John Vere

Yes the sound is certainly pleasing and enjoyable to listen too. But thats using good headphones. If I don't hear the bass on my studio headphones then I will say the majority of listeners will also not hear it on ear bubs or cell phone speakers. I just turned on my monitors and now I do hear a kick thump and a droning sort of bass but if you want to stand side by side with commercial releases you need your mixes to sound right on all listening systems. My guess is your studio monitors are of the bass heavy type. There is almost too much low end on my monitors. Its a sort of drone as I said. I can't hear the bass notes, there's no defining "pluck" the kick might sound OK but it's not going to come through on all systems.. It's all below 100hz. Give it some mids. Once again , if this was the sound you like nothing wrong with it, but to my listening taste I want to hear good bass.

A real Wave editor just does the job faster and without fuss. I like Wave Lab's workflow out of all the ones I've used. It's the fastest. I paid $99 a few years ago and it has paid for itself a million times ove. I also like http://www.goldwave.ca/ free to try and https://acondigital.com/products/acoustica-audio-editor/ which also is free to try. Gold wave has the best batch converter which I use to convert my Wave masters to MP3. Faster than re-exporting a song. There is a older free version of Acoustica found here https://acondigital.com/downloads/ along with a bunch of free VST's on this page. see Acoustica 6 You open the file, takes 10 seconds to edit and then save it. done. Doing this in a DAW would take too many steps. As I said what you want is to normalize the file so it's as loud as possible I give mine a peak of - 2db. Then you zoom in and cut the beginning tight. Then cut off the end were desired. Wave files seem to work, not sure about other formats.

I'm listening with headphones and I find it's a nice stereo depth of field, Guitars sound real good, mix of instruments are good,, but is there supposed to be a bass? I don't hear any bass or kick for that matter. Seems the low end is there on the guitars. It's not that you have to have these parts if that was what you wanted, but leaving out Bass and kick might be what you are missing.

For percussive sounds you can load them into Session drummer. I make my own sound effects and it's super easy. Record the sounds. Load them into Wave lab , normalize, top and tail. You want to cut right to the absolute beginning of the sound. These are wave files. Browse to the Session drummer folder. Programs Files/ Cakewalk/ VST plug ins/ Session Drummer 3 /Contents / Kits. Drop the files into a new folder and call it "My Samples" (or??) Now open Session Drummer and assign the samples to kit pieces. It's was so cool to sample my acoustic drum kit and load it up and hear SD3 playing my kit! But I also sampled things like Tamborine, wood blocks and a railroad spike among others. I'm just about to re do some brush sounds as I just scored a set of wire brushes at the Goodwill store for $5. As said it's easy to edit and export the audio using Vegas. Only reason I see not to use a Camera is it would be much better to have the samples as WAVE files rather than compressed audio from a camera. A Zoom or Tascam handy recorders are great for this stuff.

First off your images do not show. Did you use the image tool in the lower left corner? Secondly. I looked up this Coolsoft app and there is not reason you would need to use it. Your just making things overly complicated. Cakewalk includes a much better selection of VST instruments including the GM TTS-1. Follow through my tutorial on using the MIDI and the TTS-1 http://www.cactusmusic.ca/sonar-tutorials

Well there is a new way to Export and I personally like it a lot because finally!! It remembers by preference for 16 bit for CD's. The old dialog always defaulted to 32 bit. Go to the "Export" dialog box. It's new from an update a few months ago. If you don't see it look in your Modules / Control bar and make sure and check it. Choose "Presets" then "Master Mix" Set your Sample and Bit Depth and save. This will export your master buss 100% the way your seeing and hearing it. Just a little tip.. I always put the BT Brickwall limiter on my Master buss set at -04 db I have exported over 100 songs this way and all are perfect. ( the audio quality, not the playing) When checked in Wave Lab none will show as having any overs. Always mute your master buss with a song playing to check if any tracks or busses are not directed there.

Does the track have the MIDI icon? Or the instrument tack icon? Sorry I'm at work and cant post screenshot, but you know what I mean.

If your planning on doing any serious audio recording ASIO is the only stable and time corrected mode to use. All other driver modes do not compensate correctly for sync. You will need to perform a loopback test , see how far out of sync your overdubbed tracks are and use Manual offset to correct the timing. ASIO is the only driver that reports round trip latency correctly and accurately to Cakewalk. Your audio interface is long overdue for an update if it is not supported by your OS. The audio interface is the most important piece of hardware in a DAW set up. Here's a list I made of things to think about when shopping for one. http://www.cactusmusic.ca/Recording.htm#AI Shopping List

Dumb question but does the the Korg have drum sounds on board?? Is that what your hearing? In other words are you sure the Kick sound is coming from Sonar or from the Korg? Are you sending midi data to the Korg or playing it Live?

Ahh! You see I misread his post thinking what he said was to drag and drop the mix scene into the mix recall folder,, I missed that part about dragging to the the actual project, Copying from mix recall folder to mix recall folder would have be logical so what I would have tried first. Anyhow, I still thank you once again because I "got it" via your post. Your a good teacher Steve and you just won't admit it.

I used to do clients and kept things tidy. Now I just keep spreading out and buying more gear !. My wife say's I better get it now before I retire and will have no money. I liked your idea of the bookshelf on that end wall. Put a couch or loveseat in there and throw rugs . I would still use your acoustic panels you bought if anything just to make it look official One day I'll tidy my studio and re build a little bit. I plan on using some wood.... I like the sound of wood. Studio "B" is our TV room and it has a wood ( 1" Fir) floor and a wood (2" spruce) ceiling which happens to be the floor of the upstairs studio A. It's a 12x12 room but has Clutter being 2 stuffed chairs and a loveseat. There are a lot of framed pictures on the wall ( diffusers?) and curtains on the windows.

That is my room treatment in a nutshell- 20 guitars, 4 amps. PA speakers, racks full of effects, =Clutter- the secret weapon.

If it happens again unplug your USB controller. I was thinking this after reading your first post. Only time a VST scan hangs anybody is if you have a dud VST in there, some crappy 32 bit freebee. I have always set mine to manual scan. If it is set that way it won't hang due to a VST that's why I figured your barking up wrong tree.

It was timely for me as I had not used mix recall in the past because I didn't think it would add the plug ins. I'm now just starting to depend on it as I get to the mixdown stage involving 64 projects. Who would of ever guessed at what Cook showed us. Steve is that in the instructions somewhere?? Add this to the 100's of tips I've gleaned from that guy. Anyhow this was on my wish list for a long time ago as I come from using my Yamaha 01v for mixing. You simply save a mix and name it. That same mix could be applied to all the songs on a album. Minor tweeks easily saved and re named but the bones of a mix were always there with all effects and levels pre set. Midi automation took care of the rest. So I was disappointed when I started using Cakewalk that it's mixer ( console) could not be saved. Now it can.

During the in between time after the Gibson shutdown (Nov-Dec 2017) and before we were told about Bandlab if you go to the old forum there was a lot of threads about this. The basic back up plan looked like this: Update everything in the CCC and make multiple back ups of all the installers found in the Command centers download folder. We also obtained codes form a few of the 3rd party VST's like Overloud. I think there were others. XLN and Melodyne have there own codes and are not a problem. But the one thing never resolved was there would be no way to authorize the versions of Sonar that used CCC in the future if the Gibson /Cakewalk servers were killed. Only versions X3e and back used the codes that we can use forever. SPlat needs that server and still does. Even the offline method involves this same server. Because CbB came along and solved this problem, we all moved on and for the most part it is not an issue UNLESS Bandlab goes down. It's up to the individual if your to worry about this , myself I'm not. Worse case scenario is I'd use CbB until it goes into demo mode. Then I would be back to using Splat until the 4 computers I have it installed on died. Then I guess I'm back to X3e ( OMG) or, Cubase? Music would still be made.

Forget it After I read Steves post below I got it to work ( There was a long thread here explaining how I couldn't get it to work. But it certainly doesn't work the way you would expect it. What I did was open a project that had no mix recalls and saved a few scenes.I then saved it and closed. I re opened and added BT EQ to a Buss. I save this as Scene 4. I "save as" and re named it. I closed and opened the original with no EQ on the buss. I changed scenes and back to scene 4 and the EQ did not appear on the buss. ( thuss my original rant) But after reading Steves post below I browsed to the Mix recall folder and dragged and dropped Scene 4 to the original song and bingo, the EQ appeared. I changed to scene 1 and it disappeared. I expected a new scene but Scene 4 worked to bring back the EQ. You can see in the folder below that it created a new mix scene called 5 but that does not show on original list only the "EQ" version. One thing is it does not save your re naming of the mixes. You can call them anything you like but they appear in the mix recall folder named with the project title and mix 1 etc. So a good practice is to always leave "MIX2 - and then place your name afterwards.

You can swap out any of the parts and use some of the better sounding VST's like the Studio Instrument collection. My tutorial on midi covers how to do this. http://www.cactusmusic.ca/sonar-tutorials TTs-1 is a good starting point to see if you like the file. There are many free VST instruments out there as well.

The minute I saw the picture of your room my reaction was, Oh oh, That's not going to work. And as said the "treatment" you tried is only going to help a little bit. For now forget the room and try this_ The idea mentioned back a few posts about building a small enclosure to put your mike in for singing would be something you could do cheap. You could use those foam things. I think that might help vocal recordings. Mikes on guitar amps don't usually pick up the room if they are close in. But you can do the same with an amp. I used to have this big box I made so I could crank my guitar and not scare the animals. And just don't worry about the way your speakers sound, mix on your headphones until you can come up with a plan of attack...like moving to a house with a nice room.

That was Scook not Juno, Juno just quoted scook. You can use a screen capture program, My favorite is OBS Studio which is free. Then I edit in Vegas. Not sure how Steve is capturing.

If you look at what people use in "real" studios" for near fields you do not see brands like Presonus or KRK. You do see Yamaha's, Auratone, Genelec , Meyer, JBL and others. Music stores tend to push certain brands and if the price is right there will be a lot of people using those brands therefore a lot of good reviews by amature users. But you won't find that stuff in a real studio. Not saying you need the top of the line gear to make good recordings but you do need to be aware of what it is your compromising and learn how to adjust your expectations. I don't think you need to spend any money, You just need to know how your speakers translate to the real world. Having something like the Yamaha's just makes this easier. And they do still make very similar versions of the NSM 10 in an updated powered version https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/HS8--yamaha-hs8-8-inch-powered-studio-monitor-black

Well this is a huge clue to me. Your monitors possibly are midrange harsh and not accurate. I read that they sound great for hard rock but suck for acoustic and clean sounds. What qualifies as an accurate monitor is a subjective subject so I won't go there, but myself I own a set of Yamaha NSM 10's for this reason. Speaking of inaccurate, I just bought a set of Mackie CR4. They are boomy in the low end but I knew that before I bought them. They were very affordable, look cool and meet the rest of my requirements. I needed real small, balanced inputs and the volume on/off on the front. I don't do final mixing on them just tracking. . So I quickly got used to their inaccurate sound and I ignore it. Possibly you need to do the same for the KRK's. That is why I asked you what your final mixes sound like on other systems. If they sound great, then your fussing over a detail that doesn't really matter in the end. If it bothers you, take your mixes to a music store and audition studio monitors. But bring lots of cash!

It is actually very easy to have 2 identical workstations. Sure there might be a few high end VST plug in's out there that don't allow 2 installations but most either do or use ilock type USB dongle. If the OP is just using stock Cakewalk supplied stuff there is no issue at all. It take a few seconds to copy over complete projects. Messing with stems would take a lot more work. I have worked between 2 computers for a long, long time now as I remember I started this with Sonar 7. I have never lost a project or had one go south on me. John the reason most of us do not trust bundle files is that there's a 1 in 100 chance they can become corrupted and then you are screwed. Project files if they become corrupted can be salvaged. Bundle files are a leftover from bygone days when hard drives were a lot smaller and transfer speeds were slower. There's no reason NOT to use project folders for transfers and backups. I also back up each project as a MIDI file. That is the most iron clad future proof format I know of. I can still open all my original files that I made in the 80's. And I would expect to still be able to open them 20 years from now. For many of us midi is a large chunk of the work that goes into the backing track part of our recordings. If your projects are all audio then you sure as heck want that Audio folder copied to back ups 100% intact.

OK that narrows it down to what I originally expected. First I'll say it again- upgrading and optimizing a computer for audio has zero bearing on what get recorded. You could use an old XP 32 bit 1.5Mz with 2 GB of RAM and the sound would be identical. ( if it didn't crash . Even though you "think" you've tried everything with your mikes etc you haven't even scratched the surface on possibilities. Most of what you have tried is pretty basic low end gear. And very good point by Mike above about using a treated room. And from what I've read in reviews those KRK's are not an accurate monitor so are not to be trusted either. Your's is a classic case of "Home Studio Blues" and all you can do is either make adjustments and changes to how your inputting with what "hardware" you have on hand or find the weak link and replace it. Your blaming the wrong "hardware" When I say Hardware I'm not talking about computers. I'm talking Mikes and Pre amps. Your font end. What you hear during tracking via headphones can also factor into what is wrong. Example, headphones that are bass heavy and no mid range would result in mid range heavy recording EQ choices.

Bundle is not the way most of use would do this. You just transfer the whole project folder(s) which should all be on a portable back up drive anyways. I've been working between 2 or 3 machines for years now and have never had any issues. As I said all your projects should be stored in a main folder and then that folder should have been backed up to an external drive for safe keeping. Make sure you date the containment folder. I have 3 DAW set ups right now. Main DAW is a typical i7 It has 3 Drives. No data on C. Working data on E and then backups on G. Then an i5 Laptop which has 2 drives same set up but no back up drive. Both have all the same VST's and are fully licenced so projects all run smoothly on both of these machines. It is worth noting that most all VST's like Melodyne and AD2 allow for 2 machines. Then the 3rd laptop is a 2008 duo core Sony with only 1 SATA drive which I use differently. All run the latest CbB as well as have Splat and various older versions still installed. Here's a step by step of how I copy from machine to machine. On my main DAW I use a Data Drive (E) to store all my projects. Each song ( project) folder is inside an ALBUM folder. Album folders keep different types of project tidy. -- Live Band performance, Backing Tracks, Original Songs, Sock Monkey Album Old albums and inactive stuff are kept elsewhere on backup drives . All are backed up to the 3rd (G) drive as well as an External drive whenever possible. I will date the new Folder, example _ "Original Songs Feb 24 2019 " after I copied it over to the BU drives. When I need to use the laptop I hook up the external drive and I copy over the latest version of the "Album" that will be worked on. Note: Now that Album is stored in a minimum of 4 places! I work on the songs and save them into that same folder and when they need to go back to my main DAW I simply Re name the Album folder using current Date'. I then copy it to the external, and then copy back to the E drive of the main DAW. I could now choose to delete the older folder but I usually don't do this until my (250 GB) SSD E drive is passing 60%. The Laptop is used for live recording and right now is living at my partners house over the winter. He is laying down all his parts ( audio only) to our 65 song "album" . I am also working on some of the same songs so it will only be a matter of copying his audio tracks once he is done back to the main DAW. The Sony I use in the Family room to edit and adding some additional instruments like Mandolin. Because I cannot authorize certain VST's I will just freeze synths first and save a special copy in a different folder marked as such. But if you can it is well worth the effort to fully load up your Laptop with everything possible as this also serves as a solid back up in case your main DAW goes south. If not, it's a minor hassle to either ignore all the warnings about the missing stuff and then just swap them out with what's on hand. I didn't freeze some songs and therefore I didn't have AD2 on the 3rd laptop so just swap it over to SI drum kit or even Session drummer. I actually liked one song better with SI drum kit.. now that's weird.

What do your VST instruments sound like? If they sound good then there is nothing wrong with your set up. Your just not recording through a signal path that's working for you. How are you monitoring? What brand of monitors ? If you make a CD of the recording does it still sound terrible elsewhere? If you say your monitors sound great with VST's and pre recorded material that will rule out half of what could be wrong. Computer settings, software, updates etc have no bearing on how digital recordings sounds. It will record exactly what is processed at the A/D convertors. Only item at play would be your interfaces ASIO drivers. It is possible for those to become buggered so make sure you at least download the latest and/ or re install them. Bad sounding audio is a hardware issue. Either you front end is not up to it or your back end is crappy sounding. We can easily rule out the back end if you say it's OK. You could try 10 different mikes and still not get the sound your after. You could use 10 different pre amps etc. It's a lifelong quest to gather the right gear that sounds the way you want. What works for one does not work for all.