Starship Krupa

I’ve built more than one song around a pattern that came with Break Tweaker. Same thing, I guess. It’s just my own ignorance about how things are done these days. I didn’t know that buying just the patterns was that big a thing. Now I have a lot of questions that are probably best answered by just going to Airbit. I have no disrespect for any method used to create music. It’s the end product that counts most to me. We’ve probably all known that guy who practiced 10 hours a day and could run scales at lightning speed whose music sounded horrible and that nobody wanted to play with. I often think that if I could let go of the need to come up with every little aspect of the music myself and use more loops and sampled material that my music would be better. I mean, if I am trying to produce modern music, I might want to learn some more modern techniques, right? The people I most want to emulate don’t write or play every single note. I’m continually stunned when I see breakdowns of what samples were used in songs I love, like from Daft Punk or LCD Soundsystem or Air. I went to see Air live and they played everything live. I guess they learned to play what was in the samples. One of the best shows I’ve ever been to, BTW. I guess what remains most important to me is how to create a given sound. If that’s via hunting for loops and beats, that’s what I have to do.

I get what you’re saying, and much respect. I wish I knew more. The more theory I’ve learned, the easier it’s made things. I still sometimes forget whether Every Good Boy Does Fine is bottom to top or the other way round and I never have figured out exactly what the word “harmony” means (I’m sure that I know it but not by name) except the thing with people singing at the same time. I think it’s the part of theory that has to do with how multiple simultaneous notes go together? There’s probably a Rick Beato video about it. There’s so much baggage around the term “musician,” I kind of squirm when it gets applied to me. It sounds like a title rather than a description. I make music. I play drums, guitar, bass, keyboards and sing. I’ve led rock bands where I wrote most of the songs. I’ve created orchestral pieces that I would like to have played by a small ensemble. But I’d still rather not be called a “musician” unless there is an attractive woman nearby whom I would like to get to know better. Don’t want to be any kind of “ist.” Guitar player will do fine. Doesn’t work for drums, though. (I think I was exposed to snobbery around those terms in my early youth and decided to leave them for others. My early youth occurred during the heyday of fusion and I don’t believe I’ve ever fully recovered. My later youth occurred during the heyday of punk, which was healing, but perhaps not completely.) Fortunately, Kids These Days who make music on their laptops found a clever way to dodge bullets from people who see “musician” as a title rather than a description: they call themselves “producers.” Which baffles and angers enough older folks to make the younger folks happy and is maybe a more accurate use of the word than when it applied to Phil Spector and Tony Visconti. I know many people who can play guitar, sing, even write songs who know diddly about music theory (except of course they do, they just don’t know they do) and are completely helpless in front of a DAW. They look at it like you’re showing them the C++ IDE. Actually, being a musician (squirm) of a certain age, I know more people who can play traditional instruments and sing than I do people who can operate DAW software on even the most basic level. It gives me and their kids a shared interest to bond over, but believe me, I’d love to know more musicians over the age of 45 (my cutoff for “now that you’ve stopped pretending that you’re going to become a rock star we can talk”) who are into working with music software. It’s the reason this forum is important to me. I see “the DAW” as another instrument unto itself. Your skills can be as rudimentary as arming tracks, hitting Record, then hitting Play, or as advanced as creating entire soundtracks and albums from start to finish that never leave “the box,” that use processing and editing techniques that don’t exist in the physical world. Its definitely something that takes plenty of time and effort to get good at. To the point that it’s considered difficult to switch to another main piece of software after you’ve been using one for a while. And there’s always more you can learn. I tell my friends that just like guitar, almost anyone can learn it, but it will take some time and effort, and getting really good takes years. It’s fairly easy to get to the point where you can record voice and guitar, but from there the adventure expands, and it can expand to the point where the software becomes your main instrument. But there’s no term for “DAWist,” unless that’s “producer” (curr rather than arch).

Yes, there will be a Control Bar module with a picture of a drum and a button with a $ sign (€, £, ¥, etc. depending on localized version). The module will include an algorithm that will check your beat for freshness against a vast database. I make EDM and I cringe when I see (and especially) hear it. Probably because of having endured so many pinhead poseurs in the past quarter century saying “I make beats (“yo” optional).” I do understand that the term “producer” has now shifted closer to its literal meaning, which is amusing because you can now hear geezers saying things like “he says he’s a ‘producer,’ what does THAT mean?” As if they understood what it used to mean. At least today’s “producers” actually intend to produce music. When I “produced” a single for my friends’ band 35 years ago, I mostly sat in the control room and mediated disputes. A valuable role, no doubt. “3rd party who makes creative suggestions/decisions and otherwise facilitates creation of a recorded work?” I guess that was it. I’m not even sure what “beats” are in this context. A percussion and bass pattern? A loop that only has percussion and bass? How many measures do you need to have before a “beat” is ready for market? Is it the minimal bass and percussion beds that people rap over? I come up with a (drum part, bass part) beat for every song (except for the ambient drone pieces), often before I come up with anything else. It’s hard to imagine stopping at that point, deciding that I was done and that it was ready for consumption by anyone, but I guess I’m not widely enough versed in modern techniques at this point.

Since the motherboard acts no differently when I remove the CPU entirely, and computer issues are so seldom “bad CPU,” I doubt the CPU is shot. It would be my first bad CPU in 34 years of building and servicing PC’s. Not impossible, though. The board doesn’t even beep when I have a little beep speaker plugged into the header. If it is, the box of components the guy sent also included an i7-6800K that I can put in. Based on my Googling and what Jim said about them, the takeaway is probably going to be “I will steer clear of ASRock motherboards in the future.” Pretty much every thread I found where someone was having this issue ended with “got a replacement and it booted right up.” One person loosened their cooler a little and it booted, which implies a motherboard defect (bad solder joint), and it wouldn’t surprise me if they had issues with that board down the road.

I ordered a Gigabyte UD (ultra durable) motherboard on eBay. After I did, I tried this one again and it’s still hosed. (Based on my empirical observation that sometimes the act of buying a replacement will bring the dead one back to life)

Questions about what will suffice are hard to answer without knowing more about what you want to do with Cakewalk. Strictly audio? If what you do is record audio and then mix down using a sparse number of the FX that come with Cakewalk, that task is not beyond a Core 2 Quad system with 8G of RAM and a 500G 7200RPM spinner. If you’re doing professional scoring with multiple soft synths, sampled orchestral libraries, fancy sound design FX, maybe a gen 7 i7 with 32G RAM and a couple of SSD’s will just get you in the door. A savvy user can stretch requirements by freezing instrument tracks and FX-heavy audio tracks. That turns them into audio tracks, which Cakewalk can read with little overhead. It really comes down to how much processing you need to do at the same time. Cakewalk can record and play back a LOT of audio tracks at one time on a low end system. On that same low end system, a handful of fancy FX or synths might bring it to its knees. You can also take care to work with plug-ins that are easier on the system. IZotope’s tend to be resource hogs, Meldaproduction’s tend to be more efficient. The Sonitus fx and ProChannel modules that come with Cakewalk are very efficient.

I abused substances enough to have to stop 32 years ago, but stop I did!

Yeah, that's what I fear. Some surface mount component or other probably cracked its solder joint. My guess would be something that causes the power supply to fail to get a "power okay" signal back from the board. I guess it's a writeoff. I can get a nice used board on eBay for a little over a hundy, so it's all good anyway. Yesterday's technology today! I'll see if I have an old PSU around I can sacrifice to an experiment: pull the CPU and trick the PSU into coming on anyway and see if I can let out some smoke. 😄 BTW, for the "latest and greatest" crew, Intel have announced that Gen. 14 is due before the end of the year. Make room in your dustbins.

I think you meant this in a humorous way, but there is much truth in it. Pressures of fame, pressures of having to keep delivering the goods, access to plenty of cash and willing hangers-on are all more likely to send someone to drugsville. And if you're famous, you'll have the gigs and naturally end up traveling a lot, and the more miles traveled, by whatever means (we've lost a lot of musicians to motor vehicle accidents, too), the greater the chance of catastrophic failure. Add to that the fact that big timers don't usually fly commercial, relying on pilots and equipment that may be less squared away, and you get the recipe for the plane crash deaths (I forgot to mention Jim Croce and Aliyah). Sakamoto is the only one on my list who bought it on a commercial flight (along with 519 other people, the deadliest plane crash in history).

I have a vintage JL Cooper MIDI merger/patchbay that I am looking to sell. PM if interested.

The singer has some real talent and star power. The rhythm section are solid as a rock, despite not having the in-ear click track so many drummers use these days. Despite the multiple clams he dropped, I really liked the guitarist due to his stage presence and fashion sense. D'you think he's ever watched any Joy Division and New Order videos? He was stoic, never winced at any of his f-ups. Needs to un-deck that whammy bar. Wonder where they all are now....still playing, I hope.

It was a feature request, not a request for a workaround. Posted in the forum area where we make feature requests. Nobody said that they were going to forego using samplers until BandLab hands us one. We're going to continue to use the same 3rd-party solutions (Sitala, TX16W) that we've been using. I'd use a sampler more often if there were a native one, but when I want to use a sampler, I use a sampler. Whoa. This is an idea that hadn't occurred to me. An excellent idea, an essential feature, and one that I doubt that the other DAW's have. At least not all of them. I think that the BandLab collection of samples and loops is a feature that's neglected by most Cakewalk users.

While that statement is true, it is also true that this has probably been the most requested feature for a long time (as murat's long list of previous threads suggests). "Use a (3rd-party) VST" is a workaround, not a solution. There are multiple advantages to having an integrated sampler. Mixcraft got two of them (one a pad type and the other a mapped keyboard type) many years ago and at first I thought "meh." Then I put together an '80's Ministry/Lard type piece with newscast samples, and WHOA, the usefulness of this thing became very apparent. Things like being able to right click on a clip and "Send to Sampler," they don't seem that big a deal until you get comfy with them. There's also the important matter of the DAW keeping track of the audio files. Also a sampler that everyone has, so we have the benefit of mutual help on the forums, YouTube and wherever else Cakewalk users trade tips.

That's a nice-sounding demo. I will put Asymmetric on my want list. One thing I like about it is that it doesn't include the usual dozen or more drum kit sounds that I'll never use. Which brings me to: why doesn't A|A|S, with their amazing acoustic modeling engine, have a drum machine? I would TOTALLY use their drum kit sounds in that context. When they come in the soundpacks, it seems too computationally expensive to stick an instance of Player on its own track just to get a snare sound. I suppose I could sample them and build a kit that way, but that seems like a lot of trouble to go to. A velocity sensitive drum machine built around the A|A|S modeling engine, that is something that would definitely interest me. Still haven't found my perfect virtual drum machine.

As always, I would like to mention that Swatches/Player has also been updated with sounds from Asymmetric. And I believe that for the first time, A|A|S' installer is allowing the choice of exactly which formats to install, good news for those of us who are weary of purging our systems of AAX.