Ginger: latency & keeping the pattern on the grid
Ginger adds zero latency. If the chops drift off the beat, it's almost always a high-latency plugin sitting before Ginger on the same track. Here's how to line it up.
Ginger is a pure gain effect. It opens and closes a volume envelope in the rhythm of your Morse phrase. There's no look-ahead, no oversampling and no internal delay, so it reports 0 samples of latency to your DAW. It triggers no plugin delay compensation, and it's safe to play or record through live.
How Ginger keeps time
The pattern clock locks to your DAW's timeline: press play and the phrase anchors to the bar, at the resolution set by RATE and FEEL. It re-anchors on every transport event (play, loop jumps, scrubbing, tempo changes), so the chops land on the grid, and a bounce or freeze sounds exactly like playback.
Chops landing early? Check what's before Ginger
The one setup that genuinely breaks timing: a high-latency plugin earlier on the same track. A look-ahead limiter, linear-phase EQ or heavy pitch corrector delays the audio inside the chain, but the timeline clock Ginger locks to stays put. The audio reaches Ginger a little late, so every dit and dah fires slightly ahead of the sound, so transients get clipped and the pattern feels rushed, even though your DAW's overall delay compensation reports everything in sync.
- Put Ginger early in the chain, before any look-ahead limiter, linear-phase EQ or other latency-heavy processor.
- Or move the heavy processor to a bus or the master, where it runs after Ginger anyway.
- Not sure which plugin is the culprit? Most DAWs can show each plugin's reported latency. Anything adding more than a few hundred samples in front of Ginger is a suspect.
Ableton Live: Reduced Latency When Monitoring
Live compensates plugin delays automatically (Options → Delay Compensation, on by default). Its Reduced Latency When Monitoring option turns that compensation off for input-monitored tracks, so a monitored track can drift against the compensated ones. If a track running Ginger goes out of sync only while monitoring, that toggle is why.
Feels late, but isn't latency
- ATTACK softens the start of each chop, up to about 80 ms at maximum. High settings make hits feel late; that's the envelope, not delay. Tighten ATTACK for snappier chops.
- RELEASE holds the gate open for up to about 200 ms after each dit or dah. Long settings blur the silences that give the pattern its shape.
- Playing live through Ginger and everything feels sluggish? That's your interface's round-trip latency, not the plugin. Lower the buffer size in your DAW's audio settings.
Still fighting timing on a specific setup? Email support@audio-spices.com with your DAW, the track's plugin chain, and your RATE / FEEL settings, and we'll line it up.
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