Recording drums

Cubase
1

Hi there… The last few days I have been recording live drums onto cubase…

There was a few problems I encountered…

  1. The snare drum seems to distort a little on playback. I did check before recording that it wasnt clipping.

  2. I noticed when I hit the drum there was a tiny delay to when I heard it out of my headphones…

What can possibly be done abut these issues?

Thanks

Jetta :smiley:

2

The answer to your second question is to check the latency settings of your audio interface. Generally, the lower the latency setting, the shorter the delay. The tradeoff is that it lower latency consumes more system resources, so at very low latency settings you may encounter clicks, pops, or skipping in recording and playback.

Also, if you can monitor directly from the hardware, you can usually play without detecting the latency because the audio signal in your headphones is being derived directly from the input, rather than waiting for the time it takes for your computer to record the signal then play it back (latency is actually the measure of the time it takes for this record/playback to occur).

3

And I believe the answer to the first question may be something to do with the editing. First and foremost, check the levels on your mixing panel- if the slider’s too high, it’ll clip in playback.
Secondly, If you’ve added tone boost or changed the EQ, it’s entirely possible that some of the frequencies have been boosted a little too much so they clip.

As a tip, when you’re mixing, make sure that the ‘Stereo Out’ Mixer is as close to the 0.00 point as you can get it, even if that means dropping most of the others a fair way down. It’s important to remember that you need the sound as loud as possible without clipping or else when you listen to it outside cubase- ie after mixdown- it’ll be very quiet.

Let us know it this doesn’t help you.

4

Thanks for the reply guys…

Some questions about these helpfu ideas…

  1. How do I get my hardware (TASCAM US-1800) to play back to me what I play without going through the computer?
    (I know there is a knob that says imput/computer. I dont know if this has anything to do with it…)

  2. Just to clarify the second response, was the idea to have the Output track on O, but have all the other ones as high as they will go without clipping… Should this be the case while recording??

I think this is why I may have had distorting with some of the drums, due to the clipping…


Thanks so much!

Dave

5

Hi

To your first question.
Have the TASCAM US-1641, same functionality.
If you turn the knob to “input”, the signal will be directly routed to the device output (Monitor and Headphones).
This is useful, if you don’t have any signal coming from PC.

If you have already signals coming from the PC (Cubase?), the knob shall be somewhere in the middle, depending how loud the input signal shall be in the “mix”.


Cheers