Is it possible to add reverb to vocal mic, without affecting my keyboard sound?

Question

Hello,
I am trying to record my vocals and piano simultaneously. I'm using the MBox 2, with Adobe Audition 3.0. Whenever I add reverb to my vocal track (via the fx tab under my vocal track in multi track view), it affects the way my piano sounds while I am recording (it creates a delay on the sound of the keyboard while I am playing...almost like a 'bouncing note' delay). I really want to be able to hear some reverb on my voice while recording, but I cannot seem to figure out how to do it. This is how I have everything set up:
Piano is plugged in via DI on input 2 on the back of the mbox
vocal mic is plugged in via cannon on input 1 on back of mbox
If anybody could help, that would be wonderful. I've spent hours trying to figure this out with no luck. It is a lot more fun to record your singing with a bit of the pretty reverb....but my piano doesn't agree.
Thank you
Best,
Jenny Jo

Answer 1

Hello Brian,
Thanks for your help again. I have spent the last 6 hours running into nothing but problems. I tried your advice about recording mono in both separate tracks, and still no luck. I was using a condenser mic, and a keyboard. Both using mono, and I was using the studio reverb. I finally decided to try something simpler, just so I could at least feel a bit satisfied in getting a recording in. I set the condenser mic near my keyboard and speakers, and plugged my keyboard into the speakers. I armed the one mic track for record for phantom power, applied studio reverb, and set up the correct settings for the track by going into Audio Hardware Setup and selecting 'Asio Digidesign Driver' as the audio driver for everything. I simply wanted to play my piano, which would sound through the monitors next to me, and sing into the microphone..which would pick up my vocals with the piano in the background. The only way I could hear reverb on my voice during the recording, was by adjusting the 'mix' knob on the front of the mbox. It seemed to be working okay, and I thought I had found at least a compromise for the moment. But after saving the files, and upon listening to them...I noticed drops and rises/glitches/ in the recording volume. I then did a bunch of tests. I recorded some without any reverb assigned at all, did some recordings with the mix knob up and some with it off...I tried everything I could think of. I saved each one as a wav file, and MP3, just to see if that would affect the sound. Listening to them, they all have those same sound glitches. While doing the recordings, the sound disturbances weren't audible.
I am wondering if there is a setting that I need to fix...I am not the most savvy technical person, and am rather new to recording. Maybe the buffer size needs to be adjusted? I really have no idea...it is frustrating. I should say that I am using an MBox 2, which is supposed to be used with Pro Tools software. I had problems using Pro Tools as well, I don't think my OS is very compatible with it. Unfortunately, I have windows Vista, which I hear nothing but problems about in regards to recording. I prefer to use Adobe Audition, as I'm familiar with it, and like it.
Well, I hope this email hasn't put you to sleep. I really hope I can get this figured out, as I'm keen to record.
Thank you again..
Best,
Jenny Jo 
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 00:35:03 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Is it possible to add reverb to vocal mic, without affecting my keyboard sound?
Out of some disbelief I had to try my own setup suggestion from above, since it's not a thing I do daily anymore. Without wanting to go into any dispute with the above poster, I can only say:
It works well here.
Your mileage may vary.
Setting up two mono tracks with a separate input to each, I was able to record vocals with reverb from Audition in my monitoring headphones, along with recording an electro-acoustic instrument (guitar in my case) on the adjacent track with no reverb at all. I sang/tested with lots of consonants and different monitor levels and reverbs; I used the Studio Reverb, which is the least CPU intensive and recommended in the manual. There was no noticable delay, echo, what have you, which I felt disturbed my precision at all. Now I KNOW technically there is a delay/latency, but for practical purposes it isn't noticable. I've also heard some singers are extremely pecky on this, and for them there is the solution of direct monitoring and an outboard reverb added to their headphone signal. For everyone else however it works well and the latency just a theory - certainly not an audible 'echo' of any kind. With a poor soundcard and a computer low on resources latency will become evident. Also if you don't use ASIO. This type of application is why we have ASIO.
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