jkoseattle

I've been using the Scale Velocity feature forever. But this instrument isn't affected by velocity very much. I've been altering CC1 Modulation on this one track until the envelope is looking like the Olympic mountains. But it's across the board too high. Is there a way to scale my modulation the way I can scale velocities?

It was a mix sanity check. I should have specified that these instruments are what I'm going to be using so I'm not really interested in knowing what other instruments I could go out and procure. I was more interested in whether the articulations and mod wheel movements sounded decent, as this is a Cakewalk-related forum after all. Saying off the bat "That does not sound like a trumpet" is not helpful. Because, well, it actually IS a trumpet, and it sure sounds like one to me too. 

But I should have waited. Lots more instruments still to be introduced later in the piece, which will affect this.

I know, I've been on this forum many years, (though this is the first time venturing into this area). Everyone is really polite most of the time so I was taken aback. My experience has had me slaving away on a piece for weeks or months, then releasing it and only then being told the mix is no good. And yet, having people review my mixes along the way is hard to come by. 

Anyway, in the meantime, I'm moving on, already made some adjustments. Big piece to finish. Lesson learned, sorry everyone.

Geez, it's not that bad. I'm new to this forum, and not a pluginster like sounds like you guys are. 

What David said: "Maybe take the pedal apart and check for cold/broken solder joints, etc."
What Jim heard: "Maybe go buy a new pedal."

I just looked at the manual for the keyboard and it does say that you power down and back up the keyboard and the pedals reset, so that I should have the pedal at 0 when powering up. Which I did, no change however. Still bottoms out at 85

Right, that's how I assumed it worked. The entire range of the pedal is sending signals to the keyboard, it's just that when I go down to the lowest, it's about 83-85. Yesterday it was 83, today it's 85. (That seems significant somehow.) I also have a sustain pedal and it generates 0 and 127 as always.

This is the very beginning of a much longer piece which employs a full orchestra. The ensemble here is two pianos, solo trumpet, solo cello and basses. I've used EQ and reverb in places. (The majority of the piece does not feature the trumpet or cello particularly, that's only for this opening bit.)

I am looking for feedback on a few things: 1) The mix overall. I need some objective ears on this. This isn't a final mix by any stretch, and some of it is going to depend on how the rest of the piece ends up sounding, but I'd like to get this project off to a running start. Any thoughts are welcome. 2) How fake does the fake trumpet sound? I'm using the best VIs I know, EastWest's Hollywood Orchestra, and I've messed with modulation and note durations and keyswitches to a certain extent, and though I know it won't fool anyone, I want it to be more or less non-noticeable. I already hear a couple necessary fixes. 

This is the very beginning of a much longer piece which employs a full orchestra. The ensemble here is two pianos, solo trumpet, solo cello and basses. I've used EQ and reverb in places. (The majority of the piece does not feature the trumpet or cello particularly, that's only for this opening bit.)

I am looking for feedback on a few things: 1) The mix overall. I need some objective ears on this. This isn't a final mix by any stretch, and some of it is going to depend on how the rest of the piece ends up sounding, but I'd like to get this project off to a running start. Any thoughts are welcome. 2) How fake does the fake trumpet sound? I'm using the best VIs I know, EastWest's Hollywood Orchestra, and I've messed with modulation and note durations and keyswitches to a certain extent, and though I know it won't fool anyone, I want it to be more or less non-noticeable. I already hear a couple necessary fixes. 3) Where do you or people you know generally solicit this kind of feedback?

Trying to get some momentum on this mammoth undertaking I'm just now starting, grrr.......

I'm in PRV. I must have flipped a switch that prevents playback while recording. I am still in Sound on Sound in settings, and nothing is actually getting lost, but while recording, I do not hear existing material. What's the switch I flipped?

Oh never mind. I wasn't in sound on sound, somehow I got switched to Comping, which I never ever ever use. I figured there must be some keyboard shortcut I accidentally hit, so I went into keyboard shortcuts, which reminds me of something else which has now been promoted to the Topic Of This Thread:

--- THE TOPIC OF THIS THREAD ---

When I go to Keyboard Shortcuts in Preferences, it takes maybe 15 seconds for it to display. Is anyone else experiencing this? And if I close Preferences while on the keyboard shortcuts page, Cakewalk remembers what page I was on last time, so the next time I open Preferences, it wants to go directly to keyboard shortcuts, which means I need to wait that 15 seconds before I can use preferences at all.

Yeah, I can see that. The way I work though, composition and performance are too tightly bound for that. This IS the performance!

Hmm, that sounds promising. But each song having the identical track layout means I can't halfway through this project decide I need a solo flugelhorn and add that track to a certain project, right? Cuz then that will mess up my identical track layout, yes?

I've only used it in standalone so far, so 83-127

On 12/21/2023 at 11:47 AM, Promidi said:

To the OP: 

You say you’re only getting 60% to 100%. 

Are you able to use MIDI monitoring software to see what the M-Audio Hammer 88 is actually transmitting when moving the expression pedal?

I use the free utility ShowMIDI for this. 

This can run in standalone or as a VST and will show you what the M-Audio Hammer 88 is actually transmitting when moving the expression pedal.

https://github.com/gbevin/ShowMIDI/releases

Thanks for the advice. I installed ShowMIDI as instructed, and it worked great right away. What I learned is that the expression pedal does generate CC11 through the it's entire range of motion, but the range of messages only go from 83 to 127. So pressing the pedal from bottom to top will generate messages starting at 83 and going up to 127. This agrees with what Cakewalk is recording. The pedal itself is sending messages through its whole range, so it doesn't appear to be a physical issue, just that it won't send anything below 83. 

So now what?

That makes sense. So as far as making sure the transitions are seamless, I just have to be ready to finesse the details, yeah? Make sure all the same effects are in every instrument across movements, for example, and that the volume & expression envelopes match up. Sounds like an enormous hassle, but maybe that won't be so bad.

I'm worried that halfway into the thing I'm going to realize I need to adjust an effect on some instrument, or even adjust some knob in the instrument itself, which will mean opening up every other movement that uses that instrument and matching the change. Is that really how people manage it? Or is it more that I need to make sure I'm totally satisfied with every instrument's settings before laying down notes?

I am starting on a big piece for full orchestra, plus two pianos, made of all EastWest synths, plus hopefully a live soloist or possibly two. The piece will probably be more than half an hour. As it is currently planned, there will be no musical breaks. There will be separate movements, but the plan is to bridge these movements with interludes and vamps and sound effects and such, so no silence at any time, and no natural breaks. Also, this project will be the final product, and will be published in CD form and be on Spotify and all those places exactly how it is exported from Cakewalk. I'm the whole show. Which means I am also going to need to EQ every track at the minimum, make volume and expression envelopes everywhere, all that. So more processing.

So, while I'm starting to plan this thing musically, I'm starting to think about how I should organize it in Cakewalk. I know that if I decide to make the whole piece one single project, that it will get really sluggish before long, weighed down by stuff I'm not currently even working on. However, if I split it up into logical musical movements, (the way it will ultimately divided into tracks on the CD no doubt), then it will be a major PITA to ensure the transitions are seamless.

Lastly, much of the music for this piece already exists in old CW projects from years ago, so there will likely be a desire for cutting and pasting entire chunks right into this new thing from the old projects.

How do people handle this typically? I've been a CW user since 1989, but my pieces have always been either easily breakupable into separate projects because they had natural breaks, or if not they were small ensembles. But even at that, occasionally I've started getting sluggish, and so now I'm thinking that's just going to be a huge problem if I don't plan this out now before I embark on this thing.  I have Audacity and Audition also, but the way Adobe changed Audition a while back confuses me and I hate it, and I haven't needed to use Audacity for much anyway, so instead just do almost everything in CW now, so there's that little snag too.

Yeah, tried doing that, sounds like @Andres Medina and @David Baay both had the same suggestion. Thank you for those! 

But of course, didn't work. That's the thing about CW, Once you know how to use it, it's very powerful ---- until you have to do something you've not done before, in which case you are painfully reminded that everything in CW is a lot harder than it should be.

Thank you everyone, I'm giving up. Lesson learned. This is the first time in 35 years of CW usage that I've needed to import a Midi file of this size and complexity, and I probably won't need to again. But if I do, I'll grab a scotch and be prepared to massage the daylights out of it before I do anything else.

As for this project, I'm just going to struggle along while the freight train known as The Deadline comes barreling down the track...

I imported a .mid file and I thought it would be nice and clean, but when I go into PRV every track has got a large number of controllers in it. Most of them are empty, but even if they weren't I probably don't need them.

What I DO need is a controller for CC11 Expression. There's already one there for every track. But when I add expression info in there for one track, when I go to the next track, there's a CC11 controller in there for BOTH the track I just left, as well as the new track I just went to. Different Midi channels. I've set all my instruments to Midi Omni, but when I look in the Event List I see that the original Midi file has different Midi channels for every track. Can I just get rid of all that and reset the Midi channels to 1? I learned how to do it today in another thread, but the notes are already in there. Am I going to mess something up by setting everything to Midi 1?

Second question. Here is the layout in question:

Vln 1: Channel 12

Vln 2: 13

Vla 14

Cello: 15

I have entered a ton of Expression data into the top three tracks. Sounds good. When I go to the cellos to enter expression data there, I see that CW was showing me controllers for CC11 for channels 12, 13 14 as well as 15. So I deleted those controllers from the cello, leaving just CC11 channel 15. When I go away from that track and return, however, there are 12, 13 and 14 again. Ugh! What should I do here?

Thanks. Now I'm not sure I want to do this. (See new thread!)

Thanks, that makes sense. I do normally have a Midi keyboard connected, but that's not really my issue. I can play the instrument from my keyboard and it records fine. But the original material I had imported will not play because in the Event List I'm seeing it's on a Midi Channel other than 1. When I record new material. that is recorded on 1 and works normally. 

Can't I just go somewhere and change all the notes to play on channel 1 and be done with it?

I have imported a Midi file of a piece for full orchestra. For each track, I created a new soft synth and copied the clips from the original track to my new track. But I learned that each track is on different Midi channel. So they only work if I set my instrument to the channel the Midi file originally used for that track. Got it all working.

Flash forward to today, a few weeks later. Now they don't play, except for the clarinets. I went into the Console and saw that every track EXCEPT the clarinet shows input None and the clarinets show Omni. But when I try to change one of them from None to Omni, it only offers Virtual Controller - Omni (which does not play). And in fact, even the clarinet track only offers that option when I open the input drop down. 

I don't want to mess with all this. I don't ever use Midi channels, and don't totally understand them. And I'm not interested in learning about them now. (If I go back to this project a year from now I'm going to be completely confused about all the channels anew because I don't use them anywhere else.) Is there a way to wipe all the channel info from these clips, have everything on Channel 1 or whatever the default is?

Thanks, so what happens if I do both the CC11 clips AND an envelope?  Because I still have the problem of only recording the top end of the CC11 spectrum, which is what necessitated my drawing envelopes by hand in the first place.

Interesting. This all used to work, but it's been a couple years. The keyboard is M-Audio Hammer 88, and the expression pedal is M-Audio EX-P

I have an expression pedal plugged into my keyboard, but a couple things aren't working as expected when I am trying to record expression:

1) When recording, If I slowly press the pedal up from it's lowest position, the expression movement only shows that it's going from about 60% to 100% in CW. it also sounds like it. It's not that the pedal only transmits data once the pedal gets to 60%, as all movement is being recorded - it's that the lowest expression reading starts at about 60%.

2) The pedal movements are being recorded as actual clips that sprout a new take lane rather than as an envelope. Is this to be expected? Before recording I made an envelope for Midi channel 11, and if I manually edit this envelope the instrument does what I want, (and what I expect the pedal to be doing). But I am not abel to affect this envelope using the pedal.

I haven't used this pedal in a few years, but I'm pretty darn sure it wasn't like this back then. Ideas?

Turns out there were half a dozen such envelope lines in there. I suspect I was messing with effect settings with the write enabled turned on. Anyway, the track was good and messed up.

Because simply copying the clip to a new track didn't work, I went in to PRV and tried copying individual notes instead. That didn't work either, UNTIL... I copied only SOME of the notes to the new track from PRV, then some more, and some more, until eventually the whole track was copied, piece by piece. Ugh.

I still don't really know how it got so screwed up, but lesson learned: remember to turn off the W.

It's not that, nope. Now that I zoom in on the clip I see a whole bunch of envelope lines on the clip in addition to my regular volume envelope which is separate. The lines extend beyond the clips and therefore seem to be track related.

I decided to see if I could just duplicate the track and copy the clip to the new track and maybe the problem would go away. But when I try to drag the clip to the new track, it wants to move the clips from ALL tracks, as if they were all selected. And if I simply delete the clip, everything in the project is deleted, including Arranger sections. This now looks like the file is corrupted, but I'm hoping this behavior is an indicator of something recognizable to someone here.