Phase Alignment

[Rick Cornish]

Hey gang.....
Looking for advice from anyone who's been there:

I'm recording some solo guitar music. To capture all the aspects of the sound I'm looking for, I'm multi-tracking:
1. A mic on my guitar, through an outboard mic pre
2. A mic on my amp (set up in the next room)
3. A stereo feed from my old GP-100 guitar processor

Questions:
• After recording, I find the two mono tracks look to be right on with eachother, but the GP-100 is 6 samples behind. I tried sliding the late track 6 samples earlier, but I don't hear a difference.
• There are also waveform differences between all the tracks. Could there be more phase issues at play than can be solved by just lining up start points?
• If so, what do you recommend? I have Waves InPhase, which gives me a headache every time I try to use it. I had good luck last year with a demo of Sound Radix Auto-Align. Also Melda MAutoAlign is interesting.

Thanks for any recommendations you'd care to share.

[mikehalloran]

DP comes with Precision Delay, designed for this exact use.

Correct delay and phasing issues with one click

Precision Delay

Precision Delay's unique, breakthrough design helps you phase-align complex signals. For example, if you record a guitar amp or an acoustic instrument from two different mics placed at different distances, the time delay between them will likely cause phase issues that make the two channels sound hollow or affected by a comb-filter-like rasp when played together. The solution? Feed both signals into Precison Delay and click the ALIGN button. Precision Delay performs complex, real-time analysis on the signals to determine phase similarities, then instantly aligns the signals with sub-sample precision. You can further manually adjust to find the "sweet spot" to your ears.

[mikehalloran]

I use Eventide's Precision Time Align for this but only because I prefer the UI and I bought it super cheap at intro. I certainly wouldn't pay $99 when we already have Precision Delay.

[Rick Cornish]

DP comes with Precision Delay, designed for this exact use.

Thanks, Mike… I'd forgotten about this one. I'll try it today.

[HCMarkus]

Could there be more phase issues at play than can be solved by just lining up start points?

Definitely. Just fool around until it sounds good. Science?