I'm a complete noob when it comes to recording MIDI so bear with me here:
 
I recently decided to go to the dark side and start working with MIDI a bit. I got an old Midiman 2x2 and hooked it up to my Kawai ES1 Digital Piano. I got some VST's that came as standalone programs and plug ins (not sure if I'm using the right terminology here I'm just regurgitating marketing-speak). When I play the instruments in the standalone apps, they're beautiful; no latency at all. When I use them in Sonar Home Studio (I'm running v6 - I know, I know... if you want to subsidize the cause, feel free to upgrade me), all of a sudden there's latency there. Any ideas what's going on here?
 
Thanks,
 
Justin

Latency is the bane of all of our lives and there is no simple answer to your question. Before we can begin to offer some hopefully useful advice, we will need to know your computer system specs. Fundamentally, the reason for latency is that your computer cannot handle the data quickly enough. Why? Well, you may have other programs running, not enough RAM, your processor is too slow etc. Basically, when you open Home Studio, you are adding a load to your system processing that isn't there when you are running standalone programs - so your system slows down and you get latency.
 
http://audio.tutsplus.com/tutorials/recording/how-to-manage-minimize-latency-in-your-audio-projects/
 
Worth having a read of the above article. It gives good advice simply (which is what I can cope with!).
 

I find I need to bypass all efx bins when tracking. If there is a reverb or eq plug in on an audio track, that takes extra time to process so loads down my CPU and midi suffers.