A little help please
 

So I have a Yamaha 10 track mixer, nothing special, but it gets the job done. I have Cubase SE on my computer, and some standard sound card with Stereo Mini input/output/mic plugs. I'm relatively new to recording, but love the idea of not having to pay 50 bucks and hour for a studio. I'm willing to pay the price for a sound that isn't as great, mainly because I'm in college and don't have too much time on my hands anyway - and music recording is a hobby, performance is a major. Anyway, here's my problem...

Mixer is plugged in, my guitar is plugged in, as are the vocal mic and drum machine. I hit record on the computer, and it is set to count 2 measures before it starts recording. I play on the downbeat that it starts, but the sound doesn't register on the computer until a split second later. So I'll play with the click, but when I go back to listen, the sound it off-click. Is there any way to fix this? I was thinking that I might need a new sound card, and if so, does anyone have any suggestions? Also, sometimes it says something about sync, and the recording process stops altogether... I'd like to avoid this and just continue recording because if I start a little before it starts, the click isn't with the song, so it makes everything so much more difficult. Please, any advice would be much appreciated.

Assuming that Cubase SE is similar to Nuendo...

Go to ... Preferences/VST/Auto Monitoring.

... on the pull down menu you should have a choice between manual, while record enabled, while record running and tape machine style.
Try switching between these settings until it works the way you prefer.

Right now, what's happening is you're monitoring the sound after it's been recorded on your hard drive....hence the delay. You want to set it so that you get live monitoring while you record and have it switch back to monitoring from your hard drive during playback.

What you are hearing is as Schmange says latency. One way of curing it is to reduce the number of input buffers in the preferences option. As you are only recording 2 tracks it should not be a biggy.

Actually I don't think this is a latency problem.
Latency is caused by a delay on midi instruments because of the amount of time it takes for the midi signal to trigger the vsti instrument.
In this case, it sounds like he's talking about a monitoring problem.

On Cubase there are several preferences settings depending on whether you are monitoring directly through your computer or using an outboard mixer.
Right now it sounds like he's got his preference on the wrong setting so he's hearing the monitored sound rather than the live one while he's in record mode. (sorta like using a 3 head cassette deck and hitting the Monitor button to hear what's on the tape compared to what's coming from the original source)

No latency is universal between audio and midi and occurs by virtue of electrical signal having to travel from A to B.

There are a number of reasons why latency occurs with regular audio, god knows I have fought with most of them them recently !!

ASIO / WMD or Core Audio drivers, buffer size, sound card quality, HDD access time, Buss speed etc etc will all effect it and providing you can get it down to 20 milliseconds you are in the clear.

The last two times I have had to configure PCs / MACs for audio, the biggest single contributer to latency was the size of the input buffer. This impacts upon the number of simultaneous ins and outs however as the number of ins is only two reducing it should not be a problem.

Latency may be a problem if you monitor through Cubase VST, when you are playing VST Instruments “live” from a MIDI keyboard or when you mix your audio (in situations where high time precision is required). However, the recorded audio will not be affected, since VST takes the latency into account, and adjusts the timing of the recorded audio accordingly.

So I'm right .... thpppppptttttt!!! :cool:

Oh don't be a Booby Mr Schmange !

Since when do you use midi to record vocals ? You could use it to change a patch on a processor however, last time I looked vocal and guitar (that sounded halfway decent) for that was recorded as a sampled audio wave.