Recording with Reaper - stuck with effects on voice

INFJ

I thought I am sort of ready to try to record something. I have Reaper and a Behringer audio interface.

The interface is fine, but when I have a backing track and create a vocal track in Reaper some things go wrong. It's when the button "arm to record" (red one) is pressed then suddenly I get a nasty reverb on the vocals that doesn't go away. I have FX turned off of course. On the vocal track and on the backing track as well. I have not found any explanation as to why this happens. The echo is big. It destroys my ability to do the vocals because I am constanty angered by the sound. Has anyone experienced something similar?

I can play the backing track and sing to it in Reaper. Then everything is normal. But recording is a no no as long as this sound effect is present.

Klaus_T

i am not a reaper user but it sounds like you have an issue with latency. google "low latency mode reaper". maybe you can solve it. if not, you could always mute the rec armed track which should avoid the delay issue

INFJ

Thanks Klaus! I will do a search and see.

INFJ

Tried re-installing ASIO drivers, but no luck there. There is also a window where you can "request block size" in Reaper. One guy on YT said you can put a higher value there and see if it corrects the issue. It was set to 128 and I tried 256, 512, 1024 with no difference on the sound of the vocals. Sounds like I am singing in a tunnel. Now I have it set to 256 and the delay is 11ms. I don't know if that's good or not. But anyway did not help with the sound.

What else could it be? I tried recording raw vocals through Audacity and it did not have any of these issues. Sound was dry and natural, just like when I practise. So it seems specific to Reaper.
I guess I could switch to Audacity, but they don't have any real-time effects it seems. I will have to edit everything afterwards. I'd prefer to do the recording in Reaper so I know that what I hear is what I get.

Any help would be appreciated.