How to Record Without Latency in Ableton Live

[Music] hey friends today i want to address a common issue that is just plaguing the entire community of recording artists using ableton live and this is something that i struggled with really early in my abletoning basically what the problem is is that people are recording latency they're recording with latency into ableton instead of recording without latency or using the plug and delay compensation to make their tracks as they played them okay and i can explain this a little bit better uh here in a moment um but let's just take a look at what's going on here here's here's track nine and as you can see i've made myself a nice little guitar signal chain here so it sounds like this [Music] and um if there's enough interest in this i will make a video eventually on how to make how to get a great guitar sound using just ableton devices because you really can there's great tools in here but the subject of this video is trying to figure out how to record without recording latency okay so the thing to know is that if i was to record with these settings this track is armed and i would just record right into this track i would be recording with latency meaning it would play back the audio with the latency meaning it wouldn't play back the timing that i actually physically played okay let me show you how this works so what i'm going to do is here's track 9 with this signal chain i'm going to actually duplicate this so command d or alternatively you can right click and go to duplicate but i've just duplicated this track now on this track i'm going to leave the auto switch on so see how there's this monitoring section it says when monitoring is active a track's input is played through its devices so it can be heard at the output okay and then on this track i'm going to turn the monitoring to off okay now let's go ahead and record this part i'll turn this bracket off real quick i'll back this up and i'll record this [Music] part [Music] okay so i just recorded this part let's go ahead and take a look at this now as you can see i just recorded it into both of these tracks and maybe from a bird's eye view this looks exactly the same these are exactly the same waveforms and yes they are but let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit what the hell do you see what i'm talking about look at how far apart these two are and the only difference is when i recorded is i had the monitor switch turned off on this track and on this track i had the monitor switch turned on these are exactly the same signal chains okay same signal chains in nine and in ten what's going on here let's go ahead and take a listen to the difference so with this track i'll turn off my main track let's listen do you see what's going on that track is late sound it sounds like it's late now if i turn on this track let's take a listen to the one that i recorded without the auto switch on [Music] so let's talk about what's going on here essentially what you're looking at is ableton committing the latency that exists in your system to the recording if you're listening to your track with the auto switch on if you're not listening to the track with the auto switch off it will apply to that track the delay compensation to compensate for the latency that's being created by all of your plugins and your sound card and everything else okay let's look at this another way so if i go to my preferences i want to show you something i've left ableton on its standard buffer size when you uh if you've never touched this before likely your buffer size is at 512 samples now if you crank this down to a lower sample rate like 128 or 64 or something you can usually glean out a little bit less latency and a lot of musicians that use ableton devices tend to leave their buffer sizes lower like this so that they can get um as low latency as possible but that doesn't fix the issue the issue still exists that there's going to be some little tiny bit no matter what you do of latency if you record with the auto switch on but then you might be thinking well dude how am i going to hear my instrument when i'm recording well that's exactly what i want to talk about hey just real quick i wanted to let you know i'm making ableton online courses they'll be covering macro topics like mixing sound design composition songwriting live performance and more and i should say you can learn anything that you want to learn off of youtube but much of the time it's really hard to find exactly what you're looking for and the information is well just wrong these courses will be thorough optimized and organized to help you take your skills to the next level really fast and happily at the time of this video i am probably less than two months from launching both the songwriting and composition course and the mixing course so if you want to be notified when those courses are available just put your email in the link that i'll put in the description and um in the comments awesome let's get back to it so you can build a beautiful signal chain here and you can put your sample buffer size real low like you know 64 or 128 and it's totally playable at that point but you still need to record a second track with the auto switch off or with the the monitoring switch to off set to off because that is the track that's going to have zero latency on it all right there's another way to do this let's go ahead and look at my sound card so i'm using a uad apollo and as you can see this track is muted and this is the track my guitar is coming down right now if i unmute this listen there's a clean signal underneath of my distorted signal let's go ahead and turn these off so you can hear [Music] so what's going on here is that this is what's called direct monitoring and you've probably seen it on your sound card or seen this word at least before what this means is that there is a signal directly coming into my sound card and directly out to my ears this has no latency either there's zero latency here whatsoever this is just coming directly to my ears so when you're recording vocals guitar or maybe you have a mic set up and you're recording an amp or you've got a trumpet i don't whatever it is sometimes the best solution for monitoring is just listening to the direct signal back into your ears and most sound cards will have a mixer right so you can change the levels and my uad card actually has insert effects that i can use and all kinds of other stuff i even have sends and returns for reverbs and stuff like that but this is a pretty robust sound card a lot of you are probably using focusrite uh kind of those little sapphire ones and a lot of them have right on the front panel a little thing that says direct monitoring some of them even have a direct monitoring blend control okay the reason that this exists is because of this issue specifically when you're recording into ableton okay you have to be extremely careful about using this auto switch so let's talk about this a different way ableton live tries to treat midi and audio exactly the same way so they wanted to have the interface look exactly the same way and they did this i think this is a really a cool thing because it helps your right brain work with your left brain a little bit more and if i go up here and i look at a midi track okay the auto switch has to be on if this track is armed for me to for me to get sound if it's off i can't play it right so i think that they tried to they tried to treat audio exactly the same way i wish though that there was some sort of warning saying hey you're about to record latency be careful make sure you record a track with the auto switch off okay so you know my workflow in all of this is i'll create a track with the auto switch on and make my effects rack okay like with my guitar i'll make an effects rack right before i record okay i'll duplicate this track so i have a second one and turn the auto switch off now let's say that you don't have the resources to make that track again okay your computer cpu is spiking and stuff you can always just after you've recorded and you like the take you can always just copy your signal chain and put it in the track that you recorded without latency and then you're done you know what i mean you already got it or you could just take the audio and drag it up right so i hope this video is helpful to you um it's crazy how many people are recording latency into ableton it's absolutely nuts um i wish that it was better explained right off the bat but now you know okay so if you like this kind of thing like comment subscribe thanks for watching everybody i'll see you next time

Channel: Seed to Stage

Views: 233,783

Keywords: ableton live latency fix, ableton live latency issues, ableton live latency settings, ableton live latency compensation, ableton live latency tutorial, how to reduce latency in ableton live 9, low latency ableton live, recording latency ableton, ableton live recording latency, ableton recording vocals latency, buffer size, zero latency

Id: PT5mD2Zd7F8

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ninjasoards]

I keep a permanent "Record" track set to "Off" with a blank signal chain and then drag the audio to the correct track after recording.
I have to say, this is really stupid as the default behavior. I can't think of ANY circumstance where anyone would want to record latency on purpose.
Delay compensation should just adjust this after each take.

[u/flukeymcswagger]

This is a really good tip. I've got what I"d subjectively consider not-really-noticeable-while-playing (<10ms) latency on my recording workstation, but this does indeed still happen. My time isn't perfect (lol guitar players) so every bit of accuracy can mean the difference between timing issues and not.

[u/Stranger-Sun]

This guy kills it week in and week out. Excellent videos

[u/thethresholdofpain]

The Best Channel for Ableton

[u/mikeypipes]

What does the “reduced latency when monitoring” option do then?

[u/zcb27]

so this just stops you from recording the latency, not from experiencing the latency? so when you’re monitoring you’ll still have that latency? what’s the difference between this method and just recording the latency and nudging it back to be in time? genuinely curious

[u/Boh-dar]

Thanks so much dude! Love your band btw 🙏

[u/virtualreverie]

Very useful tip for avoiding latency in the recording itself. So how does this compare to the latency compensation you can manually add using Ext Instrument? Does that adjust the latency in the recording as well?

[u/polishbroadcast]

Great tip. Thank you. Isn't the built-in latency / delay compensation supposed to adjust that for you?

What's the recommended setup for someone doing live looping with instruments being recorded with audio?