Advice on connecting external effects.

[Nulius]

I'm thinking about getting a distressor to go with my digi 001 and digimax setup. Would I simply want to hook that up in front of my digimax for tracking? What about during mixing, will I have any latency problems? Thanks!

[gorka]

For direct tracking (as an insert for example) its no problem but when mixing you´ll have to take care of latency as with every external equipment that you use with sends/returns.

[Nulius]

how do you take care of latency?

[nightshadecrisis]

if you dont already have a patchbay, id suggest getting one....you can run your distressor either as an AUX send/return inside protools and just designate an in and an out on your 001, or you can grab an insert cable and run it into whichever channel you'd like on your digimax.
ev

[Monte McGuire]

how do you take care of latency?

Print the track through the effect and slide it forward by the right amount. You may want to add a click to the head of the track so you can compare the click as it came out of the effect to the click as it was sent to the effect.

If you change your edit window time scale to samples, you can use the selector tool to meaure the delay right in the edit window. Drag from the start of the click sent to the effect to the start of the click as it is returned from the effect and read the number of samples of delay directly in the display at the top of the edit window. Select samples as your nudge time scale, click on the green nudge value, type in the delay you read from the edit window and press enter, select the processed region(s) and press the keypad minus key to slip all the regions earlier by the chosen amount. It's also helpful to note in the slipped track's scribble strip how much you slipped the track so you or someone else can undo it later, if needed.

If you want to do this in real time, you have to slide the tracks that you're sending to the effect earlier instead of printing the output and sliding those earlier. This works fine for an insert effect, but if you need to get at the 'dry' tracks as well as the effected tracks, the easiest option is to duplicate the tracks you want to send to the effect and slide the duplicates forward in time. In this way, you have a dry track that is properly timed and you have an effect send track that anticipates the delay of the effect and thus gets sent to the mix azt the right time as well.

I do this with AltiVerb sends since the delay is so massive yet I want to use the reverb as a realtime effect.

Best of luck,

-monte-