Expert: Wayne Tapia - 9/22/2009

Question
hi wayne, does adding plug-ins on tracks somehow affect the latency on that track? i average about 3-5 plugins per track and notice it throws my songs out of wack. they don't sound like they are synced as when i recorded them. ex: the guitar will be a little ahead of the beat or the bass will sound  a few milliseconds behind the beat. i usually nudge them back into place but is there another way around this?  how do you calculate how much latency is being caused by plug ins ? your help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer
That's a little odd - I've never really experienced that problem. What program are you using?

It may be a processor issue. One thing you could try is to save everything to a "test" folder (basically making a duplicate session), and apply the effects to the recorded content (in Pro Tools, this would be the audio suite stuff). Does this make sense? To clarify, what you'll do is get your plug-ins sounding the way you want and then bounce the selected track so the plugins can be removed.

Am I on the right track here? Let me know if you need any more help.