HELP / SOUND & PERFORMANCE
How latency works
Where the delay between your pick and your ears comes from, how to read the LATENCY meter, and how to lower it.
Latency is the time between hitting a string and hearing it. Three things add up: your interface’s buffer on the way in, the plugins, and the buffer again on the way out.
Reading the meter
In the standalone Complete Chain, LATENCY shows your total round trip in milliseconds, with your interface, buffer and sample rate above it. The bar splits it into IN, CHAIN and OUT. In the example above, at 128 samples, the trip in and out is 8.8 of the 12.3 ms and the whole chain is 3.5 ms.
Lowering it
The buffer is the big part, and it counts twice. Halving it from 256 to 128 samples takes about 5 ms off at 48 kHz. Go as low as your computer plays without clicks; see DSP load if it can’t.
| STAGE | ADDS |
|---|---|
| The whole chain, PITCH off | 169 samples, 3.5 ms at 48 kHz |
| Monolith PITCH, LOW LAT (default) | About 10 to 20 ms while shifting, none at 0 semitones |
| Monolith PITCH, HI-RES | About 53 ms at 48 kHz |
| Spectre DOPPEL | Its shifted voice sits 10 to 25 ms behind |
| Revenant, Spectre’s other pedals | Nothing |
In a DAW
The plugins report their latency to your DAW, which lines the track back up on playback; the Complete Chain’s status bar reads CHAIN LATENCY · YOUR DAW COMPENSATES. While you play through the DAW live, set its buffer low, as above. A bypassed section keeps its latency so timing never jumps when you switch it on.