[Noob Question] Latency when recording guitar

Gear
#1

Guys,

I’m new to recording. I just got my Scarlett 2i2 in the mail a week ago. I was watching a lot of videos before about the recording process. I read that if you bring the latency down to 2 - 6 ms range it wouldn’t be noticable. I found that if you are “shredding” like 16th notes in the 160+ range, especially palm muted, the latency is very noticeable.

I understand the solution is to bring down the sample rate to reduce latency. I’ve already brought it down to 64 and that gives 2 ms latency which to me is still noticable when shredding.

I know the Scarlett 2i2 has direct monitoring which I believe I have turned on and doesn’t make a difference (headphones plugged directly into the audio interface.)

My computer is a 5th gen i5 with 16 GB ram. It’s not a terribly powerful computer but I don’t know if that’s the problem.

Is there anything more that can be done? Or do you just have to live with that latency when recording? Does the latency only appear when you are in the process of recording and goes away on playback? This is all very new to me and I didn’t expect it to be such a big problem.

#2

I forgot to mention I’m using Amplitude 5 free version.

#3

Direct monitoring means it doesn’t even go through the computer at all. It is the lowest possible latency you can get with an interface. If you’re hearing delay with that turned on, something is wrong.

Re: latency through the computer, just because the system tells you it’s 2ms or whatever doesn’t mean that’s what it actually is once it goes through your operating system, audio software, and so on. Lots of factors can influence the total round trip time. I’ll let others chime in.

In general any Mac I’ve owned in the last 10 years has been fast enough to do low enough latency that it doesn’t bother me personally. So Mac OS is generally pretty good on this front. I can’t speak for Windows.

#4

Since you’re using an amp sim (amplitube) the only thing direct monitoring should do is make your direct guitar sound be heard (which I’m sure isn’t what you want). Direct monitoring is only helpful to hear what your input hears. Since I’m running a dinosaur 2007 macbook for recording without amp sims, I use it.

#5

There’s something terribly wrong here.

  1. Direct monitoring on the Scarlett means it routes the raw input direct to the headphone socket - that’s a completely separate signal that doesn’t touch the computer.

  2. True 2ms would be completely unnoticeable - so it all depends on the complete audio round trip. I’d make sure you are using the ASIO drivers - and make sure your using the scarlet for both input and output. It also depends on any DAW latency/compensation and any DSP latency. All these things can add up.

#6

Hey thanks everyone. The problem was I didn’t install the Focusrite software. I stupidly assumed I could just plug it in like a mouse or something and it would just start working. It automatically installed something called asio4all of something and sort of worked but it had massive latency issues. When I installed the focusrite software it immediately cleared up all the latency issues.

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