Re-Amping Tip....track compensation delay

shasha

shasha

Fractal Fanatic
For you veteran professional guys this is probably one of those "no duhh" type posts, but I did run into this as I've been 'optimizing' my modest little setup for pain free recording and re-amping.

I'm getting great quality dry and wet and re-amped recordings via ASIO4All using my AxeFXII's USB outputs, inputs and my Saffire DSP 24Pro in a pseudo aggregate device setup with PreSonus StudioOne (I am a really big fan of this DAW right now). Got everything routed so that I basically just have to change the input on the AxeFXII from front analog to USB and hit record. No pops, glitches, dropout, jitter and the levels are dead on.

So the problem...play the original wet track and the re-amped track and its a mess in terms of phasing issues.

Now the latest beta of ASIO4All does have something called latency compensation, but I can't figure out how to get it to work so I left it at default. Even if I was able to figure out how it worked exactly trying to get the timing down would be a frickin' headache. Doing it inside of the DAW was a big enough pain in the ass to be honest so I figured I'd give some quick pointers on how I figured it out finally. I'll try to cut to the chase here.

Phase inverting. That was the only way that I was able to adjust accurately. I tried a quick transient and got semi-close a few times, but even in a loop it's too short and you can get confused on which direction you need to go. So I figured that if I put the re-amped track 180 degrees out of phase and then adjust the track delay that once its right I'll get a null output or total cancellation. Seemed to work really well.

I'm at about -23.43ms which is a pretty significant amount on paper, but once you consider that it's going from disk out to USB through the AxeFXII to analog, through some A/D convertors, through firewire and then to disk it's not too bad...but more important there is a way to adapt to it built into the DAW. From what I understand this is a pretty standard feature in many DAW's.

Now there is something called pipeline inside of StudioOne that supposedly lets you measure the delay/latency of offboard gear, but the closest I managed to get it configured was a big fat feedback loop. The phase inverting thingy worked really well for me and it's saved in my re-amping template so I don't have to figure it out again.
 
Here's what I do. I super-zoom the waveforms so that I can see the peaks and valleys of both the wet and reamped track. Then I move the reamped track so that the peaks line up with the wet track.
 
Yeah, I did do that and was actually even able to measure the offset, but the scale and clock weren't precise enough. Just remember to disble snap or you'll never get it close enough. :)

The big reason for me calculating it was so that I don't have to worry about moving every track and mostly because I'm just trying to get this new DAW down pat. Plus I'm an engineer/maintenance type guy so if I see something that isn't 'right' rather than deal with it I an compelled to 'fix it'. Knowing that there was a way to just kill it and not think about it again is important to my mental health. :mrgreen
 
Great idea! Thanks for posting this. I haven't set up for reamping yet but I now plan to take this approach to measure the latency offset.

:)
 
sheky said:
Here's what I do. I super-zoom the waveforms so that I can see the peaks and valleys of both the wet and reamped track. Then I move the reamped track so that the peaks line up with the wet track.
Click to expand...

This is what I do as well. If re-amping from my DAW I sometimes put in a 'spike' before the guitar track, like a short sharp blast of white noise or big square wave that I get rid of later, this makes it really easy to line up.

If you can do it automatically it's better though, there is a setting in Logic which offsets automatically once you've worked out the offset in samples. I used to use this with an old soundcard that never compensated properly but haven't bothered of late.
 
There's a way better method to reamp and have no delay, to minimize phase issues.

Simply open up two tracks in your DAW, the first will have input 1 and the second input 3. Reamp.

The input 3 one will have the exact same waveform of the original one since it's just the dry signal, but it will occur just a bit later. Now all you have to do is select both reamped tracks (wet and dry) and drag them until the dry one perfectly matches the original one.

That's it:)
 
mrhankey87 said:
There's a way better method to reamp and have no delay, to minimize phase issues.

Simply open up two tracks in your DAW, the first will have input 1 and the second input 3. Reamp.

The input 3 one will have the exact same waveform of the original one since it's just the dry signal, but it will occur just a bit later. Now all you have to do is select both reamped tracks (wet and dry) and drag them until the dry one perfectly matches the original one.

That's it:)
Click to expand...
I got you. But it still requires you to manually adjust every clip after you re-amp. Not really an issue if you aren't planning on re-amping on a regular basis.

By using the delay compensation its a one time deal and is done automatically so long as you save your re-amp track in a template or something.
 
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