Richard Strickland

Nevermind, it finally worked after multiple attempts.

I just performed the latest update in CW, and I'm getting a window stating that I need to sign into BL to activate it, but every time I click on the window, or go up to Help>Sign In to BandLab, and click on that, nothing happens. I get a brief blue wheel, which quickly disappears, and nothing. Please help. Thanks.

12 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

 

If you really do want help, it's available here (and not just from me, but others who have done this work professionally and commercially for years) but you need to go into it with an open mind with suggestions or nobody will be able to genuinely help you. I've been on the other side of the fence with ignoring great advice and believe me, you don't want to waste the time I did back in the day.

My only issue was the other guy trying to tell me I'm not hearing what I know I am. 

2 minutes ago, Byron Dickens said:

You're spitting into the wind here, your Lordship.

Actually he's not. He knows how to give advice in a way that isn't omniscient. 

3 minutes ago, Byron Dickens said:

You're the one who can't read. You've been told by two different people - one of whom has recorded and mixed commercial releases - where the root cause of your issue is and it is not in the recordings.

 

 

The issue was obviously misunderstood by both of you. It's a dead topic now. 

9 minutes ago, Byron Dickens said:

You and your f-ing blankets on your f-ing desk are like indexing spark plugs on a motor with a rod knocking.

 

Your mixes are always going to suck because you won't listen to any advice from people who know what they're talking about. The end.

Damn, somebody has anger issues. If only you could accept the fact that your experiences aren't what everybody else experiences. I'm sorry this hurts your narcissistic feelings so much. My f'ing blankets cut down on the f'ing echo that apparently doesn't really f'ing happen because it doesn't f'ing happen to you. If you bothered to actually read you would see that the acoustic environment would have no effect on IRs and soft-synths. Your advice has no merit because it's impertinent to the topic, and also extremely self-centered. But thank you for your brilliant contribution to the forum. What would it be without some jerk who thinks it's his safe place to be the ***** bag that he wants to be in the real world? Get over yourself and seek therapy. 

53 minutes ago, Byron Dickens said:

No, I record, mix and master in my room.

This was done in a 10x11 foot room. Including a Miced up guitar amp and the real drums that take over from the drum machine around 1:00 in..

And I didn't throw a blanket over the desk either.

I-GET-SOUND-REFLECTIONS-FROM-MY-DESK. THE END. 

8 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Backup arriving; he's right. 

No matter how good your gear is, if your room is fighting you, you can't actually hear it without certain frequencies building up or cancelling out. This isn't just for acoustic instruments in the room either, imagine you've put a song together with a softsynth and you think "wow that sounds wimpy" and you've fattened the sound up to compensate. That might sound great in a room that's nulling 120hz, but in other rooms, you might find that this is way out of control. And if your mix guy is under the impression that this was what you intended for the sound, it won't be fixed, and then mastering at the end (if you get it done elsewhere) ends up as a compromise/fix mistakes session rather than a final shine and prep.

Flutter echoes can be a thing, and a lot of good studios have a cloud above the mix position. I was going to put one in here but I found that even without it the sound was pretty balanced and not a problem for me. I have a keyboard and monitors/computers on the desk in front of me, mixer to the side, and if there's any flutters, I'm not noticing them. But what was a MASSIVE difference was setting up the angled walls, tuned resonators, etc. in the room - the difference was literally night and day.

This all aside, I'm listening to the songs now...

The biggest 2 things that stick out to me are:

Mastering - this stuff is pumping like crazy, like the bass management hasn't been set up correctly first before it's hit the limiter. This can be traced back to the room issue for a start, but this can be mitigated by better mixing, and then if that hasn't solved it, then better mastering (although everything before that point is always the better choice to sort out first)

Mixing in general - the vocals are getting lost behind a lot of things, both with level and effects. You'll find that your mix might sound great alone but once it's mastered you're changing the balance of the instruments. Things like overheads, guitars, etc. will suddenly seem WAY more prominent in the mix, and things like vocals and anything with a lot of transients like snare and kick will just disappear. Turning those up can work, but it might also make the master pump.  Reverb in general is a little loud, and that'll be further exacerbated by mastering effects changing the balance. And I think the last thing is I'm not hearing a lot of clean ups in between phrases, and all of those little noises, hums, hisses, thuds, etc. all add up once they're all blended together.

Like I said, if this is all sounding decent during tracking and then you get it back at the end and you go "this sounds dodgy" (especially if you listen in some other environment and notice it more) then it's definitely your environment first. Then the mixing decisions. Then the mastering. The sounds and performances themselves are fine, but they're getting lost in the problems.

 

I suppose I expected the professional mixing engineer to give me something of better quality. He actually did the mastering on that track, but the others were mastered with Sound Cloud and had very minimal mixing. I'm sure my room contributes to reverb mistakes, in addition to being a novice. 

8 hours ago, Byron Dickens said:

No it isn't and you don't. I don't throw a blanket over my desk and neither does Ocean Way, the Record Plant or Abbey Road. 

Not to make this about my desk, but you don't record in my room, and my room isn't Abbey Road. Trust me, I know what I'm hearing and what I'm hearing goes away when I cover my desk. My room is small and I have to be in front of it when recording, and it absolutely produces flutter echoe.

12 minutes ago, Byron Dickens said:

It is absolutely necessary to cover my desk. I get flutter echoes otherwise. The lack of acoustic treatment wouldn't have any effect on my soft synths and impulse response recordings. I'm not saying it isn't the mixing engineer, but his other work sounds great. Granted those recordings may have been done in studios.

Like the title says, I feel like my recordings always sound bad, as if they have a lofi quality. I've had two songs professionally mixed and they still have the same lofi sound, just a little better. Through headphones the mixed ones aren't terrible, but in the car they prove to have been a complete waste of money. I've been using a Scarlett 2i2 first gen since about 2015, and I'm on my second computer, both good brands. I record vocals and acoustic guitar with either an Audio Technica AT2020 or a Groove Tubes GT55. I run these microphones through a Tube MP/C pre-amp with light compression. I always use a foamed microphone shield and I cover my producer's desk with a blanket to alleviate reflections. For electric guitar I always use a Torpedo Captor X with impulse responses. My room isn't acoustically treated, but I doubt the quality of the overall recordings is a result of that. I was hoping some of you could listen to some tracks I have on SoundCloud and tell me what you think may be the problem. 'Go Unknown' is the only one I have posted that was professionally mixed. I'm interested to know what others think of the sound quality of it, but also the other unmixed tracks. Do your recordings have the same lofi quality until they're properly mixed? 

7 hours ago, scook said:

I cannot say for certain if this is the problem but there is a registry entry 

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Soundtoys

that may interfere with installing an older version.

I'll try looking into that. Do you use this plug-in suite?

I recently installed Effects Rack 5 by Sound Toys and it is unusable due to an extraordinary amount of crackling. I have increased the playback buffer multiple times with no success. I seem to be able to use individual effects fine, and I can even stack them without issues, but assiging the full Effects Rack to a track is causing a mess of noise. I have checked all of my peak meters and everything is under the red. Muting the track that it is assigned to does nothing to alleviate the issue as the crackling continues to be audible. It seems to be more pronounced when a long delay or saturation is in the effects chain. I contacted SoundToys and they had me uninstall the most recent version of Effects Rack 5 and replace it with an older version. After uninstalling and making sure every folder is clear of remnants I continuously get a message that a later version is already installed, despite not a single instance of anything related being on my computer.

I'm using the most up-to-date version of Cakewalk and Windows 10. Everything is set for 64 bit operation. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

There's an issue with the installation apparently, that's why I can't find it. It's supposed to work as a VST and can be loaded into the master track effects bin. 

Scook, did you ask because Scarlett doesn't always work well with Ryzen?

If anybody is using the Free G peak meter can you please tell me how to load it into my project? I want to use it for gain staging in my mix. Thanks. 

1 minute ago, scook said:

What audio interface will this machine be using?

A 6 year old Scarlett 2i2.

I've narrowed down my search to either of these:

https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/5448005/HP-Pavilion-TP01-2066-Desktop-PC/

https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/7517433/Lenovo-IdeaCentre-5-14IMB05-Desktop-PC/

I only plan on producing my own music for now but I do want flexibility with the amount of tracks, VSTs, and plug-ins that I use. My current computer is 12 years old with an Intel i5 and 6GB. It still performs decently but I'm having to increase my buffer size substantially to prevent audio dropouts during playback and still get a lot of pops regardless.

Thanks.

I think for now I'll just use the freeze method. 

I tried setting my instrument tracks to mono but my toms were barely audible. They are panned hard left and hard right within EZDrummer by default, so I'm not sure if that makes a difference. I deleted the mono tracks and reinstalled them as stereo and now my toms have the appropriate volume but neither my hi-hat or reverb channel are registering in the decibel meter. I can hear the hi-hat fine, and I think the reverb is audible, but there isn't a visual representation of the sound.

Thanks abacab. I'll have to watch that a couple of times but it looks like there are concepts I can apply to EZDrummer.

Thanks Terry. I was always under the impression that all MIDI has to be converted to audio before mixing. 

2 hours ago, reginaldStjohn said:

You do not have to recourd the audio out of the EZDrummer2 if you do not want to. You can leave the midi as is and just treat the audio tracks like any other audio track. It just won't have a waveform on it.  Another thing to try is to "freeze" the track and it will bounce all the midi to audio without you having to record them.

Thanks, freezing was the answer for me. However, I'm still uncertain of how I'm supposed to route the effects. The reverb and compression are routed to their own tracks but is this really needed? There is a faint audible sound coming from these two tracks so I'm unclear of the purpose. 

I have recorded a project and created my drum track within EZDrummer 2. Now I want to route each individual drum piece to their own separate audio tracks but I don't think I'm doing it right. 

I have created individual audio tracks for each piece and set the EZDrummer mixer channels to route to their respective track, but I'm getting a bad, lo-fi sound after recording the EZDrummer MIDI to audio (I'm literally arming each track to record and then hitting record to transpose the sound to audio). It also sounds out-of-phase.

Additionally, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be somehow including the EZDrummer effects (reverb, compression) with the audio recording of the drums or if I should leave that out and introduce these items during the mixing phase.

I appreciate any feedback. I also apologize if these things have been addressed already, but I was unable to find answers in the archives.

Thanks.

15 hours ago, John Vere said:

So did you try replacing ez drummer with SI drums. 
 

I can try that but I've never had an issue with EZD before.

My track is armed, input and output is routed correctly, but when I either click on the 'Record' icon at the top it will turn red for half a second and then back to gray. The song will begin to play but my performance will not record. Everything was working fine apparently until I loaded EZ Drummer onto an instrument track. This has never been an issue before, however. Anybody know what's going on?