Tim Smith

Trying to decide if  I'm upgrading right away. What I have now seems to work fine for what I need. 

I must be getting old. Gone are the days when I upraded because I felt like it was the thing to do.

Most of the updates lately on my other software mainly dealt with the new macs. Not something I care much about.

Ableton is my main DAW right now, sooooo maybe?

Now there's something uncommon on most forums and something I actually miss. Deep discussion.

I guess the things we value are not the things many other value, or at least our priorities are far different. When I listen back to a lot of my stuff I dislike it. After a few years go by I know I could have done something better, and maybe this is all just a learning experience for me.

Like Google, most of these large music platforms are search engines and it's easy to fall behind unless you either self promote or hire someone to do it. It's all  about promotion and visibility. 

I know we have a lot of very good musicians that come here. I've never heard your music, but I'm sure it's as good as any other.  I have heard many a track that I think SHOULD have had far more attention. I know that musician spent literally days to make it and the plays are pithy. Soundcloud which is the platform I use is largely hip hop.

I am pretty much genreless, so I have a mish mash of recordings I've done. For awhile I was a church pianist vocalist and maybe 5 years later one individual who knows someone I know asks for me or wonders if I'm coming back.  I have had several tell me they liked what I did. The worst comment came from a little old lady who told me I was hitting the keys too hard. I constantly run into people in grocery stores and elsewhere who stop to chat with me and I have no idea who they are. I guess after 10 years of that playing to larger groups I can't remember everyone. 

Lately I've been playing guitar. I admit I am a hack on it, but I seem to get by pretty well faking everyone out that I can actually play the thing. I squeak by on some of those chords playing whatever version of the chord I think I can pull off and not be noticed that it was a lot harder to do than I wanted it to look. Playing fingerstyle and then strumming means I'm mostly without a pick. I'll be up playing it soon on and off. I guess we'll see how that all turns out. 

I never really looked at myself as playing anything particularly well, but if I can make it look like I'm playing they won't know any better.

Probably the wrong area to post this.

It seems some musicians just like to play music and to heck with the tech. I have a friend who tours a good bit and even he doesn't seem to have a very strong connection with music tech, even though he plays regularly to backing tracks. He plugs in, makes a few adjustments and plays (guitar). A very layed back gentle guy.

I think I must be somewhere in between. I mean, I like tech if I feel comfortable with it. If I don't it adds to uncertainty.  It seems to be different in a studio environment because then it's like my little sandbox to play endlessly with music tech. I don't mind that. It's more when I need to utilize it for playing live. If something doesn't work or goes wrong it could seriously shake up what I'm doing. I don't do it very often and maybe that's part of the problem. I don't have a system down that I feel ok with.

The last few days I have tried different hardware setups and checking my wireless setup to make sure I can be ok with it. That was when I found the 1/4" plug into my guitar wasn't always making contact. IF I pulled the plug out very slightly it works, so that's an issue I need to fix.

Backing tracks are another thing. I pulled out my old RC-300 looper that can hold 3 hours of .wav audio. It has rhythms but they are cheesy and no change ups. It's like a drummer stuck in one loop all the time. Then I realized I could dump tracks from my computer into it but I need a roland driver. I had almost forgotten the days when you needed to download a driver for everything. New OS recognizes a lot more than it once did. Apparently not this. The RC-300 has a lot of little details that need to be ironed out or you'll be playing a song repeated not wanting to and other similar stuff.  I have realized how much I dislike menus and submenus. If I knew exactly what I was doing it would be far easier.

Keyboards that once sounded pretty good now sound terrible compared to my software synths.

After two days messing with various keyboards and stuff, I guess I'm back to square one which is either a DAW for tracks or I'll just plug in and play acoustic. I don't have a comfortable feeling yet with backing tracks, even if I make them. I can't say exactly why.

It seems writing command strings into a midi controller is the easiest thing ever for some people. I mean it's hexidecimal, has 16 channels and values range from 1 to 128.  For me it would be a challenge to get all of the program changes exactly right times with the songs. I prefer straight up easy to use guitar effects and that's probably why I use the stuff I do. 

So really it's like I'm of two different mindsets depending on whether I am messing about in my studio or if I'm playing out. Some of that probably has to do with no worry if I make a mistake in the studio. Everything can be edited and changed or even deleted there. Playing live is, well, full of unpredictable things and the more gear I add to it, the more chance for problems there are. Could just be me not accustomed to that envronment as much.

These are going fast.

Practicing alternate propulsion systems in Texas.

So far it has done the job for me. Do you play that banjo in the pic?

9 minutes ago, kitekrazy said:

That's a very good deal.   The only drawback to the Suite is there's an additional 70gb you will rarely use.  The only plus is Max4Live.   It's probably worth effort to learn it but there are also great 3rd party devices for it.

I second that and why I normally just upgrade to standard which is everything but the extra vsti and libs which amounts to orchestral stuff and some other things I didn't need. Quite a bit comes with the suite package. My upgrade before the end of Feb from 11 to 12 is $127.00.

On 2/17/2024 at 7:59 AM, Shane_B. said:

Lol.

It's a feature not a requirement thankfully. It still have buttons on it and a physical remote.

I agree though,.it's not going to be a good day if manufacturers ever do force you to use wifi controls only.

Another little hiccup about all these wifi gadgets is they only run on 2.4gHz. Routers have 2.4 and 5 but I could see a time when they go to 5 only to make them cheaper. That would render your entire house dead.

It's already started actually. Comcast iirc, just got in a lot of heat because of the new routers they were giving people. They changed some protocol on the 2.4 side of their routers that wouldn't communicate with Ring camera's. The last I read Ring was blaming them, they were blaming Ring, and people had to go out and get their own router or go back to the old ones if they could get one from Comcast. I would never use theirs and pay their exhorbant rental fees anyway, but those who don't know how to set this stuff up have no choice.

They tick me off. Im.paying $140 a month now for 800mb. They offer 1G at the place I'm hoping to buy for $80 with free Premium Peacock channel. Not that I watch Peacock, but WTH?!

I think going without Alexa is the safer way to go. I guess I am unsafe.

I just tell her what I want to turn on or off. I have a fan for white noise that I could schedule to just turn on through Alexa, but I verbally tell her to turn it on. Most of the house is verbal commands. Even my cooling system. Alexa is an app too, so if I'm in another country I can look at my blink cameras or command things I want to turn on or off. If I loose wifi in that other country though I obviously loose that control. I had the blink set up in my great room to motion sense but decided to only have it on if I'm away. I got tired of watching myself go across the room in my underwear.

Alexa sometimes reads to me at night when my eyes are tired and I usually ask her the weather every day. 

I dropped all my cable TV and went to Roku for everything.

Oh I see you wrote it in white.

What word would that be?

Can we put anything up here, I mean anything?

Cautiously awaiting an anwer.

Future FOH guy

"Well it's either McDonalds or this.  I think I would love knobs and faders."

Disclaimer- A good sound guy is hard to find. They do exist, and for you we are appreciative. Our ear drums thank you.

18 hours ago, bitflipper said:

I made the mistake of starting with a folding tripod-style table (made by Samson, iirc) because it was compact. But it kept falling over. At one point it dumped my mixer onto the concrete floor in my garage and took out one of the mixer's channels. Another time it bent the power supply connector on another mixer, making it impossible to disconnect. 

Good to hear experiences of others here. The table I have isn't a made for music kind of thing, and maybe not ideal, but it has a solid sort of ironing board leg layout where it unfolds and has two long 'feet' at each end. Seems pretty stable but a little low to the floor. About 3ft. high. Lower center of gravity but need to bend to access computer if I use one. I like the table you linked much better. I would be standing. 

18 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Those speakers look like a nice solution. I have used similar powered speakers, the ones made by Bose. I was amazed at how you could place them anywhere and not get feedback. Their only drawback was we couldn't get a whole lot of volume from them. But for low-volume gigs they sounded lovely. No distortion despite handling keyboards, guitar, drum machine and two vocals.

As monitors they seem to work very well for them. I am seriously looking at it. Would be dual purpose as I could use it for a small 'gig'.

18 hours ago, bitflipper said:

My monitor strategy these days is to run mine (QSC K8.2) at low volume but up close. It sits atop a speaker stand about 18" from my ear. Being a PA speaker, it's full bandwidth, which is important because I am often mixing the band from the stage and need to hear the full mix (keys, guitar, drums, bass and vox) in the same proportions that are coming out the mains. I only wish QSC made a 6" version that wouldn't block my view of the audience as much.

Well I guess you would never have issue with not hearing the mix, that's for sure. The volume of your show must be high.

18 hours ago, bitflipper said:

I totally understand. It provides a depth and texture that you don't normally hear in live performances, and therefore makes you stand out from the crowd.  It sounds great with my own PA, but unfortunately I often play venues with house systems that aren't stereo.  Or for that matter, anything close to high-fidelity. Pearls before swine. But if I was, say, playing in a house band in a quiet restaurant with quality reinforcement, then I'd absolutely revisit Omnisphere. As well as Keyscape, for its electric pianos, and the IKM Hammond, and probably Zebra2 for synth leads. Sadly, that's not my world.

Alternatively I could freeze recorded tracks in Omnisphere and add them to a show using Ableton.  I had planned to solo though so it gets complicated. Here's a vid you might find interesting on backing tracks.

18 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Well, your first mistake is "refusing to go broke in the process".   I gave up on that principle a while ago. That old washer/dryer makes grinding noises but still has a few years left, I can live with that leaky faucet a while longer, and my car is Italian and therefore built to last forever. 

I agree, using a controller that's designed for abuse by musicians is probably a much better idea than using a laptop. Assuming, of course, that it's rugged enough to be a key piece of your rig. Or cheap enough that you can afford a spare. I would definitely advise buying a nice padded hardshell case for it if it's going to travel at all.

When I think about it, it scares me how many individual devices I have that could halt a show should they fail. So I try not to think about that.

A lot of musicians are only using a laptop, so I could save myself 2k on a PUSH 3. Push 2 used would be much less, but still, not sure if I really need it. Ableton can map to any midi controller for things like song start stop next song etc. Theoretically a song can be one long loop or it can be broken into segments and 'fired' off a controller. Some musicians who write their own tunes and play alone or with one other don't even use a click track if the have decent monitoring. Four drum stick counts in and they can follow the rest.  I would be tasking two things at once instrument and voice plus managing the tracks with some kind of a controller. One task would be better and I don't want a guitar part in a track I could be playing. I have the 4 channel looper too. In an unplugged set that could be very useful.

I had been looking at this product because even though I'm a guitarist I can't quite pull off those very fast math metal runs. I can somewhat but not like the pros.

I never bought it because well, 299.00

Went to Amazon and found it for 149.00 from a Japanese vendor.

Emailed Prominy to validate the link and the vendor.

Long story short , Prominy said that due to a strong dollar against a weak yen, the price and the item was legit.

I had to pay an additional 18.00 for what basically amounts to an empty box with a number in it.

Still a good deal on this. 

There were 4 four left when I ordered, so now it's three. Just sayin'

About 21 gigs, but I don't think there is another program out there that emulated those tunings and guitars the way this does. It's a Jackson they sampled. The same Jackson all the metal guys play.

4 hours ago, Shane_B. said:

I love all those wifi gadgets. I was slowly converting my house over to wifi control. All of my outside lights, ceiling fans, heated floors in the bathroom, cameras, heat/ac, even the electric fireplace I put in our bedroom, even my Lionel train was wifi controlled. You could control the heat, color, brightness on the fireplace. It's really amazing what you can do with these gadgets now.

One thing I learned about all this wifi stuff is, all the apps are the same. I had one app controlling everything even though some of the stuff was different brands. For the inside outlets I used the plug in wifi adapters.

They were great, especially at Christmas. I used weatherproof ones for outside.

I set everything inside and out to come on 15 minutes before dusk. The wifi followed sunset and sunrise via the internet. Inside was set to go off at 11pm, outside set to go off at 15 minutes before dawn.

I hear ya about getting them to fit in the box. This pic is the worst one I ran in to. It originally had a 2 gang box. I had to cut out the drywall and install a 3 gang. I tidied up the wires and tapes them before I stuffed it all in. I also didn't have a big enough nut for the ground and I had to run to Lowe's and get a box of them.

Looks like you are into it too. I have maybe three different brands of smart home products. Most of the main things in my house are all smart devices. There are some quirky things, like my ceiling fan is on an alexa voice controlled switch that turns the fan on or off, but to turn on the fan light you need the fan control. Since I don't use the light very much, it usually isn't a problem.

Everything else is great which is mostly lights and thermostat. If your wifi goes out though it's odd. Like when I drive our ICE car and get out of it and  forget to turn it off because I usually drive a Tesla and all you do is get out of it and everything shuts off lol. My wife has to remind me, uhhh...the car is still running. So when the wifi goes out, it's like Oh I guess I better find the light switch. Luckily the wifi doesn't often go out. We are all probably a little bit spoiled by technology.

20 hours ago, bitflipper said:

I used Omnisphere on a laptop for a few months, as well as VB3. It didn't work out as well as I'd imagined it would and I eventually gave up on the idea.

I hate to give up Omnisphere because there are some unique one of a kind sounds in it I haven't found anywhere else, some of them specifically for solos, so they stick out. If I was only planning basic keys sounds I guess it wouldn't be as much of a concern. If I give it up I feel my performance sound will hurt. The house system runs in stereo so that could be a killer sound live. 

20 hours ago, bitflipper said:

The first issue I ran into was getting audio out of the laptop. I did not want to complicate the setup by adding an external interface, so that meant taking output from the headphone jack. I wasn't concerned that the audio might be less pristine than from a proper interface - it's live, after all. The biggest issue was that the connection was unreliable or intermittent, with the cable often falling out due to the weight of the adapter, requiring that it be taped down.

I probably can't do that  because of playing through a DAW and latency. I have a secondary Focusrite I plan to maybe use. You're right though. It's a pain.I can't tell you how many times either myself or someone else stepped on the audio jack and pulled it out.

20 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Second issue was where to situate the laptop.

I've got a little folding table maybe 18 x 24 and plastic,  Probably need velcro in case it gets bumped.

20 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Then I realized that Windows is just not friendly to real-time applications.

I agree macs are probably better for this. 

20 hours ago, bitflipper said:

You really need a separate programmable MIDI controller, one more thing you have to figure out where to put. 

I think for me this might be the answer. I have Ableton. Apparently you don't need a computer as you can load projects into it. I would be playing to backing tracks with live instruments. I have seen backing tracks done well and was impressed with it. I need to be able to toggle and start songs. If they are Ableton projects I just put them into PUSH. There might be a caveat though as I'm not sure it just plays through songs as opposed to individual chunks of audio. In some cases it would be cool to play a verse or chorus again, or add another element and I know it does that. It's also an interface, but I need to play my synths live using my controller with it. Still checking this thing out.

For monitoring , I seen THIS  used by a professional touring act as a reference monitor, so I'm considering something like this . It sits high enough to hear and is bottom heavy. This would be maybe no more tha 5-6' away.

20 hours ago, bitflipper said:

As far as special MIDI concerns, my first challenge came when I wanted to use a single sustain pedal for both keyboards. At first, I tried making a Y cable, but that never worked right. The solution was to pass CC64 events (and only CC64) from one keyboard to the other. The second challenge was switching between layering the two keyboards versus playing them independently. Fortunately, one of the keyboards provides a fairly easy way to do both, so it became my master device even though it was my secondary instrument. The third challenge was controlling a vocal effect via MIDI from a keyboard, which appears to be impossible due to the lack of MIDI options within the effect, e.g. no way to disable troublesome CC events. Every time I'd switch the Leslie speed, the effect treated it like a patch change. I'm still looking for a solution to that issue that doesn't involve more devices (you can buy an inline MIDI filter, for example). In the same vein, you also have to make sure that your laptop-hosted soft synths are configured to ignore patch change events unless you have a separate keyboard dedicated to soft synths.

Yikes that looks scary. I am hoping to use one controller and have my synths changed up as the programs run. Easier said than done.  If using Omnisphere, I would need those commands for each sound and would need to have a computer booted on that instrument ready to play. Sounds easy in the studio. Probably not so much live. IF I could get that into the Push it would be great, but might be asking a lot. Alternately I could use substandard sounds on one of my stand alone keyboards. I don't really like that idea. plus it's another audio feed to route and mix.

My setup is going to be computer based ( or PUSH) but I want to play synths and guitars. Sometimes it seems like trying to juggle with three arms. I have Guitar rig 7 which I love and it would save dragging amps and efx to a show. I will certainly need to submix and route the main feed to the house. Doesn't sound simple any more does it? 

I am evolving wih this as I go and trying not to go broke in the process. I think I would rather run a show on PUSH than a lappy. 

They had a bumpy landing sometimes in Siberia didn't they?

I have a bunch of Waves plugins but it's kind of scattered  .What happens I guess when I nibble on those sales I didn't have a unified package other than Horizon.

None of that has been wuped in forever.  To WUP only Horizon is 240.00 and that leaves probably 30 more plugins. The upgrade may cover a few and leave holes for the others.

Having said that, as someone else commented. It all works. Never had a Waves plugin crash my DAW. They are good plugins and I don't think it's fair to imply they are all dinosaurs.Many have updated interfaces and functions. Prolly the biggest hurdle for me is going through all of them. Waves needs a meta search.

It seems 3 way switches should be easy to install or replace, but I sort of found out the hard way it isn't always that straight forward.  In addition I was repacing regular switches with smart switches that used wifi and they are larger than the other switches. I still don't know how I managed to stuff that wiring and those swtches into that cavity and even make it look normal from the outside. No more puns. Craig has me covered

I have been 'popped' several times. It really gets your attention.

On 2/11/2024 at 1:49 PM, bitflipper said:

I started a fresh project last week, hand-planted a click track in the PRV to drive the TTS-1, and chose a Kontakt library to serve as the voice for a basic guide track. But when it came time to record said guide track, I couldn't record any MIDI.

I switched to a different keyboard controller to see if I'd screwed up something in my main synth's configuration (I have a special setup for live music and have to reconfigure for recording). Still no MIDI coming in. Checked my Sonar MIDI settings but couldn't see any problems there, which was expected given that I never change it. Tried a different soft synth just in case it was Kontakt being weird, but that wasn't it, either.

Could my trusty Focusrite be at fault? Geez, I hoped not. But this is my third interface, the previous two having died, so that was a possibility. But I needed to exhaust every other possibility before making that leap. I am running a beta version of Sonar, so as with a brand-new car anything's possible. But an older version yielded the same results, so it wasn't that, either.

So I did what I always do when I'm stumped: lit up a bowl and stared at the screen while drawing a MIDI flowchart in my mind. At each potential point of failure, I mentally drew a red X over each one that had already eliminated, until almost every possibility had been accounted for. Almost. The only thing left was the line drawn between the synth and the interface. "No way", I said to myself. MIDI cables don't break.

Well, it turns out that sometimes they do.

 

So it was something simple. Go figure.  I have had a few midi cables go bad. 

I might need to take notes from you or look up some of your info as I'm maybe preparing to play live again running a DAW and a midi synth controller playing Omnisphere. Omnisphere is a big program but the patches are light. Running my old i7 quad core lappy.

7 hours ago, Bridget Murphy said:

Well good luck and I hope you get the best tool for your job.

The main tool is me and I think it needs sharpened

8 hours ago, Bridget Murphy said:

It sounds like you made some thoughtful purchases during the sales period and are considering future upgrades to your setup. 

I am pretty indecisive at the moment on when to upgrade the computer. I am a long way off looking at this I suppose.