Bruce Olsen

Jeez, that's good. Love the vocals and guitar. Great lyric. Love the entrance... bam! Lead-in to the solo kicks *****. Maybe look for a way to change the energy between verse and chorus, so the listener feels the energy build. Maybe start to ramp it up in the chord change at 0:46 . You sound almost like Lou Reed when you're at lower volume: 1:12-1:13 is an example of that, or "guns" at 1:50. I might like to hear verses with you singing at lower volume. I'm a drummer so there are also some things I can see to change it up. I'd add 4 bars of drums at the end of one of the choruses if you can find some big-***** drums like Taiko. Also layer them in with the cannons or thunderclaps or whatever they are (which are really great). PS. Soundcloud played San Francisco Days right afterward. I'm in Pasadena now but lived in SFBA for decades and you got me all weepy 😞 I've been all those places... Then while I was writing that it served up A little Bit. Both of those are great, and I feel the same way about LA. And yes, the lead-in to the solo does kick asterisks 😞

I think this is related to my other issues, thanks.

Thanks. This has a different UI than the full product does, so I'd assume anything on it works. I'll look again.

Thanks, I'm playing a D where the high E string plays G so that's not it.

Edit: Dragging that button onto a MIDI track will copy the selected strumming pattern onto the track. Your example will copy Pattern 2. The strumming pattern consists of notes that control the plugin when it strumming mode is turned on. They produce no sound by themselves. Additional MIDI notes need to be created to specify which chord (chosen from a user-defined "Chord Bank" of 24 chords) will be strummed in the manner specified by the strumming pattern notes. Note that the current chord in the Chord bank is not copied when you drag the circled button onto the track, only the pattern is copied. If you play the notes when the plugin is not in "strummer mode" the corresponding guitar notes will be played. In strummer mode chords will be strummed.

I'm trying to play chords and strums from Ample Guitar M II Lite's strummer by using the notes outside the instrument's range. My objective was to create a track and record the audio (which I need to send to my engineer). No matter what notes I add to PRV the VSTi does not start a strum playing. I'm able to hear them when I select chords and strums in the VSTI's UI, so that aspect of the routing seems to be OK. Thanks for everyone's help so far. P.S. I've had this kind of issue with other VSTis hat use the same kind of scheme--namely, some MIDI notes trigger a sample and other notes trigger a pattern of some type. In that case I just programmed the notes by hand, but I'm keen to avoid that. Resolved: The main issue was forgetting that CW uses different note names. Adjusting "Base Octave For Pitches" to -2 eventually resolved most of the issues.

I'm trying to record the MIDI from Ample Guitar M II Lite's strummer (I have no MIDI controllers, only a mouse 😞). Thanks to some of the previous answers here 🙂 I've been able to arm a MIDI track, hit record, and then use the play button in the VSTi to generate the strums I've programmed. The good news is that some of the notes are recorded, so it appears the routing has been handled ("Enable MIDI Output" was the key to that). The bad news is that not all notes are recorded. An unscientific experiment shows the high E string's notes are not captured. One of the other answers discussed tweaking MIDI channels because each string is assigned to a different channel but I have the "MIDI Guitar" option off, and as I understand it the channel assignments aren't honored in that case. I'd appreciate any guidance anyone can offer. I have other questions about the VSTi's other mode (where hand-programmed MIDI notes outside the guitar's range are captured by the VSTi, and call up chords and articulation) but I'll add a separate post for that, since it's really a different thing (though I'm sure the resolution could easily be the same). Resolved: The main issue was forgetting that CW uses different note names. Adjusting "Base Octave For Pitches" to -2 eventually resolved most of the issues.

Thanks to everyone! I first learned a little about MIDI in when is first became a standard, but didn't really use it then.

If you need someone to testify to that, I'm available. My main concern was that I'd have to redo a bunch of work if I didn't set things up correctly, but it sounds like that wouldn't be the case for what I'm likely to do.

OK, so I guess it matters more if you're out of the box, because routing in the box is a direct connection from MIDI data to synth...?

Thanks so much! Back in the day, when everything was done by connecting cables, I imagine it was pretty important (so your synths didn't respond to every note they saw) but I guess that's irrelevant... because you're routing MIDI notes to synths directly, I guess?

I've started writing drum and percussion parts for a band, and also a couple of melodies/progressions. I then export audio tracks that are sent to our engineer for mixing/mastering. Thus far I've ignored MIDI channels completely. Each part has its own MIDI track, with 1 or more associated audio tracks. I think everything is on MIDI channel 1 (I actually haven't looked so far). It works fine. So I'm asking how my poor MIDI channel hygiene might (realistically) get me in trouble in the future. I won't perform any of this work live: I don't even have a real MIDI controller--everything has been done with a mouse. Can anyone suggest the kind of thing that would make me clean up my MIDI act? Would getting a MIDI pad controller and keyboard controller change things? Is there anything big I'm missing out on by Ignoring MIDI channels? Thanks.

The Cubase facility looks very nice, and I'd be more than happy to have something as capable. But by implementing it, the only reaction outside the existing user base would be something like, "Nice, but Cubase had that 10 years ago." What's developed really depends on the plans BL has for the product. I assume they want to attract new users, so they need to be building things that will... attract new users. I'm not product management for CW (I used to be PM at multiple big software companies) so I don't have the pulse of all new users, and I don't know what the BL business model is intended to be, but I can offer a few suggestions. From my unscientific sample, most new users want to compose. They're new to music and hear something cool in their heads and want to make sounds. Even existing users have expressed an interest in a composition tool, so let's stick with that. I'd consider separating composition from song development, in the sense that there's an initial phase characterized by generating and testing concepts, but at some point in time the composer has main themes worked out and a distinct phase of development begins. A DAW UI is great for development, but it's pretty heavy for composition, so I'd argue there should be a distinct composition UI. It would be building/managing tracks in a project behind the scenes, but would not necessarily offer all options when in use. For example, say it offered only CW instrument plugins during this phase, or automatically handles (say) routing. Defaults would be chosen, to be changed by the user later in the project. This lets the effort be directed to the composition capabilities. As far as those capabilities, I'd look at Captain Chords and Scaler, probably others I don't know about. It needs to enable easy development of A/B comparisons of chords, melodies, and rhythms. As far as the UI itself I'd suggest that, at this late date, it's important to build something that can leapfrog current offerings. I think CW can take some cues from modern "code-free" software development environments, such as the Unreal engine. Apps like that have been commonplace (at least in enterprise software) for at least 20 years, and libraries for building that kind of app are readily available. So rather than work directly in the DAW's tracks, I'd ask the composer to work on a blank canvas and create sections ("Chorus", say, or "Verse Line 1") as they write. Each section would be a clip, except it would be represented by (say) a rectangle. Initially it would just contain just the chords, using whatever chord selection assistance was developed. Compositional assistance tools would help the user fill in with as much detail as desired--melody, rhythms, samples, whatever was allowed. The rectangles (each containing a clip) would be connected with arrows leading from one to another. Pressing play would start at the "current" rectangle and proceed along the arrows to subsequent rectangles. You can imagine looping, "play along with", "vamp until" and other constructs so clips didn't need to be duplicated. Changing a chord could be done within a single clip, by stepping through clips serially, or in a single operation. Ideally it would be possible to switch between the composition UI and the track view, though there might need to be a "promotion" function to "compile" the current choices into a project , and the unchosen alternative clips would be saved somewhere. Some of the capabilities (change key) would also available in track view as a menu-based option.

Thanks for the input, and I checked, but ripple editing was the culprit

I'd tried that, but it seems to have been ripple editing (below).