Hi , I’ve noticed that I’m getting slight jitter (not latency) even without syncing my electron boxes with any clock. I tried record 8th note at 100 bpm through reaper and after a dozen measures the note drifts few ms late or early. I’m wondering what is the cause of this issue ? Seems to be the case with digitakt 2 and octatrack .
I’m guessing that clock sources can be slightly different between different hardware and software ? So 4 measures on electron machines might be slightly off compared to software daws for example ?
More often than not, yes. The hardware clock pulse (if you can call it that) is generated by a timer ic equipped with a quartz crystal clock oscillator just like in a digital watch. Two clock signals in parallel, even synced for start, may begin the same but will deviate sooner or later. It’s unlikely any two will be exactly the same over any significant period of time, so we sync them by sharing the clock of 1 device with many so that any deviation is shared and therefore undetectable.
Crystal oscillators are used for their consistency and reliability, but unfortunately that doesn’t make them identical, so it more or less ends up like what you’re describing.
4 bars is a bit fast to be noticing drift, but very rarely will a daw be in sync with hardware for very long without sharing clock. If you record like 16 bars of metronome into the daw, you will also find that 100bpm in the daw may not be 100 bpm on any given piece of hardware, it might be closer to 99.9 or 100.1 and you would have to compare them over some duration with a synchronized start to see which is actually closest to what the daw expects 100bpm to look like.
Just saying, you might get a longer illusion of synchronicity with 100.1 on the elektron device than with 100bpm, but you also might not. If you send reaper’s clock to the hardware it will play with a matched timing, and if you were to share the hardware clock with the daw then they would be in sync but you would need to clock the entire project from the hardware to maintain the same results throughout.
Might be more of an answer than you were looking for but that’s how it is and what you’re experiencing is normal.
so my next question is if I were to use something like the ERM multiclock, this should keep the DAW and any external sequencers tightly in SYNC? provided that latency is not considered into the equation.
I mean, one would assume so but I’ve never used the ERM device. What you described is the function of a very stable standalone clock unit though. Is everything in your setup midi?
I have an old amt8 unit that is also synced to USB, it can run in standalone mode which will sync to one midi clock but I’ve found it to not be very reliable.
With the elektron boxes I use midi to recieve transport but never sync to the daw clock. modular is also synced to MIDI usb… so I’ve thought the next logic step is to introduce a tight clock to sync everything together.
or if you’re ready to spend the money the multiclock is highly regarded so I’m sure that would do it. I also saw expert sleepers usamo can take an audio output from your daw and turns it into a “jitter free” midi clock signal. I don’t know how well it works but it sounds cool. From the website:
I can’t vouch for it or anything but like I said, it sounds cool. You can explore your options because the ERM multiclock is probably the more expensive out of all of them. If it works the best, then maybe it’s worth it but you’ll have to see which seems best for your actual setup.
those do look interesting, yeh and I think the ERM multiclock is really quite expensive, the thing is I’m reading some reviews that say the audio pulse is not always super reliable.
I just spent some time syncing everything to the AMT8 midi hub, still drifting but not too bad. everything is pretty much synced with some very slight jitter here and there, actually adds a bit of human ness… if it drifts too much making some edits is pretty easy on Reaper.
Anyways thanks for the recommendations. If I see a good deal for the multiclock i might grab one, but for new its pricy .
Yeah, if you find a good deal probably worth taking a swing at it, otherwise that’s a pretty expensive piece of kit so buy it with a return policy or something. Anyways good luck, glad it worked out to some extent!
Interesting. I don’t know if what you’ve read about the audio pulse relates to the multiclock plugin, but if you experience a problem with that, you can place samples directly on the timeline of a track in your project and drive the multiclock that way as well. If there is one thing that a DAW excel at, it’s playing the audio tracks in lockstep. If a problem occurs with keeping audio tracks in line, the DAW tends to stop the transport and report an audio dropout.
When you aren’t factoring in a DAW, a stand-alone MIDI Clock brings all the devices together very well and keeps them from drifting, as long as the devices do not have any bugs and the MIDI signal path is reasonable. The DAW adds a complication in that software reaches a point where sending MIDI Clock is not its priority, so the clock output itself is the thing that’s drifting and has more jitter. That’s mainly why there are products like multiclock, to take over the responsibility of MIDI Clock from the DAW, while instead using the audio output from the DAW which traditionally is far more solid and scalable.
If you are interest in that form of sync and the expense of multiclock turns you off, you might consider the product that I make called CLOCKstep:MULTI. It does DAW sample accurate sync like multiclock (you can even use the multiclock plugin with it) and it’s about 1/3rd the cost. It isn’t a copy of multiclock, the overall feature set between them is quite different, so you really want to examine each to decide which fits your situation the best.
