" lesson?

This is just how Ableton is and it won't play the game if you don't run the "driver error compensation" to get things lined up.

After that you should be fine.

turn down your buffer size to around 64 samples, thats what works for me, the delay is so small i cant feel it anymore

zalo wrote:turn down your buffer size to around 64 samples, thats what works for me, the delay is so small i cant feel it anymore

+1 to zalo

Thats about the problem, i guess your Mac sounds really optimized, but the most important thing to latency is your soundcards buffer setting.Turn it down as far as possible, run the delay compensation test and voila, most guitar players i know can easily adapt to 128 Samples, 64 is optimum pleasure.

One Thing you got to know is that guitar rig and especially a compressor/limiter will introduce some serious latency.

Cheers hope that helps

Ah.... one more note, midi latency (Abynth, Battery etc.) is something completely different to Hardware recording (your plugged guitar/ Bass Guitar or microphon)

Thanks guys, lots of useful replies here.

Buffer size : Good point, I'll try that. I actually should have mentioned that (don't remember if I did in my original thread), but I'm at 128 right now. When I do Live's built-in test, I'm OK at less than 64 - I can safely go down to 48, actually - but when playing memory-intensive plug-ins like Akoustik Piano, I get a few clicks and pops. I had it at 128, but 64 actually seems to work just fine - the very occasional pop when REALLY loading the piano, but that's it.

I had run the built-in lesson for Driver Error Compensation, and I'm only at 2 ms. I have it set at 0 in Live because it was my understanding that this was only used during situations when direct monitoring is used...? Which we're not, BTW. The guitarist has to hear himself in the mix as it sounds live. (Our only monitor feed is going to be the Main Outs, which is an output of the Live Master track.)

And thanks for pointing out the difference with MIDI, but I was aware of that. =) Actually, my MIDI latency in all of my plug-ins is very low - I can't tell. Sounds immediate enough to me to be as playable as anything else.

One more thing - I also run a simple compressor in the master track, and a limiter as well (both Live built-in items, not 3rd party plug-ins, although I do have IK Multimedia ones, but didn't run them under the assumption they'd probably be more CPU-intensive than the Live ones) - does that induce serious latency, or only negligible?

Thanks, guys!

JS

SilverJS wrote:I have it set at 0 in Live because it was my understanding that this was only used during situations when direct monitoring is used...? Which we're not, BTW. The guitarist has to hear himself in the mix as it sounds live. (Our only monitor feed is going to be the Main Outs, which is an output of the Live Master track.)

that is direct monitoring

direct monitoring is when you can hear the processed sound as you are playing, aka, live performance

im pretty sure though that this setting does not effect the direct monitoring latency, it is an automatic shift that is applied to recorded audio

SilverJS wrote:One more thing - I also run a simple compressor in the master track, and a limiter as well (both Live built-in items, not 3rd party plug-ins, although I do have IK Multimedia ones, but didn't run them under the assumption they'd probably be more CPU-intensive than the Live ones) - does that induce serious latency, or only negligible?

i wouldnt say it adds serious latency but i would say that the compressor isnt very necessary, a limiter is good when working with "live" things, (guitars, mics etc) it will stop the speaker destroying noise or feedback, but in a live setting people expect dynamics, which you are squashing with the compressor, since you arent djing people arent expecting LOUD CONSTANTLY!!!!!!!!

a good mix will eliminate the need for the compressor

I use a Macbook Pro running Live and Guitar Rig as standalone each, this way you just have to deal with Guitar Rig latency, not Live's.There's no reason to have Live as a host and GR in a track adding more latency. I have my backing tracks into Live (pre-recorded without Guitar and voice). I'm using a simple Firewire Audiophile (M-audio) cause I broke the adapter of my RME Multiface and it gives me 9 ms latency which is good enough to play live without notice, I control Live with a UC33e and Guitar Rig through the RK1 and a FCB1010. The most important thing...I play Live...in a band I see your Mac is more powerful than mine so...it will work fine for your set up, because for me...it works like a charm.