Hi guys and gals.

I've just bought a Yamaha thingy that connects my piano whatsit to my deskytopycompy. It came with Cubase Ai5. I knokw it ain't the bee's knees, but I ain't here for a flaming. I'm just messing around with stuff till I know what I need to get properly. But, I'm struggling to get a live monitor going for the headphones. I've got the mike connected to the DI box, and that is connected to the computer with usb and thats all fine and dandy. But Cubase obvioulsy has a delay so anything 'live' is out of sync so I can't use it as a monitor.

I could use the DI box, but then I can't play the backing at the same time as I monitor, unless I cut up my expensive headphones and run seperate cables to each ear.

Is there any way that you guys know of that I can run a monitor straight out cubase without the delay? It's starting to bug me somewhat.

Cheers peeps.

It would help if you put a more technical detail about your hardware than "thingy". The problem you're getting is with the "latency" which is measured in milliseconds. The higher the latency, the further behind the response is from the hardware. It is a problem with the hardware and the drivers and the better your stuff, the lower the latency (it's not a world away from gaming "lag" in principle). You will not get anything decent from an onboard audio chip for instance.

You could try this application http://www.asio4all.com/

Hmmm.

The thingy is a Yamaha Audiogram3. I bought of spec as we all have to start somewhere. It was bundled with AI5 so thats what I'm using for now. I've got a soundblaster card, but I'm not entirely sure that Cubase is using it.

All I need is a way to get the direct feed from the mic into the headphones whilst overlaying the track play. It's starting to bug me slightly, but I'm all for suggestions on different hardware and bits of kit . . . . . .

This is all new to me.

Are your speakers plugged into the creative card or the audiogram's line out?

Speaker out put shouldn't matter should it?

I see it that Cubase has latency, and no matter how hard I try, pushing it through the sound card, I ain't gunna get rid of that. I need some way to pull off the mike feed before it hits Cubase so I can monitor it without hearing the latency.

I'm gunna need more boxes aint I. The girlfriend will be pleased. Hehe.

Does your sound card support Direct Monitoring? If not, try Device > Device Setup ... > VST Audio System. Make sure that the correct ASIO driver is selected. Here you can see the latency. The fewer the better. If too high, try reducing the buffer size (in the sound card Control Panel).

I might have gone some way to improving the situation. As my suspicions where confirmed that Cubase wasn't seeing the SB. So after muchos menu trawling I finally got windowz to agree that I do in fact have a soundcard installed and that it should try telling a few other programs about it too.

Then, in Cubase, I found the creative driver settings, got them started, worked out which socket to plug the speakers into and by the looks of it I might get 20ms latency . . . . Hopefully thats not too low. I heard that 20ms is pretty much impercetable for practical purposes. I've yet to try it in anger.

Cheers for your help guys.

If your soundcard has ASIO drivers then you can run a low-latency monitor mix out through Cubase including the input signal(s). If not you'll need an outboard mixer of some sort - run the output from Cubase into one channel, your input(s) into the other(s) and create your headphone mix there.

But TBH it would be just as cheap and probably less faff to buy a decent audio card and stop using your soundblaster. In fact, is the Yamaha 'thingy' an audio interface? Is that where you're getting your headphone signal from? If so you should be able to disable input monitoring in Cubase and set up the mix right there on your audio interface.

I'm beginning to see that Soundblaster ain't all that cop in the real 'audio' world. Yes, it is an audio interface. It's a Yamaha Audiogram. I can't get the soundcard to recognise it anyway, it looks like Soundblaster arn't up with USB interfaces just yet. What I've done instead, now that I've worked out how Cubase recognises inputs, is use one of the other Asio drivers that only see's the usb interface. It doesn't see the external speakers but it does route the audio back out the interface where I've got the cans hooked up. Virtually no detectable latency.

I'm a happy bunny now.

It has made me wonder if thats why all my click tracks seem to be after the beat, when I'm sure I've recorded them spot on. Gunna have a bit of a session and see if it all works out alright. I've wanted to up the current track from 100 to 110 anyway, so nows as good a time as any.

Cheers again.

You recorded the click? I'm not familiar with that version of Cubase but I've never come across a DAW before that couldn't generate a click.

Sorry if I'm too late on this but...

Quote from Funnybear :

Is there any way that you guys know of that I can run a monitor straight out cubase without the delay? It's starting to bug me somewhat.

You want to hardware monitor your inputs not soft. In XP it was as simple as unmuting the microphone/Line in within the recording mixer. On Win 7, find the input you want to hear, choose properties, then "listen to this device". Make sure you can hear your inputs through headphones before running cubase then they should work fine within cubase too. Your card may have it's own mixer but the principal is the same, make sure you can hear it outside of cubase first. Then turn off the cubase monitoring of inputs else you'll hear the real one and the soft one milliseconds later.

Regarding the click track there should be one somewhere.

Got it all working through messing around with the Asio Drivers in Cubase. I got a choice of four. Asio4all has the best Latency, but only works with the usb in and out. But thats ok, I can do all the recording over headphones and then swap the Asios around for playback.

As for the click track, I know cubase can generate a basic drum pattern, I just ain't worked out how too. But most of my tunes are piano based, so I use a rough guide with good timing to then lay all the right components over the top and then get shot of the guide . . . . . It works for me.

Quote from Funnybear :

As for the click track, I know cubase can generate a basic drum pattern, I just ain't worked out how too. But most of my tunes are piano based, so I use a rough guide with good timing to then lay all the right components over the top and then get shot of the guide . . . . . It works for me.

I'm not talking about a basic drum pattern I mean a click that it will play to every beat (with a slight change for the first beat of a bar) normally switched on via a button on the transport bar.

Saying all that, if it works for you then it's all good.

Yea, I use the metronome. I use that to get all the timings right with a basic sketch of the tune, and then record over all the bits I want, and then remove the base layer when all is said and done.

I mean, you know what it's like mixing, your messing around with stuff all the time, but I always use the same foundation to come back too when laying new stuff down, then the timings will always be spot on.