How to Solve Latency Issues in Your Headphone During Tracking Using "Direct Monitoring"

In almost every home studio I visit, there is one key element of the recording process that gets overlooked, or missed. This is the concept of Direct Monitoring, which allows you to hear the sound you are playing or singing in real time, at exactlly the moment you make it.

If there is latency, you will hear yourself after the fact which is very confusing, unsettling and makes it almost impossible to truly sync up with the track during overdubbing.

You want to make sure input monitoring is turned OFF in your DAW software, and yes, you are monitoring your tracks or metronome from the computer, but you have to listen to your live take from a source that is in the initial analog stage. This is before it makes the round trip of being coverted to digital, written onto the hard drive of your computer, read back off the hard drive of your computer, coverted back to analog and finally sent to your ears. Conversion from analog to digital and digital to analog takes time. It's only a matter of milliseconds, but they add up quickly, and the whole point is not to have to travel in time while you are recording.

If you are having trouble figuring out how to create a direct monitoring path with your setup, I encourage you to submit a detailed google search something along the lines of "how to direct monitor with xxx interface and xxx DAW software".

The control is usually on your interface or in its drivers, but remember, you will probably have to turn off input monitoring on your software somewhere, either globally or per channel. This is so you don't hear both the live direct monitored signal and the latency-affected return signal blended together.

I hope this helps! Happy recording.