start times off a little when tracking out

hey. i recently tracked out a beat from the mpc 1000 to reaper. i had about 7 tracks in total and they all tracked fine. the only thing is that some of them seemed to start a little later or earlier than others(just a very very little amount, ) i added a blank sequence of 4 bars in the beginning to allow time for it to sync up. im gonna try this again tonight with an 8 bar sequence in the beginning maybe to give the mp and comp more time to sync i was wondering if anyone had similar experience with this sort of thing. it didnt seem to affect the beat terribly but im going to be going to a studio where i want to line these tracks up(vocals were already layed down but the drums needed more kick so im just like replacing the beat keeping previous vocals) and i want them to all start in the same place so i wont have to be guessing where to start each track. any input is much appreciated.

you probably have a noticeable amount of latency on your sound card that you are hearing. I doubt it is a problem with the MPC. Though having a 1 or 4 beat or whatever 'sync' measure is often a good start for fixing these issues.

I'd check your sound card buffer size and try to reduce it if possible. Maybe reaper also supports buffer delay compensation... no idea.

okay so heres the thing if i track out say 4 tracks at once then those four will be synced. but if i do another one then that one is a little off. so ... each separate tracking is slightly off. now this wouldnt be a problem if i were to just render this beat myself cause it sounds fine. but im gonna be taking it to a studio etc so i want it all to line up perfectly no fuss. im usin a firebox to track out so im gonna try to utilize the four tracks and one spdif to get my total of 5 tracks to be perfectly synced up. thanks again and any more input would be appreciated. thanks

Set up a 1 bar before each track in the MPC with a nice click. Record each track. WHen your done tracking line up all the clicks and your done....

ooooooooo im gonna try this. good call pound.

Thats broke mans midi right there homie it works tho!

That's similar to what I have used in the past Pound, although I would do something more along the lines of give 2 bars leader, on the first beat of the second bar put a hit with a good transient (you would have to add this to each track you want to record so requires a free pad in each used program) and then line up the hits in the DAW once everything is tracked off.

If you are using MTC, rather than MIDI Clock, you shouldn't need to though. This would require you to set tempo yourself as MTC is just time (song position) data, similar to SMPTE.