Starise

It's a great instrument- UVI Mellow. Been around for a long time, still a good one to have around if you fancy a mellotron. Digital sensations is a nice set of old classic keyboards. Has a decent DX-7 copy among others.

Thanks for this.

For those who may not know- - INFO to download the latest version of Scaler 2.5 HERE These instructions are for an earlier version but still apply. One thing I almost missed was to select the windows icon since the default here was Mac. The acoustic guitar samples make this a heavier program at 913mb zipped. Probably well worth it.

Thanks for the heads up on this. I've had NI 10U and had never seen the point in an upgrade for the price. As it happens i was also shopping acoustic guitars sample libraries. This has at least one decent one in it and extra orchestral libraries I didn't have in 10U and who can't use yet another orchestral sample library? For 299 quid i would not have jumped. For 99 quid to move to 12U. Yeah I'll do that. BH is in NY so it isn't a huge hop for it to get to my place. I have never before had a hard drive with Komplete on it. I always used the online downloads which were quite extensive with something like Komplete. If I get this I am wondering if I can simply use it from the hard drive and forget what is stored as 10U on my computer? That is of course, once I have affirmed my ownership of 10U to get the update. -Tim

I get it. Inside job during the day. No one around the house any more other than the grand children? I would probably do a similar thing. I did the Irish music in bars for awhile and the door is always open for me to return. No money to be made though. Decent people many of whom are great players. I discovered it ain't really my scene. It was like an environment I could live in for a short time and do ok. During COVID there were a few gigs in homes and I went to a few of them. The Irish call em' sessions. At one of those the person who owned the house was sure to tell us the session would end at promptly 7pm. It was about 10 after 7 so I reminded the guy what he had said. He told me that if I didn't want to play I could go the f home. There were a few nervous laughs. I decided I didn't really like playing with him any more. Crazy Irish. My path was planned not by me. Control over our destiny is really overrated. Apparently it didn't lead in the gig direction but I get along with and have played with plenty of those guys who I greatly admire. I mean , what would this world be like without the likes of Notes_Norten and weekend warriors like bitflipper? As I have mentioned I am a church musician on a fairly regular basis. Yeah I know Notes, that one doesn't conjure scenes of joy for you And prolly one reason I'm like a square peg in a round hole here. I played the prelude last week on piano in front of maybe 200 people and streamed to many more via a stream. The church just did a major upgrade to their streaming system. Now I don't play to see how many people I can play in front of, but compared to a bar band. Well I'll just say God Himself was listening 🙂 That's about the only one that matters to me anyways. I actually prefer smaller groups. One thing I like about this church though is they play both classical music and some of the more modern stuff. It's a good mix there. Some seriously talented people on the teams, and I like that I am not obligated every week since we have teams that rotate. I am also a tenor in the choir and I work the live stream at least once a month. The really nice thing about it from a set up perspective is they have sound techs to set up and work the sound. Both FOH and a crew for cameras and a dedicated streaming board. The equipment never goes anywhere and I always go to the same place. I feel spoiled in that regard. At my age and the way i am wired I feel like it's probably the best all around thing I could do.

That sounds like my life exactly. Picking up the extra instrument was probably a mistake at this stage in my life. Even so, it was very educational and will help with compositions. I have a mostly desk job where I work and I'm on a computer all day. This wasn't always the case in my job. I got a fairly recent promotion. It's technical mostly and not clerical which makes it interesting for me, but to work this job all day and them go home to a computer again is often just too much even though it's something totally different. I'm getting closer to retirement now. I will probably have the larger better equipped studio then. It's a great thing to do if a person is not as mobile as they once were. Right now I am in pretty decent health and able to do pretty much anything I want to do. I was thinking I might have two gigs after retirement. The music recording and another gig that's more physically active. If I could start material and have all kinds of time to work on it I'm sure my music would be a few notches higher than it is. Hopefully that will be me in the future

I haven't had much time in the DAW lately. I brewed this up last night in about an hour. All done in Cakewalk. Maybe I'll upload it to Bandlab too.

Have you ever wondered how many bugs could be in a program that's only 30mb? I'm guessing at that but I know they are very small programs. This was something I liked as well. Is it 340 dollars interesting? For me at least, No. Why does brand ***** have free updates? I agree. I did this a few times and managed to pick up some decent plugins and a new WUP. They are one step ahead here. Introduce an initially high upgrade/update price, then make it seem like you are getting this really great deal around the holidays or when they offer it. They might snag a few who pay full retail price for WUP. It is what it is and I guess I'll either live with it or jump ship.

I will try to keep you all updated on further updates.

Thanks for the heads up on this. I'll take advantage of this since I have Scaler 2 which I have only opened once or twice. Still it's a good deal for me to have this in the toolbox just in case.

Good point. If I have the improvements I might just sit on this for awhile. I don't enjoy handing money out for no good reason. The only thing I can think of there is maybe one or two plugins crossed over with something else I bought. Heck I'll just delete the multiples. If I have duplicates it can't be more than a few.

Last night was update night. Never mind I haven't had time to do much of anything in the studio lately. I thought I would do a few updates and maybe have some time left over to play. Two hours later I decided to turn in since it was late. It isn't just the programs that needed updates. All of the apps that download the updates needed an update. It felt good to have that done. I managed to get a few program upgrades in the deal. All of my DAWS needed updates. I still have a few that I haven't updated.Windows needed an update. I hope I'm good for a little while now.

Thanks CC. I'll look for the next one. I might need to "negotiate" with those guys. 340.00 for Horizon and a handful of other plugins seems very steep to me. I mean I can keep usin em' for now but MAN........that's 100 bucks over the so called 240.00 "cap". Are they TRYING to loose me?

They are tough to beat. You are tempting me to pull my Aero Press out again. It does make a good cuppa.

I updated my plugs to 12.7 no extra charge. My WUP is due in June though and it's over the cap. Can we still shop around for a better WUP deal?

Thanks Larry! You da best.

Thanks Mibby. I wish I could say the lead acoustic was me. It was a loop from Cakewalk I think. Just too busy lately to even pull a guitar off the rack. I did play the rest of the lead parts. I like to do these light kinds of things. I think a uke would fit nicely with some of those Groovemate loops too. I almost did it here but decided to try it on something else.

I picked this up few weeks ago and used it in an inspirational video. I do it for fun otherwise I would starve. Works well for light percussion which is something I find I am using a lot lately. Small acoustic sets don't need a huge drum kit. I simply pulled various loops from Groovemate into Cakewalk.

At Newegg HERE This is a clockable chip to 5ghz. 125 watts. The K version is slightly less capable than the non K version. Still for 329 clams it a nice capable chip for a build IMO.

Worth the update I think. AIR vsts are nice instruments and plugins that pack a lot of serious value for the money.

Thanks for that info. My smallest keyboard is 76 keys and mostly I use bread and butter sounds which made VIP look good because I could have the equivalent of a high end keyboard using my laptop and for the limited live playing I do it wouldn't make sense to invest heavily in a top end keyboard. Not to mention those keyboards are HEAVY to lug and I ain't getting any younger. The really cool thing about having lots of sounds is the idea of being locked to a groove on stage and having a bunch of things going on while I'm also concentrating on playing, or maybe a very sci fi intro or fills for some material. On stage you don't want any load times so everything has to be pre programmed and fast. Maybe even two keyboards one programmed to certain layered sounds and the other one freed up to play. Dragging a laptop around isn't something I'm fond of but I would do it if I could get the kind of capabilities I'm after without buying a high end Yamaha or Korg. Of course then I need some place to put it which means an investment in some kind of stand or holder to add to the keyboard. Things can get complicated very quickly and if you don't always play the same songs you're changing it up each time.

I have thought about taking up mandolin since the fingerings are the same as violin. So far I haven't because there's this thing called time I can't seem to find.

I noticed VIP can be used with any midi keyboard. I assumed their Keyboards were tailor made for VIP in the same way the NI controllers are made for NI software.. It's sad really that they seem to be backing away from their product. It's appealing to have capability to move all my studio VSTs to the stage. VIP looked an inexpensive way to do it. In the end maybe it's just too much for musicians to fiddle with on stage when they can buy a high end Yamaha or Korg and have it all in one box.

Glad ur still around Shane. Bad as it was it could have been fatal. In that case you would not be here to write this and I would not be answering something that doesn't exist.