*RESOLVED* - Help! How to Record Audio tracks "free form"

Free wheeling recording is what made up 100% of all recording up until somewhere in the 80's. Even then most real bands will record live and without the crutch of a metronome.
So 3 things can cause bad timing
1-The musicians
2-The recording gear is not syncing up properly.
3- Monitoring has a delay in it.
Sorry can't help you with your timing as a musician but you can test Sonars accuracy by outputting a transient track like a snare and routing it back and re-record it. Zoom in and check that the transients line up.
Sonar is set to automatically compensate for your equipments latency. There is a manual offset you can adjust if this is out.

Other possibility  is you have your monitoring set up wrong and you are hearing the latency of your system so your playing to the out of sync track. Test your overall round trip latency with this free tool from Centrance

http://www.centrance.com/products/ltu/

-  Set your computer/ Sonar up properly
-  Hit Record

Rhythm Concepts


Thanks for the answers guys,

Although his answer was flip, cactus was right. I had forgotten to disable my on-board audio card. Running perfectly now with just the Firepod. Found the answer here in another post.

Dan thanks for your response, I will use your procedure when I need to quantize an audio file.

Regards,

-Pete

Happy you got what you needed.

By the way...the procedure I mentioned isn't for "quantizing" audio.  It leaves the audio alone, but gives you a tempo map that matches up with your existing audio so your barlines match up.  If you're recording all straight audio, it isn't that big of a deal.  It becomes a lot more useful when you're supplementing your stuff with MIDI or tempo based loops.