GuitarHero/RockBand fans... side project anyone?

[Iain Buclaw]

On 12 December 2013 17:43, Joseph Rushton Wakeling
<joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net> wrote:
> On 12/12/13 16:47, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>
>> Instead I had to time the screen to get any points.
>
>
> Not defending Guitar Hero here, but sometimes it is necessary to follow
> visual rather than sonic cues in performance -- e.g. the brass players and
> others at the back of a symphony orchestra will often play ahead of
> musicians at the very front, because the sound takes longer to get from them
> to the audience.  There's a lot of subtle internal stuff that goes on with
> different sections of the orchestra having to react and play differently in
> order to keep the whole together, and a lot of that needs to be be modulated
> by following visual cues of one kind or another from various different
> people, sometimes against the grain of what your ears are getting.
>

You know, I've never had that... but then again I haven't had the
fortune of being in a band where distance between the first and back
musicians is > 200 metres.  (Because sound doesn't travel *that* slow
;)

> Then there are things like some extreme contemporary music where different
> musicians are effectively in different tempi -- you can play with a
> click-track, but sometimes it's easier or preferable to have flashing lights
> give you your own personal tempo.
>
> Plugged-in performance isn't really my area, but it wouldn't surprise me if
> having to deal with latency is an occasional occupational challenge there --
> can anyone confirm? :-)

Only in the recording studio - if the time it takes for sound to leave
your instrument, into the microphone, through the walls into the
studio booth, into the mixer (and assuming digital) from the mixer to
the sound card, to the DAW software mixer which is taking the
recording and mixing it in with the playing tracks (optional live
effects processing being done) back to the sound card, to the mixer,
through the walls into the studio room, into the headphones of the
receiver playing the instrument...  is greater than 22ms, then the
person playing experiences a delay in the time he plays to the time he
hears himself in the song.  If that happens, you are not in a good
situation. =)