I have a RYTM and I’m using Overbridge in Cubase to control starts and stops. The RYTM is set to receive transport and clock. When I hit record in Cubase the RYTM starts playing just before Cubase records the audio, so the song has a few milliseconds clipped of the very beginning, which is a bad thing when your track starts with a kick drum for example. I looked at Cubase to try and account for this, but all of their solutions are for midi recording, and I’m just using sync since sequencer data doesn’t get sent. Does anyone know how to tell the RYTM to wait a few milliseconds before starting, or how to tell Cubase start recording before starting the song?
That was happening to me in logic and I enabled a “count in” in logic that would simply count a beat or bar (can’t remember) before recording and it worked better…
If you can’t get it right you can start on an empty pattern and then switch patterns to begin your performance after a bar or so…
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If you want to be on the safe side you can setup Cubase to pre-record.
Myself I always set punch in/out outside the bars that I want to record. Especially useful when recording midi synced gear and to be able to capture fx tails properly.
But it’s perhaps better to find a solution for the sync problem you’re having with overbridge and Cubase.
I spent some time looking into the sync problem itself and it seems that all the solutions in place (in Cubase at least) account for output latency by adjusting the actual midi data that it’s fed. Cubase assumes that audio recording of a midi instrument would be done after the midi is first in place there. This would be fine if Elektron products sent sequencer data. I would prefer this personally because it would be nice to have the option to use Cubase for midi editing for finishing touches etc. It’s a mystery to me why there doesn’t seem to be an option to send that data.
I will look into the link you sent and see if that would do the trick. If not I could use @Open_Mike suggestion and add a blank pattern, which would work just as well. Thanks for the help!
I don’t have the overbridge plug-in, but I have a plug-in that sends out audio pulses to hardware to keep hardware and Cubase transport and tempo in close to perfect sync.
Currently I’m having some problems with this plug-in in Cubase 9 Pro making everything I record about 2.5 ms late. (Might be a Cubase problem, could be the plug-in or it might be something with my audio card drivers… God knows…)
I have found a solution that works in my case, might work with the overbridge plug-in as well.
So the trick is to use an “Instrument Track” in Cubase (instead of the Instrument Rack) since instrument tracks have the Track Delay (se image below) you can tweak to compensate the early or late information that the plug-in are sending to your hardware.
For regular midi tracks in Cubase this shifts the midi notes early or late but on instrument tracks this works even if there’s no midi involved. (Like for plug-ins that have their own built in step sequencer and require no midi input to sync to transport.)
If the plug-in is an VSTi you just select it when creating the instrument track, if it’s a VSTfx plug-in you can load an empty instrument track and add the plug-in on the first insert effect slot to get the same result. Since audio gets shifted in time I’m thinking this might also fool the overbridge plug-in so you can tweak the sync.
My Overbridge plugin is on an Instrument Track, and I tried adjusting the track delay, but it (frustratingly) doesn’t seem to affect the sequencer start when I hit record. It’s my understanding that the track delay affects incoming midi data? If that’s the case, it would make sense as to why it doesn’t work for control data sent to the AR sequencer.
It’s the other way around, track delay only affects outgoing midi data. But that doesn’t matter since overbridge doesn’t care what track delay you set… (And I don’t think overbridge sync is based on midi.)
Have you tried disabling the “Asio Guard” for the plug-in? You can disable asio guard in Cubase completely but you can also set it to inactive on a specific plug-in in the “Plug-In Manager” settings. (You have to enable the “i” button on the bottom left of the plug-in manager window to get to the Active/Inactive button.)
I’m not sure if turning off the ASIO guard helped or what, but the pre-record feature totally works. It was already set at 1s. All I had to do was drag the audio over to the right and then expand the start of the files back to where the audio began recording. It’s a little on the annoying side that I have to wait until I’m done tracking everything from the RYTM before placing the audio properly on the grid, but it’ll do. Thanks for the insight!
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