Aside from all the funny secondary connotations of the name, I am calling the blog latency issues because there will occasionally be a bit of a focus on my "home studio." Of course since this is 2007, we are talking about a home computer and a couple of audio interfaces.
Latency refers to the time delay in digital audio systems due to analog to digital conversions, processing and conversion back to analog. The lower you set the latency in your Audio drivers the more instant the music sounds, but if you are running a lot of applications, can make things go haywire. The best way to stabilize a home studio is to increase the latency, which takes a lot of pressure off your system, but will produce a noticeable delay between you physically hitting a note, and hearing it through your speakers.
These posts may be long. Please feel free to skip right by if hearing a semi-techie bitch about his gear is not exciting to you. There is a funny piece right below about how I am considering falling in love with the State of New Jersey. Skip ahead, I won't judge.
So for the record, here is my current system.
AMD X2 64 2.4 GHZ 4200+ 2 gig ram running XP Media Center Edition
250 gig 5400 RPM internal Hard Drive (running my OS and apps)
250 gig 7200 RPM external Hard Drive (recording the audio)
Focusrite Saffire Firewire Audio Interface
M-Audio Axiom 61 Keyboard Controller
Software:
Sonar 6 PE w/related soft synths
Waves Diamond Bundle
Guitar Rig 2
NI Pro-53
NI B4
The first few experiments have been, shall we say, less than encouraging. The first hurdle was the Saffire. It would either recognize the signal coming into it, or Sonar attempting to recognize it, but never both. I would get errors that the SaffireControl software was unable to locate the interface. Didn't the weasel at Guitar Center sell me on Firewire because unlike USB 2.0 there is a continuous signal path between the device and the CPU? How come it seems like my interface will only recognize one path or the other, but never both. This is hardly "continuous." As I have come to learn, focusrite.com was one notch below useless, because the information on their site is so poor as to encourage you to do harm to your own machine. Upon independent investigation I discovered that by default, XP SP2 turned everyonejs Firewire ports to S100, regardless of their original spec. HOLY SHIT! So, I did some poking around in my machine and discovered something interesting. The Firewire port that came standard on my HP machine is by default S100 and cannot be raised. Fucking corner cutting. Did they assume no one would ever use Firewire since there are admittedly about 250 different USB 2.0 ports sticking out of my box? Maybe. However the Firewire port that is gratuitously on the back of my Audigy2 card was recognized by my machine as S400. Success!
Now my Saffire is being heard by everyone. This has turned out to be a mixed blessing. I have discovered that the instrument input on the Saffire hates my guitar. At least the bridge pickup. I put a really hot Seymore Duncan in a few years ago. It is about 4 or 5 dbs louder than the stock Ibanez pickup that I keep in the neck position. In a dubious cost cutting measure, most Ibanez guitars that roll off the assembly line have 2 humbuckers that aren't technically wired as such. They are instead wired in series, so you in effect have four single coils. Although I had the bridge wired as a true humbucker when the pickup was installed, I opted to leave the neck pickup in series. I like the sound. I don't mind the clean sound of a single coil. It sounds kinda strat-ish. But anyway. The Focusrite HATES the bridge pickup. If I leave the level at zero it still clips the level and produces a lot of distortion. And this pickup is PASSIVE. I tried switching to a balanced line input which does bring some sanity to the levels, but at the price of substantial tone. You can even hear it when I apply processing. There is no brightness left at all. So I am still working this one out. I cannot lose access to my awesome pickup. I tried distorting the neck pickup and it sounds like a distorted Tele. That might be your cup of tea, but if you are reading this you know the tea I like to brew, and that shit is LOUD BRIGHT AND GNARLY.
So there have been some monstrous latency issues and disk issues I am still resolving. There are mystery clicks I am still trouble shooting and eliminating.
A major victory I had was routing everything through the Focusrite. I tried to be cute and use the Audigy2 as my playback interface so I could use my default speakers. No dice. The WDM driver support sucks for the Audigy, and the Saffire is a bit wonky with ASIO. Routing everything through the Saffire using the WDM drivers, which Sonar greatly prefers anyway, has brought a much greater degree of stability.
Also, taking advantage of zero latency monitoring is helping. Instead of listening to my tracks being played through the DAW, I am listening to the untreated clean signal through the Saffire. For trying to play dirty this sucks. At least there is some built in DSP that you can choose whether or not to apply to what is being recorded. Therefore I can use their really shitty built in amp sim to at least get some life in the performance, but the sound being passed to Sonar is 100% clean and ready for real processing.
MUSIC IS BEING MADE. Samples will be up soon. My bass sounds incredible through it, my guitar's neck pickups sound great, and the Axiom controller has a pretty amazing feel. I love the semi-weighted keys so much I have temporarily given up my M-audio prejudice (and I am trying to ignore the fact that my PC only recognizes the board as "USB Midi Interface" and "USB Midi Interface (2)."
Hopefully by the time the Gods of Fire are ready to record a new album, or some tracks, or whatever the hell you do these days, this bright orange colored room I am typing this in now with wacky angles which hopefully will kill a lot of standing tones will be ready as an over-dub/mixing/post-production facility.
Once I find the battery charger for my camera, I will take some pictures of the room and post them up.
