Mr No Name

here's a zip file of some nice wav cymbals I acquired this morning in a sample pack, sound very nice, bit less like generated white noise, may be one there that will do the job. https://file.io/Tw1QOBmGKWVY

I have just read in another thread that it is now on a "free subscription" where you have to renew it on a monthly basis, have the people at bandlab nothing better to do than carrot and sticking people into subscription modelling? why don't they just charge an amount of money and let people have it as it is with no more updates as they want to make it obsolete. what will happen when people maybe are travelling or doing some other thing where they forget about daws or laptops for more than a month. not a great strategy imo.

They are giving away a VCA compressor for free if you log into your account, ends on 31st, an emulation of a dbx 160 $150 from April 1st

they don't sound harsh just a bit " non defined"

That makes alot more sense now with the rest of the track in there for context, nice track sounds very good, can see some long haired rocker shaking his hair about to that. cymbals sound a bit washy in places, only thing I would say.

would you mind putting the whole song on for context?

Ok, I've had a more critical listen to your track, imo, the mix of the drums is pretty good, the bass could cut through a tiny bit better, I made some notes, Start is very good 52secs - 1 min ? 1 min onwards - drum hits need sharper transients, attack not fast enough,bit flabby on timing with bass 2 mins on, drum hits sound faster, sound nice 2.20 some timing issues 2.50 nice feel 3.00 on, little bit off on timing, cymbals too splashy 3.25 on nice groove, 3.40 on nice groove, 3.53 , flabby kick note 4.10 on, cymbals to splashy, snare not timed well 4.30 on , nice ending.

I don't play drums only programme them and edit in daws, but as someone who listens to a lot of music, the drums sound unnatural as if the timing doesn't make sense and doesn't follow the bassline, it may be that it will fit better with the rest of the music you had in the track, removing the other instruments may have made the timings sound strange. ? that would be a very difficult thing to programme in MIDI so fair play for getting it that good.

To be more constructive, try messing with the " groove " tool or the quantization. It's probably alot more difficult to programme complicated drum patterns like that in midi than it is to play it live.

To be polite If I had a band and that drummer came for an audition, he/she wouldn't get in the band.

The thing is they said it would be still available to use, but I have a bad feeling about it, I've had to reactivate twice in a month, used to be only after an update. Hopefully It will stay at once a month, but being the cynic that I am, I have a feeling they will squeeze it into shorter re-activation windows.

I have noticed that there are frequent requests for reactivation for Cakewalk by bandlab, this has to be done within a certain time window, I am assuming if this is not done Cakewalk will be unusable with no way to reactivate moving forward. Is this the game plan to make the free version of Cakewalk obsolete and get the number of users of it to zero, in order to move to a paid version. I can see a scenario where these requests for re-activation become more frequent and the window to do it in becomes shorter, people who don't constantly use the DAW, who might only open it up once a week of so, may get caught out by this and have their "copy " of the DAW rendered unusable and their projects lost? Would seem like a sneaky and underhanded thing to do. Any thoughts on this?

Someone seems to be on the case inventing a similar idea where you can hum your music into a daw and turn it into music via MIDI, like a reverse Shazam. Interesting stuff. https://vochlea.com Produce entire songs using your voice Dubler 2 turns your voice into a real-time MIDI controller, letting you create music you dream of. Sing, beatbox, hum or whistle your ideas and Dubler 2 will translate them into MIDI notes, allowing you to write music at the speed of thought.

here you are folks, just incase you thought I was totally crackers. He says it's done by "AI" but it seems to me to be voice activated MIDI, which is a nice invention. another 3 years it will be in every DAW (maybe)

Have you not seen this new thing where Barry who can't sing to save his life, now can sing over his songs, out of tune, presses a button, 30 seconds later he sounds like Barbara Streisand. There you go, et voila.

It means if you do any singing into the daw while recording a midi track the singing will be recorded onto the midi track aswell as the midi information, I assume the singing will be in midi also, which is amazing seeing as midi stands for "musical instrument digital interface" and has nothing to do with singing. ?

subscription for a daw is stupid unless you run a recording studio and are able to deduct it as a business expense, anyone else who does it is a moron. imo.

you will own nothing and be happy.

You are right of course a million people have different things connected by usb at the same time, interfaces as monitoring devices and midi devices as inputs, but if the input signal is not recognised or set incorrectly in the preferences you won't hear anything on the output, an output of a silent or incorrect input won't work..

some driver installation may be necessary or it might install them automatically.

plus you have your output as speakers and trying to listen on headphones, whole thing looks abit un-orgainised, I would try turning off your laptop, disconnecting your equipment, replugging in your piano by usb, leave the interface unplugged, and see if your piano shows in your output preferences as yamaha and use that with you headphones connected to your laptop or keyboard.

if you see that button on the end that looks like a radar ? (input echo) 2 across from the "S" button ? that should be lit up, press it see if anything happens.

.

you would be better with your set up using midi cables from your piano to your interface, and usb from your interface to laptop, I see your interface has no midi ins/outs ? also your piano has no 1/4 jack output to connect to the interface? if you have both your interface and piano connected to the laptop by usb cables it won't work? you may have to connect the piano by usb to the laptop direct and use yamaha drivers (it should then show in your settings in cakewalk as an output - yamaha ) and use the headphone socket of the laptop? looks like a mismatch of piano and interface possibly ? or it would be better to use the headphone direct output of the piano.