Hi everyone,
I have Ardour 7.1 installed under Win11, I m using a Behringer USB interface UMC204HD.
I simply would like to record guitar using the interface…
Unfortunately, I cannot find any tutorial on how to configure tracks to do this…
Ardour recognises that interface has 2 inputs and creates 2 tracks.
I could also record my guitar (guitar plugged straight into the interface, no plugin).
I tried to monitor the sound during recording by plugging my earphones into the interface (earphones output) and also into my computer earphones jack, but I always end up with a disturbing echo on my sound… Probably some latency issue ?
Anyway, if someone has experience with Ardour and UMC204HD, it would be ggreat if you could send a few pictures of your audio/midi settings, track settings etc.
The “Mix” pot o the front of the interface controls what you hear though your headphones. If you turn it all the way to the left (IN), you’ll only hear what gets IN the interface. If you turn it all the way to the right (PB - playback), you’ll only hear what gets OUT of the interface.
As you’re recording an input in Ardour, if the pot is all the way to the right (playback), you will hear your guitar with whatever latency your system has. If it is in the middle, you will hear a mix between the input and the output, which can sound as the echo you’re mentioning.
If you can, monitor your input with the Mix pot in IN position. If you can’t, try to lower your latency in the audio panel.
Hello, i use this Interface with Ardour unter Linux.
You have 2 different monitor options: Direkt in the Interface and the 2nd over Ardour. Use only one of them. If you latenc is very good, you can monitor over the software (every channel has button). If not, use the mix button of the interface.
My setup indicates a latency of ca. 20ms. Is that acceptable ?
I guess monitoring using the software (ardour) is always the best since the
signal does not need to be redirected to the interface then.
To keep things a bit simpler, I would avoid using multiple audio interfaces at the same time.
When I’m recording via the UMC I always use the (headphone) output of the UMC.
Regarding latency: when I’m recording guitars, 20ms latency would be already too big for my taste.
By playing around with the buffer size I usually try to aim between 5 and (at most) 10ms, which for my ears is good enough for monitoring via playback in Ardour.
Another hint: when you do direct-in recording of an electric guitar, check out the Line/Inst button.
For my Gibson, setting it to “Line” produces significantly less noise in the recording than “Inst”.
Usually using hardware monitoring is best because it does not matter what latency you have, you always hear your instrument right away.
The disadvantage of using hardware monitoring is that you cannot hear any effects added in software, so recording guitar for example, you would hear only the clean guitar, you would not hear the output of an amp simulator or effects pedal simulators.
The latency of sound through air is approximately 1ms/foot or 3-3.5ms/meter, so 20ms latency would be roughly the same as standing 6m away from your amp. So like playing on a decent size stage, plenty of people do that without problem. However the total latency is probably not 20ms, that is probably best case, possibly even one direction only. If the round trip delay is actually 50ms, that is in the range that you start to detect the sound as an echo rather than comb filtering or strong coloration of the tone, so may be bothersome. As a different poster just pointed out you may be able to get the latency lower, but that may require some care in adjusting your system settings (remove power saving mode for example, and set at a fixed clock rate).
So it somewhat comes down to what you need. If you can work with just hearing the clean sound, then high latency and using the hardware monitoring would be simpler and more reliable. If you need to hear the processed guitar sound then you will likely want lower latency and may need to adjust your system settings to make that reliable.
I am using the Behringer U-Phoria UMC404HD as my external sound device for Ardour, whereas I work on a Linux machine. But that shouldn’t be part of your problem, which seems to be, that you’re faily new to the world of sound production in general.
As far as I understood your questions, you want to know how to handle the input- and output-management of the input channels of your device? As you already uncovered, in New Session → Recording Session mode Ardour creates as much audio tracks as it finds input channels on your input device and assigns each track to a free input channel ascending. But you can change this assignements at any time. And you can also add as many audio or midi channels and / or audio busses as you like. How that is done, is covered in the manual quite well. (The Ardour Manual) So you can handle as many tracks as you might want with your two input channels, but only two of them simultaneously in recoding mode. So if you want to record how you play and sing along at once, just plug in your guitar and your microphone and use your two tracks for recording.
As covered in the earlier answers, this disturbing echo is related with the fact, that you hear synchronously input of your Behringer and the output of your DAW in 50/50 percentage, while knob 7 is at 12 o’clock. (It’s the one left to the phones volume knob (9)).
If you want to hear the raw input of your mike and guitar, turn knob 7 to the hilt to the left. If you want to hear the master output of the DAW-processed signal instead, turn it to the right. In between, it’s always a mix between the input and output signal, which leads to this doubled output of the unprocessed and processed signal, because 20 ms latency is a lot already, especially, if you have added different types of processing plugins, which add latency. (Limiter, reverb, guitar effects, to name just a few.) If you want to overdub already recorded tracks, you’ll turn the mixing knob accordingly to hear the master-output of your DAW.
Maybe you should think about some training of the basic functionalites of Ardour as far as they concern your needs.