Starise

@Hidden Symmetry Very nice relaxing track. So you played the guitars and bass? Was the horn added by someone else? I love how these collabs can sometimes come together. Nice work on the mix so far as I can tell on these earbuds. I'm not at home and listening from somewhere besides my studio. The earbuds I'm wearing miss a lot of low information and accentuate the high mids.

I made version of this song that I added a slightly celtic feel to it here-

Chicken and steak tend to cook on the outside before they cook on the inside. I have one of those insta pots I sometimes use for those. It has a stainless steel pot in it. Those pots will steam and slow cook. If I'm cooking outside I usually put steak in an aluminum pan marinated and covered in foil in the top of my grill for about 45 minutes, same for chicken. The grill gets to 650/700F that's about 370C. This cooks the meat well inside. Then I remove it from the pan and finish cooking it on the grill surface. A friend gave me one of those ceramic "egg" cookers which I smoked brisket on this past summer using wood chips. Nothing like the smell of meat smoking in the summer. In the winter I'm mostly either slow cooking or I put the meat in the oven and broil it. I use a standard iron frying pan for wok style cooking. I can get steamable vegetables you simply microwave and that's even better yet. I steam precooked shrimp with old bay seasoning to lock the flavor in. Only takes less than 5 minutes once they get to temp.. I prefer outdoor cooking to indoor cooking. I use a Blackstone outdoor griddle in the summer in addition to my regular grill. It's great for Asian style food. You just dump the mixed vegetables with shrimp on it and cook away. No cracks for food to fall through. A great way to make cheese steaks too. For eggs - Did you ever use one a microwave egg cooker? 1 minute and you have two cooked eggs. No grease.

You mean using TRackS Master Match? I had that problem with MCompare. Not intuitive at all. I have been less prone lately to over analyze a mix at the master stage. This is mainly because I just don't have the time. Having said that, I can get a decent master much faster than I once could. TBH I see two ways to mix for streaming. One way is to simply mix using only your ears in a good space or using monitor correction( or maybe both). Then look at where the levels actually are. It's all the same thing just measured in different ways. Back in the day it was db and RMS. Now its LUFS and the K system. One difference from now and "back in the day" though is most of their signal chain had compressive softening qualities to it naturally. I think this played a big part in the end results. Nowadays you have to add it in if mixing ITB. ....and mixing from start to master is an art of sorts. I stopped thinking in terms of " this is how a real environment would sound" or this is supposed to work like this or that. In mixing everything is a trick and nothing is cheating so long as the results are favorable.

Yeah but you don't get to eat the song afterwards. If I use anything it's mostly timpani for orchestral work sometimes I use snare drum with pre programmed rolls. Compared to a rock band I guess it's pretty tame, but yeah I hear you. If making anything cinematic with big drums I have to reach for another program. I have epic drums but haven't used it much. Mainly because I don't have a need for intense cinematic tracks right now. I still use a rice cooker which is basically a none stick fry pan with high sides. If teflon is deadly I'm probably going to die from it because I have used those kinds of pans up until about 5 years ago when I switched to an old style cast iron pan. They say if you go black you'll never go back...I think they mean't something else but it applies here I love to cook too and it shows because I have to sample my food. I like large samples. Knowing you Bub that isn't why your mom had the cast iron frying pan. Same here. I might try them again though because I hate wearing glasses.

Relaxing? Maybe for a seal. I dunno. I'll stick to heated baths as long as possible. But then, I'm not Norwegian. Maybe that's the difference. Want a good cleansing? Go down to the deep south when the humidity is at 99% and it's 110F out in July. That opens those glands right on up.

I don't think any of us are going to get any better on the hearing end of things. One thing I did the other day was look at someone else's master I really liked. I used TRackS Master Match plug in. It takes a master you like and makes adjustment to your master based on it. I also had Melda's Mcompare but never really took a liking to it. Just too much involved in using it. They guy left downloads opened on his SC so I downloaded the track and put it into the TRackS master Match plugin. Here are a few hints as to why his master sounded so good. I usually roll off everything below 60hz. This guy had material in the 20hz range. You have to be careful though in how much you use and where you use it. Another hint- There was a huge difference between soft passages and loud passages. If it had all been loud there would have been no contrast. If you mix it right the material is very powerful when those climaxes come along. Don't listen to my last mix. It is not representative of either good musicianship or a perfect mix. Listening to his track though gave me a basis for future mixes.

My suggestion on EQs, compressors, limiters: If you want to step up get just one or two good ones. No need to go round' buying them like candy. If I want a good EQ I have Fabfilter Pro Q. The GUI and controls are amazing. My go to limiter has been McDSP 4L4000 or IK Stealth limiter though Stealth is a little dirty and not as clean as the 4L4000. It all depends. The Cakewalk brickwall limiter is ok on some material. . I don't think the Adaptive Limiter was a part of the new Cakewalk, but I like it as well. I'm not as selective on my compressors. I have way too many of them. Sometimes the Cakewalk compressor is just fine. Sometimes I'm looking for something a little more selective. How much better are 3rd party plugins than their factory equals? Better EQ's have improved filters resulting in a slightly more honed sound. Not that you will always hear the difference, but it's there. I use Melda's Dymanic EQ or Izotope Ozone sometimes when looking for a dynamic EQ.. You can use the Fabfilter EQ as a dynamic. Have I bought just one or two? No. I have somewhere around 1400 plugins last count. That's why I can tell you it isn't really necessary. Just get a few good ones. I think the TRacks plugins are a great value for performance mainly because it's a one time buy unless they add something else to the pak later. Waves has WUP. With TRacks, buy one time and be done with it. Don't get me wrong Waves makes wonderful plugins but when you buy one they charge for updates using WUP. Melda is another great plugin buy if you can get past those GUIs. I never liked them even though I have a few of the plugins. On orchestral libraries; I thought the violin samples were tinny in one recent library I bought so I decided to try the same samples in several of my other libraries. Guess what? They were all tinny. I almost blamed the library. It's either my hearing or my setup. Here's the real kicker, during my little experiment I decided to make comparisons of a bunch of instruments across all of my libraries. You would not believe the results. There is no huge difference between many lower end libraries and the more expensive ones depending on the sound and the context. Example- I have the Joshua Bell violin and the Taylor Davis violin. Both are excellent sampled violin libraries with large foot prints. Just for kicks I decided to try a few samples from IK's Miroslav Philharmonic 2 which isn't thought to be very good compared to the likes of Spitfire and Vienna. I came across one solo violin with really nice vibrato sound . Would work great in a mix. The kicker? I looked and it's 8.1 mb. That's right 8.1mb. Wow. In this case it would have worked just as well as the JB with less programming hassle. Same thing happened with string sections in Amadeus. I compared it to Spitfire's CORE violins. I had a tough time telling the difference. Amadeus is somewhere around 20gb or less.

John had a few patches for the Discovery version on a prior release free included as a patch in UNIFY. Not sure if he expanded on that in this version with the Discover version. I recently bought CORE. Can't wait to give this a try! This was the one drawback ( depending on how you view it) to CORE in that it was all just independent sections with only instrument range mapping. Looks as if loading it as a UNIFY patch will make it more like the sychron player in Vienna or any other number of other similar combo types of players. For fast group compositions of different orchestral component combinations that sound realistic this looks amazing. Not that it matter to VST users, but I hear there's an AAX version of UNIFY in beta for PT users.

I was able to get the 29.00 deal with Plugin.com. Thanks Larry. Will be interesting to see how it work with my headphones.

I hear a lot of people are working on home projects to stay busy. I was off for 8 weeks and managed to get a lot done. No commute. My wife is a a professional too who works from home a few days a week. Thankfully she is always local. Would be tough dealing with a spouse who had to go away. I've been at my job for 20 years now and in this line of work way before that. I don't do bad where I am. To go anywhere else and have the deal I have here probably wouldn't happen so I'm hanging on until I'm ready to retire. Then I figure I'll get a "busy" job of some kind part time or take more time in the studio recording. I could probably quit now and we would be ok but I'm staying at it for a bit more yet to save. Completely debt free. Three cars all paid for. Own my home. Financially I'm doing well. Had some health issues awhile back I'm trying to stay on top of. If things get worse I might have to leave earlier than I intended. I have some issues that could be progressive in the future. So far so good. I would probably get tired of staying around the house all the time, but waking up at 7am would be very nice. No commute would be very nice. Staying up late would be nice. One day hopefully in the not to distant future I will retire and the people who work from home will be envious

Hi Gary, I am primarily a writer of music who sometimes gets lucky with a lyric. They say even a blind squirrel gets a nut every now and then. Shoot me line or I'll shoot you a line . It's funny, I was working with a girl in Norway but her music is not this music. Her lyrics were more "out there" and artsy. Not a bad thing . I have played Christian music at church on and off for quite awhile. I'm still working.........must be nice over there in Norway to retire at 56 years old but I could free up some time for a project like this. I see someone has already offered so I'll lay back to see if you need me or want to work with a project in the future. If you're still interested just send me a PM.

Glad to see you back Bub. I'm still on the daily grind during the week. In order to get off work I would need to get hurt and I don't want that. I feel like most of the world is sitting at home in their underwear working from home and I'm still out here every day. I'll admit I'm a little jealous. Even my supervisor gets two days a week working from home. He called me up a few weeks ago about 9:30am and had the "I just got out of bed" voice. Mind you, I get up at 5:30 am. The kicker is 99% of everything I do could be done remotely. I am here on a technicality because others who don't work on a computer have to be here and I'm part of that group. I wouldn't want to be off because I'm injured or sick. Sorry to hear about the accident and hope you continue to recover.

Just poked my head into the Newegg site. They tend to be one of my favorite suppliers. Currently you can get an i7 10700K for 359.00 or a Ryzen 7 3700X for 319.00. That's not a huge difference in price for me. Both chips clock factory in the high 3ghz range. Looks like you can O.C the Ryzen to 4.4. Not sure about the 10700K. I could be mistaken but I think the "K" designation means you can O.C. the chip. I keep my 5820K 6 core i7 overclocked at over 4ghz and have never had a heat issue or any other kind of problem in the 4+ years I've had it. That chip is getting long in the tooth compared to more recent chips. For me though it's plenty. If I were going to upgrade today I would be looking at an i9 only because I run libraries and lots of plugins.As of now you can get an i9 10900K 10 core for about 5 bills. For a budget build you can get an i5 for half that and still have a nice home studio computer. One of the main things I learned on my last build was the lanes on the 5820K are less which can affect throughput depending on what you're trying to do. For some odd reason they throttled the lanes on the 5820K .vs the 5820. I'm still running samples off of 4 large SSDs simultaneously. I think it has more to do with the available throughput and speed of live recording channels from your interface. I seldom record more than 2 tracks at a time. I track acoustic instruments usually with a stereo pair of pencils or track a vocal. That's about the extent of my live work.

I sometimes use the Fat Channel in Cakewalk. The effects in SO5 have been compared to top notch effects. I see them as a few steps above the factory plugins included with most DAWs IMO. I have a lot of the Waves plugins and I think they compare favorably.

Hey I just realized I think this is Bub the zombie ^^^^^^^^ Hey man, how did you unzombie yourself?

Looks like this server might be RAID. There are two hard drives. Would this change anything?

I think in some cases they go head to head well. I have nothing against AMD if I could find one with low heat and quiet cooling comparable in performance to Intel. Some people say we have that now. I think it's a bit of a stretch to date. Not arguing that there aren't good Ryzen chips. In a build like that I would also want a good MOBO with the right I/O. Not just I/O but support of peripherals . Sometimes a MOBO will advertise I/O but you come to find it only supports part of a spec. This was an issue back when Thunderbolt USB-C came out. Sometimes it still is. This isn't just AMD/Ryzen MOBOs. Can also be Intel. I have had a wonderful track record with Intel and I guess I'm very reluctant to chance a bad apple in a perfect run of computer builds. An excellent choice in a mid tier home studio DAW. Glad you've had good luck with that GPU. TBH I would only be shopping a higher end video card if I were going to put together videos on a regular basis in high resolutions using video production software. I do some of that now but it's mostly just me playing around. Nothing serious to date. If I had clients though , then yes I would have something more robust. What I have now isn't bad. It' s somewhere in the middle and seems to work well for what I do. Video is one area said to be better using some Ryzen chips. Not head and shoulders better. Only minimally better than Intel.

I remember back when a decent build was in the 500-800 range. I guess I'm dating myself. Good i9 build is now probably 2K range not including the interface. Especially if you go with a good video card. Those can be pretty expensive on the high end. If you're thinking about video work , might as well look at that too. Can save a few bucks on Ryzen .vs Intel but I would not recommend it personally. I'll take the extra 300-500 hit for Intel. We are talking about something you want to depend on over a long period of time. If you don't want to get involved in a build, I would contact Jim if you live in the US. If in the UK fees and shipping add up. Might still be a consideration though. Gaming computers are basically higher spec'd computers, so yes I would look at them especially. The main consideration to buying a gaming setup is to make sure the I/O suits what it is you want to do. Faster SSD dives. No platters preferably. Some places are advertising gamer computers with only 8gb of memory. That just isn't enough usually. 16gb minimum and if using large sound libraries you need large drives and more memory. I'm a smaller project maker, so 16 has never not been enough even running several tracks of heavy libraries. On the cheap and running under 20 tracks? Making basic band mixes using mainly audio tracks? You could probably get a computer from Costco, tigerdirect, newegg, the HP or Dell discounted sites. You might be forced to use USB ( work ok for most), Lack as much I/O as you might want. Have to add additional memory and/or another SSD but you could go that route. Plenty of people have Cakewalk loaded and working on basic PC's if only doing basic things.

Build your own for a lot less and get something closer to what you really want. I had mine built by a bud with a wood shop. If you're handy build it yourself. I build cabinets when the mood suits. Just built a drink center from scratch. Back when I needed a desk I didn't have the tools I have now. If you need/want advice ask away. By modern standards my desk is now considered massive. I have 12 rack spaces to either side of me at knee level. Two half racks still under the main surface. 4 additional rack spaces under my monitors. Enough room for two sets of monitors. The middle has a cutout for a full sized keyboard.A level above that has a sliding shelf for two monitors. I can slide that shelf over the keyboard if necessary. There is yet another level to the rear that could be used for a 3rd video monitor on a taller stand. The back of the desk is truly cavernous. Lots of room for whatever behind the racks. At least as much room as the racks take up. I had to bring it in three pieces bolted together. We used high quality finished plywood which was stained. The only things I wish would have been done differently is he made the racks spaces just a little tighter than I wanted. Also there is no rack mounts strips. When I move to my next studio space I plan to either build a smaller desk or modify the one I have. Back in the day all of those spaces made sense. FWIW I never even half filled them. Now it would be overkill for most studios who use ITB plugins and efx. All you really need is a nice front end into a decent interface, decent monitors. If a keyboardist it's nice to have the keys handy. That's about it.

Thanks for your comments. Interesting that you haven't had issues with Win 10. I have heard horror stories about hardware changes that require the software to be re authorized on the same computer. Mainly if a MOBO is changed. I wasn't sure if it also applied to an SSD/HDD. Hardware and builds have been so stable I haven't needed to attempt it until now. I'll look Cloneszilla up. Thank you. Great to know others have used it successfully. Those additional gifs really help to see the process better. Thanks @msmcleod I have a single HDD disk carriage with a usb connection. Do you think I could use that? My plan was to plug the old drive into it. Retrieve the image onto a functional computer. Then write the identical image to a new drive ( wiped clean) using the same hardware.

That's a baby desk you ought to see mine I think I could live in it.

I know we have some very computer literate people here. This question would also apply to music computers. I have known you could clone a computer's HDD for some time but never actually had a need to do it. I think I even have the outboard HDD shuttle you drop the spare drive into to clone it. The situation is I work for an interest that has an old Dell running winxp that controls a whole bunch of stuff related to their hardware. I think the HDD is beginning to go bad or we might have lost a cooling fan. If you reboot it's ok for a little while and then looses the points to the hardware yet again. I'm guessing it's probably 10 or more years old. We are being given a price of 15K to replace the server, mainly I'm told, because of the software that would need to be bought and re registered. The server itself is a basic Dell desktop . They took away the keyboard and mouse. It's password protected so even if I hook up to it I can't get into it. What I'm thinking I could do is clone the HDD and replace it. Win10 is more finicky about hardware changes, but Winxp I'm thinking was not as difficult. Do you know if I could simply clone the drive and replace it? The way I figure it, I have nothing to loose if it doesn't work. Thanks.

I seen the email. For me, with CORE it isn't too heavy. If I had pro though it might feel like passing a kidney stone. Not that I ever have. I don't know why I bought it in the first place. It's an excellent library even the CORE version, but I seldom make orchestral music. I have a few other libraries that would have done in a pinch....so I guess I had orchestral GAS there for awhile.

My room is all full of sound absorptive junk. None of it was scientifically done though I know how. I've used ARC ever since it was introduced now in version 3 and Sonarworks for headphones. The last time I bought ARC I bought the most recent mic they sell with it. I am quite happy with it. Mixes translate pretty well for me using ok monitors. ARC is not only EQ it is also time relational to the standing waves and adjusted to your location. I don't usually move around my mixing space so it works fine. Not trying to sell anyone just telling you it works for me.