Another frustration I had with Ableton Live was their weird latency behavior when recording hardware synths or drum computers.
The recordings are delayed when your input monitoring is set to IN or AUTO.
Why?
The reasoning is that when you play an instrument like a guitar or keyboard with software monitoring, you automatically compensate for this latency by playing slightly ahead of the beat.
However, when you’re just sending MIDI notes out of Ableton to your hardware synths or drum computers, then this doesn’t make sense at all.
The only solution was to add an additional track and set monitoring to OFF. In that case, Ableton would compensate for the latency and shift your recording so it ends up as expected.
This all changed with Ableton 12
With Ableton 12 we get a new feature called ‘keep latency‘. It’s a bit hidden but you can find it by activating track options in the mixer.
Turning off ‘keep latency’ means Ableton will compensate for the latency even when you’ve set monitoring to IN or AUTO. So you can listen to your recordings including plugins and it would all end up in sync!
Will this fix all MIDI latency issues?
Unfortunately, there’s still some manual tweaking to do, and this is always the case. MIDI in itself also has a latency. The more synths or drum computers you add to your MIDI chain, the more latency you’ll get. This is unavoidable.
That’s where the Track Delay comes into play. Adjusting the track delay to a negative value on your MIDI tracks means you can manually compensate for this hardware MIDI delay. This makes sure your tracks land exactly on the beat!
Driver Error compensation
In the video above I’ll also explain more about Driver Error Compensation. This is often misunderstood so it’s worth checking that one out.
Alright, let me know what you think about this new Ableton 12 feature. For me, these little improvements that aren’t really advertised make this upgrade completely worthwhile.
