Question about tracking Vocals

[seawell]

I've never tracked with Pro Tools HD but I have a session coming up soon where that will be the setup. My question is this: When you guys track vocals in Pro Tools HD can you give the singer a little reverb without the latency being unbearable? Or do you guys use an outboard reverb for this? The setup with be an HD-1 system running on a Mac G5 Dual 2Ghz with an Apogee AD-16X for AD and an Apogee Mini-DAC for DA. Thanks.

[Mt.Everest]

TDM systems have barely any thruput latency when recording (only a few samples). Just set your Playback Engine buffer to 256 or less. Send all your vocal tracks to an Aux Master, and use a send from there, feeding a reverb plug. I track with all sorts of plugins as well, and any delay under 50 samples or so, most performers will not notice. Most plugins or bussing configs used when tracking have latency WAYY below this. Under 10 samples. Youll be fine.

MT

[PTUser NYC]

My question is this: When you guys track vocals in Pro Tools HD can you give the singer a little reverb without the latency being unbearable?

Just to add to the first answer:

The latency through Pro Tools will be effectively transparent. You asked about Reverb though, and latency because of it. This brings up two points.

1) Latency is usually the least annoying in a Reverb situation. Most Reverb settings inclide some Pre Delay anyway - a period of time before the first reflections are sounded. Since Reverb is meant to sound late, additional latency (predealy) is usually not a problem. If the increased delay is making things too big, dial back the predelay of the patch to compensate if you can.

Since Reverb is smeary and late anyway, you don't have the same phase problems that you would with a latent parallel compressed track for instance.

2) You should set the Reverb up on the insert of an Aux Return. Set the input of that Aux Return to an open bus (or busses, if stereo). Then send to the Bus from an aux send from the Singer's source track.

I had a vision of you putting the Reverb plug in on the insert of the Singer's track, adjusting the mix in the plug to 85% dry, 15% wet or something, and worrying about latency. I hope you weren't thinking of that. In the overwhelming number of applications, Reverb is generally better on a send to an Aux Return, rather than "inline".