John Vere

1 hour ago, greg54 said:

Monitors have frequencies that sound one way, and headphones sound another.

To infinity! That is why most of us have lots of options in the studio to proof mixes.  Over time you learn to know what it is you are actually hearing from you monitors. It seems from what you are saying you have good monitors you trust.   But you also were saying you were not happy with the sound of your vocals. So is it that they sound great after you EQ them in the monitors and everywhere else but not on your headphones?  Don't use those headphones, simple. 

I have dozens of headphones I've bought over time, many were expensive and name brands. I only have one pair that I trust, Apex HP 60.  They are so old all the vinyl is gone from the foam. Finding the right Headphones is like that quest for a Mike that matches your voice.  

The other headphones are scattered about the house and might see use when I have someone else in the studio. 

5 hours ago, Emanu3le85 said:

why do all these analog consolle emulations exist?

Very good question. I personally think it’s an attempt to bring back the sound you can get from good quality ( expensive) analog recording equipment. A lot of the marketing is snake oil. 
As we all know the difference was mostly in the harmonic distortion that analog circuits and tape added to the recording . 

In the digital world we have two phrases that are bantered about transparent and coloured. 
Coloured might also be called warmth or even analog mojo! 

There’s the snake oil. 
Hopefully by design your digital signal path is transparent and your audio recoding will be un-coloured. 

The only thing that would add true colour is the pre amp of your audio interface. As everything before the A/D converter can be high quality analog, This is the best way to achieve great analog sound. Hardware that is before the A/D. This is why your choice of an audio interface is so important. 

So this is also part of the answer to your question. Why make digital emulation of this hardware? 
Most people seem to think that they are missing out on something using digital so they  seek out that analog warmth using digital software emulation. All the digital stuff can do is attempt to add harmonic content to the sound. It is doomed to fall short of the mark  because analog is infinite and digital will always be a block of numbers at the mercy of your computers processing power. 

The OP came back yesterday I guess to read the replies. 

17 hours ago, Emanu3le85 said:

putting the pre at the beginning

I hope you understand that there’s no pre amp involved in a DAW. The pre amp is your audio interface which controls the input level. 
You could turn the tracks Gain right off and your input level of the audio you are recording will not change. 
Once the audio is recorded or in the case of the output of a VST instrument then the gain can be used to set a desired level of the input to the track or bus channel strip. 

Digital channel strips will usually fall short of the emulation of analog gear. Often making things worse not better. 
You want great analog sound then purchase a real studio mixer like a Midas or ? 

The pro channel is just as David said another place to put effects. It differs in that it comes with modules you can use that are easy on your CPU. You can drag them up and down to try different things. You can save pre sets etc Its a handy tool that keeps things tidy. 
The inclusion of the Concrete Limiter in Sonar has made my day.  

Therefore the reason I use a dynamic  mike that is a world class leader in rejecting background noise. No real need for a vocal booth. My studio is well treated and dead as a doornail. My computer is very quiet. 

Even in well treated rooms I found the highly sensitive nature of the LDC mikes picked up everything. I make a LOT of noise when I sing, breathing and my lips smack. It's horrible. I also found all my years of perfecting a mike technique went out the window. Moving in and out on a LDC made little difference  And my quiet computer became real noticeable. I had to build it a isolation box.  These were all good highly recommended  mikes and overall  they sounded great. But the artifacts from my voice did not play well.  The dynamics of my performance then required much more editing and EQ. I think I only bought a couple of them the others I borrowed. I used them for my acoustic instruments but they were sold off to purchase other toys. I kept this  one Made by CAD, I like it a lot on drums. 

So don't rule out that the perfect mike for you isn't dynamic mike. I guess it wasn't the Beta 58 but there's no shortage of good quality Dynamic mikes in the world. Possibly you could find one with a similar EQ pattern.  My music store will let me try stuff out as long as I put a wind sock on it. Most music stores have a Iso booth you can use and will set you up with a small mixer. Bring your own headphones that you trust and even take your currant mike. Last time I did this I was testing small mixers to see which one had the best reverb built in. 

I demonstrate in this video how to do this. You can’t do it automatically like before but it is only 1 extra step. 

I wonder if you could combine a Emoji font with a sound font? 
Think of the possibilities! 

If you did a little more digging around there’s another thread that refuses to die in which Noel states very clearly that for sure there’s going to be purchasing options. 

I just built a new computer in November. So I had to purchase the OS. W11 Pro was only a few bucks more than W10 Pro. It's different in some ways. I don't like the the way explorer works now. Still tripping me up. And they totally changed the Sound settings dialogue and made it harder to customize stuff. You have to always use the Search to find things like the control panel. Because it's a new computer everything is running supper smooth and fast so I see no issues with it performance wise. My Motu interface stopped crashing. 

This is what I use on my backing tracks for live music. I have also used it on one recording. 

Air is the biggest PITA to install I think it took 3 days to sort it out last time I re built. Then  they don't have very good support. They haven't updated much either. I only use This and the DB33. I also have Velvet installed. I have the complete collection I think I got it for under $100. I just haven't bothered to instal most of it yet.   Great stuff and I have never found anything that replaces the DB33. Xpand is just so handy with the 4 channels/ patches. 

Are you taking about the controller pane is missing. You can drag it up or down to resize or go to view and check it to hide show. Actually the view menu is what you use to customize what you see and then if you like save that workspace. 

Did you try it with and without the pre amp. You need to rule out what is causing you to hear what it is you don’t like. A Beta 58  more or least a SM58 with a different pre amp. A standard mike for live sound used by millions of top performers because it is transparent and rejects feedback better than most. 
The Beta adds a crispy sound the SM is lacking. Example smack your lips into a SM58 and then the Beta. 
And it has a pronounced proximity effect so you get a warmer tone the closer you get. Over time I have developed a proper mike technique that takes advantage of this. Both live and in the studio. 

Cell phone! I have a metronome app on mine with tap tempo. I use it a lot because it works better than trying to use a mouse. 

Before that I always had my Roland 505 set up. 
 

One thing I forgot to mention was that interconnection off this sort often results in a ground loop hum. I remember trying the headphone output of my Blackstar amp and it was terrible. 
 

A DI box is only needed if you are recording both the amp with a mike and also want the direct signal from the guitar. A very common and excellent way to record. 
But a DI box won’t help record the sound of the amp.
Audio interfaces are in a way a basic DI box. The Scarlett has an instrument input that can be toggled to match up with different impedances. 
A cheap DI might sound worse than that. A real good DI can cost twice as much as a SM57. 
 

Being a person who has tried just about everything at least once it’s like this. 
Best guitar tone- Tube amp / Mike 

Next Hybrid Modelling amp/ mike

Next -Directly into interface and Guitar Sim 

Things that didn’t work very well— effects pedals directly into interface. 
Headphone output to interface, USB output to computer. 
And then my attempts at Re-Amping also didn’t work well. 

I just watched this video where he reviews just about every common interface. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMuA-2FbJxE

Right at the end he does a real quick overview of each. He got to the Motu M2 and rated it at the bottom of the pile. His claim was the headphone seemed to introduce distortion into the recording when turned up? Weird. 

Now I've always had trouble with my M4 since the day I got it 2 years ago. Randomly it would record audio distorted. A total system re boot fixed it. I also had to purchase a USB 3.0 PCI card just to get it working at all. I abandoned it last Sept when I purchased the Zoom L8. A much nicer sounding interface. But I bought the  Zoom for live performances, not as an interface,  so a bit of a pain to have to keep hooking stuff up. 

I built a new Computer in November and around January I thought I'd give the Motu M4 another chance so I wouldn't need to do this. It has not caused any issues with the new computer. I really haven't recorded anything serious in this time, mostly been just mucking about testing other DAW's,  making backing tracks and making You Tube narrations. 

So this guy had me curious about this distortion thing.  I fired up a project and put the M Oscillator on outputting from the master. I connected the headphones with a Y cable back to inputs 3/4 and set a new track up with that as input, None as the track output  just incase.  I then put the M analyzer on it.  Turned on input echo and got a reading of the correct sine wave. it looks clean to me? 

But here's where things get weird. I have the master volume way down because I don't really want to hear the sine wave. I crank up the headphones and the input level in Sonar is up around -6db. The M analyzer is not showing any distortion ( harmonics). Hmm.  

But I turned my monitors off. and unplugged the Y cable, plugged in my headphones to listen and when I turned  the headphones to off this crazy bunch of harmonics is showing on the graph? Anyhow the more I played around the weirder it got.  This thing has some sort of major screw up in the internal routing. Crosstalk etc. 

It's late but tomorrow I'm going to document this. Then I'm selling it.  

Good way to blow up the pre amps on the Scarlett! 

You can monitor what is happening with headphones connected to the solo headphone jack until you purchase proper studio monitors. 

I don't recommend doing what you are doing unless you are very very careful when turning up the input gain.

Obviously you are trying to use a stereo output into a mono input jack. That's also doomed to not work correctly.

You will need to purchase a mike like a Shure SM 57 or 58 and connect it to the XLR input to properly record the amp. The headphone output rarely sound like much. 

For now you are better of plugging your guitar directly into the Solo using the instrument jack and use TH3 guitar sim. 

See the post that is on this page marked solved. 

If you want to watch or work with video that is all 48. Don’t use 44.1. It’s only a hold out from the days of CD’s. 
I set all my settings to 48. And I also disable the exclusive mode in both windows and Cakewalk. 

Probably a USB mike. 

Audacity 

What he said, you can see that is your name in the middle at the top of your screenshot. There's no @ 

I never use my user name, I just use my email and password. 

Thanks to @pwal³  for the link to the WinDbg app. I have never looked at a dump file before.

The ones for CbB are all showing either TTS-1 or Kontakt. 

The TTS-1 I'm aware of and then I just went ahead and uninstalled all of Native instruments apps and the product manager.   I didn't find any use for it other than the Steel Drums which is what started all that in the first place. 

The one Sonar crash dump that started this thread only points at Sonar exe. So I don't think it was Session drummer now that I can look inside the report. WHo knows what that was. It has been pretty rare for me to see a crash. But I have been installing a few new things lately.  

A very interesting find was that Motu's Digital performer crashed a few times and it looks like it's pointing at my Motu ASIO driver?? weird. Oh well i also have uninstalled Digital Performer.  You crash! You Die!  

Then I have had a lot of crashes with Magix Movie Studio and those all pointed at a VST wrapper. Vegas has always used DX like Cakewalk.  I removed all VST pathways ( I don't use them anyhow) and will see if that fixes that long standing issue. 

So thanks once again that kept me entertained for a few hours. 

50 minutes ago, pwal³ said:

you need to use a tool like windbg to read it https://www.windowscentral.com/how-open-and-analyze-dump-error-files-windows-10

Thanks. I though there might be a app for it. I’ll give it a try.
I would also like to figure out why Vegas crashes. Oddly enough I think it’s auto save! 

I have changed at least 8 shortcuts to  speed up my workflow. I just re purpose the ones I never use.
The naming tracks issue is due to being a terrible typist I look at the keyboard and not the text box. It will have lost focus somehow therefore the mess. It rare it happens but it’s an example of how easily you can trigger unwanted changes. Some of them might not be noticeable. 

7 hours ago, CSistine said:

would be better to enable the shortcuts one by one with your growing knowledge

This.

 Say you can have the default basics but then an option to enable the whole works.

In a way it’s that Cakewalk uses one key shortcuts, most software uses combination shortcuts. I like this myself. In Cakewalk split is S. elsewhere it seems to be Ctrl S. 

Where I’ve often toggled a huge mess is when trying to name a track. You think the name dialogue is in focus but it isn’t.