Suppose you are monitoring your voice or an instrument through an external device instead of Live (you have the "Monitor through Live" switch set to "no"). Now, as you sing or play along with the metronome or clips already in the Set, you are in fact playing along with "late" audio, because it takes some milliseconds for the audio to travel from the CPU to the audio outputs. This delay is referred to as "latency". Because you are hearing the audio from the program late, the audio you are recording into the program arrives late with respect to the program's internal timing. Live automatically compensates for this error by moving the recorded audio in song time so that you normally don't have to worry about any of this. If the recording you make sounds "untight" despite Live's effort to compensate for latency, then the audio hardware driver is probably the culprit: It is reporting an inaccurate latency value to Live. You can manually correct Live's latency assumption by adjusting the "Overall Latency" control in the Audio Preferences. The manual describes how to do this in the "Computer Audio Issues" chapter.