Help with latency on drum plug ins

[Leadfinger]

Hi protools people, me again!!

I have been experimenting with using limiting (maxim) on the drum aux's to try and tame some of the peakiness of the drums and to bring out a bit more of the room sound, it definitely livens up the drum sound whilst reducing the peaks but can anyone provide some insight into the how I should tackle the latency this introduces. Do I need to nudge the drum tracks back to compensate for the 1024 sample delay that is shown on the channel indicator of the track with maxim on it or is there another way to fix this.

I am using the (dual Stereo Aux) parallel compression technique with another aux for some reverb. I have only put maxim on the un-squashed drum aux but this seems to introduce some minor phase difference vs the squashed drum aux. Maybe I shouldn't be using a limiter at all or maybe I should put maxim on the other drum aux too - I dunno but it does sound better....Any advice welcome.

Thanks

[Leadfinger]

You could always record the aux to a audio track and then inactivate the plugins?... 1024 samples is an unusually large delay i'd figure protools would be giving you CPU overload errors by then...

Yeah I might just do that - print the drum tracks to a stereo sum. Sounds like the safest bet and a CPU saver to boot. As for the 1024 sample delay - that's what shows up when I Apple/Click the track volume indicator to show Delay. I am running my system on level 8 buffer at 90% cpu with a full mix so it is at it's near limit but when I did some research on maxim I did read that it introduces some latency as it reads ahead of time and this is borne out by the fact that I had to put the medium Time Adjuster plug-in on the other two drum Auxes to bring them into phase with the Aux that has Maxim on it. Coincidentally the preset on the Medium Time Adjuster plug-in that I used was called "Maxim RTAS 44.1/48khz" and it gave me the exact sample delay of 1024 that was on the Aux with Maxim on it. Hope that makes sense. Maybe someone from Digi or one of the pro's out there can confirm this.

I ended up nudging all the drum tracks forward 1024 samples to make them exactly where they were before using the maxim limiting. It sounds like a lot of fiddling about but it has made the drum tracks a bit wetter and less peaky - a big problem with many of my past mixes.

Thanks for your reply though and thanks for your other post on eq info at wikipedia. Good stuff.

Stew

[Ben Jenssen]

Simplest way to keep two tracks in phase with each other when doing the parallel compression thing: simply place the identical plugins on both tracks (aux´s) and bypass them on one track. This will introduce the same latency on both tracks. Of course, it will use more cpu.

[Leadfinger]

[QUOTE]
Simplest way to keep two tracks in phase with each other when doing the parallel compression thing: simply place the identical plugins on both tracks (aux´s) and bypass them on one track. This will introduce the same latency on both tracks. Of course, it will use more cpu. [/quote

Thank for your reply, yes you are right this does fix the latency/phase issues on the parallel compression Aux's. But what concerned me most was that the drums as a whole are now out of sync with the other instruments (in particular the bass) - I know it's only 1024 samples and prolly isn't noticeable but it concerned me enough that I ended nudging the drum tracks forward, just to be safe.

On a lighter note - I have now cracked the 100 posts barrier on the DUC. I must be into this stuff to have hung around so long....thanks to everyone on the DUC for helping me over the past 2 years!!!!!!!!! It's a great forum.