Starship Krupa

This forum is for Cakewalk by BandLab.

I can't afford Omnisphere, so I use Hybrid 3. It's about 1/100th the price.

You can still exchange your dollars for gold if you want to.

I'm now on day 2 of trying to punch in an organ part, an 8 bar chorus, one-handed block chords. Loop recording multiple takes of MIDI has been a fraught process for me since I first tried it with Cakewalk, but I figured I have a lot more experience with the program now, so I'd give it a try. This is a screenshot of part of the results of this attempt. I'm not going to talk about the territory around this clip looking like the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, that's for another time, after the combatants have had a chance to heal. I just want to focus on this one clip, which is indicated inside the red ellipse: This clip is part of one of a dozen or so takes. It's in a "selected" state. none of the other lanes are solo'd, but the track itself is. Over in the Inspector, you can see that I've set the foreground to orange and the background to blue. My issue with this clip is that I can't get it to play sound no matter what I try. "K" or right-click to mute/unmute, no go. Soloing the lane, nope. It. Just. Won't. Sound. There's not another clip on top of it or underneath it, I know to check for that. It's just sitting there by itself, with notes in it that won't play. I can play the onscreen keyboard and my MIDI controller and it makes a sound, I can un mute the clips in adjacent lanes and they will play, but just not this one for whatever reason. Notice it looks weird for a non-muted clip in the Mercury theme: the background is correct, it's the light grey that indicates a selected clip, but the MIDI data/events are plain white. In its selected state the data should have the foreground color. Unselected, it should obey both color settings. If I hit "K" to mute it, it takes on the look of other muted clips, but in its (supposedly) un-muted state, the color ain't right. Any ideas, what may have caused this, did I put it in some known locked state by accident? This is unfortunately characteristic of my life with MIDI in Cakewalk: it usually goes smoothly (except for the weird loop recording/clip behavior), but about 33% of the time I lose an hour or more to "this one thing," which is sometimes a MIDI track and a synth track that have stopped communicating and nothing I do will bring them back together so I wind up saving the synth's settings as a preset, then deleting it and adding it back, or somehow during the process of recording and editing I end up with an extra clip entirely overlapping and hiding another clip, or I can't get the editing cursor to grab the edge of the clip or change to the tool I want, or something that brings my project to a halt while I untangle the ball of yarn. It could be 100% pilot error, but I'd at least like to know what I'm doing wrong.

That's strange, as if there's some spurious automation. Are you using an external control surface?

I've been writing up a list of suggestions for beginners, and I think defining a goal is important. What am I going for with this? That's why the pop culture vibe works for me: I want it to look like the dashboard of a sports car, or a favorite album cover, or an anime franchise. Picking something that already has a color scheme that I find appealing. Along with that comes defining half a dozen colors and making a note of their hex numbers. Racing Green is comparatively easy in that regard, it's 3 shades of green, Tungsten dark brown, and black. It was once I got away from my menus being light text on a virtually black background that things got way stickier. If your menu images and borders are light grey or dark, you can choose a single contrast color and be done with it. If on the other hand your menus are purple, blue, or yellow, then you need to find a color that's readable on that, which ain't always easy. You always want to have that list of colors at hand for when you find yet another UI element that needs to be changed to fit your theme. Otherwise, you wind up eyeballing it, which can result in inconsistency.

TBProAudio make a freeware loudness meter that is a powerhouse, dpMeter5. There's also one in the Meldaproduction FreeFX Bundle. I'm trying to understand this process. When you say you tried using the "W" feature, do you mean you tried to write automation for EQ and Maximizer parameters in real time, but your computer couldn't handle it? It sounds like you're doing might also be accomplished with track freezing? Maybe not, I'm not sure exactly why you need to take the files outside Cakewalk then bring them back in to do this.

(note: I'm not using the metronome and there are also 0 count-in measures set, so I'm pretty certain that's not the issue) Scenario is that I'm trying to punch in a chorus, recording a sustained block chord organ part to MIDI. The chorus begins at measure 19 so I set my punch-in to 19:01:000. Chorus ends at measure 29, so I set my punch-out to 30:01:000 to give myself a bit of overlap if necessary. I'm also looping it, and set my loop points to 17:01:000 and 30:01:000. Starting early so that I can drop into the groove and ending late in case I need to overlap. What's happening is that I start playing, but my playing doesn't start getting recorded until I get a full measure into the chorus. What I suspect is causing this is that I'm playing sustained notes and am rushing (see "not using the metronome" above), so starting them before the punch-in. Although I can hear notes sounding, my note-ons aren't getting recorded; it's not until I lift and go to the next chord that it sees note-ons. Sound likely? If that's the issue, let this function as a public service announcement: when punching in a MIDI performance, set your punch point a quarter note or so ahead of where you think you're going to start playing so that sustained notes don't get lost.

Perhaps not though, I have a memory that it was completely eliminated a couple of years back and then was returned for the Smart and Move tools after protests from the userbase. I don't remember why it's only for those two tools, of if there was a reason.

Something that has long bothered me is how when I have View/Show Clip Outlines enabled in the Piano Roll View, there would be shading for clips, but no indication where one clip left off and the other started. By accident, I discovered a way to tell clips on the same track apart from each other. It may be obvious to others, but it took me 3 years of using this program to stumble on it, so maybe not everyone knows. First, ain't this lovely? That's a single track with the clips showing up in different colors. Great for working with linked clips or just to know where one leaves off and the other starts. How to do it? It's the Inspector. Just select the clip you want to color, open the Inspector, click on the "Clip" tab at the top, and choose a Background color. The background color you choose for each clip will show up in the Piano Roll View. That's all there is to it. It may look a little different on your screen depending on whether you're using a custom theme. My themes use dark backgrounds for selected clips. I hope this helps someone, it's really helped me with keeping track of clips in the PRV. It also helps distinguish them in Track View. Foreground color will change the color of the data, or events in the clips but only in Track View.

They do look effn' cool, and that's a good thing for when someone's looking over your shoulder and wondering what that intriguing DAW is. Not surprising for someone as into CbB theming as I am, I'm really into how visuals can be inspiring, and this does it. For anyone wondering how to set their colors up, drop into the UI Themes subforum and see what we've worked out with Custom Color sets. Custom Colors is the only way to change the vertical lines in Track View, so it's important and powerful. The standard lines are too faint for my taste.

BTW @Glenn Stanton, I'm kinda interested to hear what "Watch All The Longtower" sounds like. Makes me wonder if you have a song called "Rock From The Third Sun."

I think you mean "set Now Time" in Cakewalk terminology. I'm with you on this. The behavior has changed a bit over the years, but I'm still reflexively clicking down in the whitespace with the wrong tool. I'm not sure what the rationale is for limiting it to the Smart Tool and Move Tool. I'm just as likely (if not more) to want to position the Now Time when I'm using the Select, Edit, and Draw Tools, so why not?

Yellow Submarine has been updated with more fun. More round buttons!

EVA 01 has been updated with round buttons (images are from Yellow Submarine, which has been similarly updated):