Starship Krupa

If I wanted to do this, I'd probably go with the second option, automate the reverb mix (or send if you are using the reverb as a send effect on more than one track) on a single track. Which is not to say that your first method isn't valid. It does seem like it would be more complex. Another way to do it might be to split your track into clips and put the clips in two different tracks as necessary, but I still think automating the reverb depth is the way to go.

Mod Filter is a DXi effect, so in order to use it in another host, the host must be able to use DXi effects. AFAIK, the only host other than Cakewalk that still supports them is REAPER. Live does not. Depending on what you're doing with it, there are several freeware motion filters. Check the Favorite Freeware FX topic in this forum. My favorite is Audiomodern's Filterstep. FKFX Influx is another one that can get some really crazy sounds. The MeldaProduction FreeFX Bundle contains more modulation plug-ins than I can remember at the moment, MComb is my favorite of the filter plug-ins. Moreover, the bundle is something I think nobody should be without. You'll see once you install it. Several of the plug-ins are IMO, best in class, despite being free. MCompressor will teach you more about how to set up a compressor. Although fully-functional as-is, the bundle can be upgraded for a fee. If you wait a few months for one of their 50% off everything sales and combine that discount with the $10 credit you get for signing up for their newsletter, you can get the upgrade for about $11. There are 37 plug-ins total in this bundle. Kilohearts Essentials is another free bundle that nobody should be without. Contains multiple modulation and filter plug-ins in addition to bread-and-butter FX and utilities. Over 30 great FX. About the bundles, although I own licenses for over 400 effect plug-ins, if I sat down at any DAW and wished to produce and/or mix any genre of music, give me those two bundles and I would not feel constrained. Crazy breakdown FX for EDM? Check. Great-sounding and easy-to-use dynamics and EQ? Check. Deep features and modulation options? Check. So there ya go, ask a question, get 75 new plug-ins for free. Also, doesn't Ableton Live come with some crazy modulation filters of its own? Lastly, you need not say goodbye to Cakewalk. It can still be useful even if it's no longer your primary DAW. More than one user on this forum (including industry legend Craig Anderton) likes to compose electronic or loop-based music in Live, then export the tracks to Cakewalk for final mixdown. Not an uncommon workflow. In comparison with Cakewalk's Console, you may find Ableton's mixer....less capable.

Are you 100% sure about needing a registered version of Melodyne for this to work? My understanding was that although CbB doesn't come with a license for Melodyne Essentials (as SONAR did), only a 30-day demo, the monophonic audio-to-MIDI conversion feature still works after the demo has expired. None of the other Melodyne features will work, only this one. The Cakewalk Reference Guide makes no reference to needing a registered version of Melodyne for this to work. I can't test this, because I do have licenses for Melodyne Essentials. Anyway, I agree that Drum Replacer is a better option for replacing drum sounds.

Give Acon Digital Multiply a try in CbB and note the difference in sound between the VST2 and VST3 versions. Be sure to turn your monitors down, because the last time I tried it, the VST3 version seemed to be feeding back on itself. Then it jams the meter to full scale and goes silent. Mixcraft, which is otherwise known for being one of the most bug-free DAW's on the market, took a long time before most VST3's worked properly once they started supporting them. I stopped even trying to run them for a while. So "how they communicate with the host" seems to be pretty crucial.

Oops! Sorry. Pot=potentiometer=variable resistor. Most continuously adjustable controls are pots (with digital encoders next most common). It's used more for rotary controls. Volume pot, tone pot, treble pot, bias pot, pan pot. The straight line ones in analog mixing consoles (faders) are also potentiometers. Tiny ones meant for making precise adjustments are "trim pots."

Become known in the neighborhood as a person who's interested in fixing up old instruments! One time, my neighbor across the street had about 3/4 of an old CB700 drum kit out on his lawn, ready to be dumpstered. He knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to haul it off instead. No snare, one really ratty cymbal stand, no kick pedal, no throne, but it had a bee-yootiful Rogers "Big R" hi hat stand (same model Bonham preferred). Not knowing anything about putting together a drum kit, I figured I'd fix it up and donate it to a school or something. Another neighbor donated an ancient Japanese marching snare. I started setting it up, got various parts from a local used instrument store and Craig's List, some Zildijian ZBT cymbals....and started playing it. Got completely and thoroughly hooked on playing drums. Cut new bearing edges, rewrapped the shells.... Fixing up that kit turned me into a drummer! It's now my favorite instrument. I later got a sweet vintage Slingerland set on Craig's List and fixed that up as well. Kept the CB's as a gigging kit, but gave it to a friend a few months ago in preparation for moving. It's found a good home in his studio and will never see a dumpster.

You must have missed my post. That's exactly what I suggested.

I still keep my Mixcraft license current. I was a beta tester for the product before I mostly switched to CbB. At the time, Mixcraft was still lagging behind CbB as far as features, and CbB's mixer was love at first sight. It's straightforward and a great DAW for someone just starting with DAW's. Their commitment to shipping a quality bug-free product is amazing. Good forum, too. Given how much Mixcraft has caught up to the industry leaders, I see it as pretty close competition for Sonar. It has had some slick features that Sonar lacks for quite some time now, most notably the integrated samplers. Their Performance Panel is also better integrated than Matrix, allows for direct recording to cells, etc. Every plug-in gets a little meter that helps a lot with effect gain staging. Routing a MIDI track to multiple Vi's is dead easy. AFAIK, though, there's still no way to collapse take lanes, so if you're a multiple take monster, things can get cluttered pretty quickly. And the mixer, while it's made strides, is still no match for Console.

Try the Ctrl key. BTW, when switching tools, if you use the F keys to do it you can hold down the function key (in this case F8) to switch to the tool you want, and if you don't release it until you want to switch back, it will automatically switch back to whatever tool you were using before (in this case the Smart Tool).

This is more like it, I think:

I finally sorted out what's going on with the graphics resources for the older Cakewalk plug-ins. My confusion came from having the same plug-ins installed in two different locations. These plug-ins just pull their bitmaps from the \resources folder inside the folder the plug-ins' .dll file resides in. You just have to take care that your plug-in is actually loading from that location. Without further ado, here's a work in progress, Cakewalk Sonar-ized Boost 11:

I think the term "underlying principles" would be a better one, but "Theory" is the one we're stuck with. I have rock 'n' roller friends who write songs, have made albums, etc., who claim that they don't know "theory." Then I point out to them that they can hear "bad" notes and tell when a chord doesn't fit. And that's "theory." "Theory" is just a way of writing that down and being able to talk about it. It's the nuts and bolts of what we can already hear, what we know instinctively. It's the same as what native English speakers are taught in English class. Breaking down sentence structures and all that. People learn to speak English "by ear," then we learn the theory later. Even in literature class, with themes and the like, if someone tells a long story, it will have a theme, a protagonist, etc. without the storyteller being consciously aware that they're doing that. For me it's not a matter of whether learning theory "does" hinder creativity, but rather "can" it. I have also known some musicians who had a hard time improvising because they were thinking too hard about whether what they were going to play fit whatever rules they had learned. How exactly you're supposed to play across changes and so forth. When I write lyrics, even if I start out trying to just free verse it, it always ends up having a metre and rhyme scheme. I put this down to learning those things in English class in high school. It's nuts, there were decades between when I learned that and when I started to write lyrics, but it's there. Does it hinder my creativity? Maybe. Some part of my brain is sorting out the words and fitting them into a metre and rhyme scheme. It goes the other way, too. I can improvise like crazy on keyboards because I know the scales better. Once I figure out what key the song is in, I just rip modally, playing whatever feels good. Just let go and don't play any bum notes. Harder on guitar because after all these decades, I still haven't memorized the fretboard higher than fret 5, and haven't committed the scales to muscle memory.

How I hate to hear this. That is the death of a business district, people who repair things are rare enough without having to face things like this. Curious, though, did you ever visit 3 Tracks when it was thriving? Keith is a great repair guy (and the sweetest dude) who learned his chops doing final QA and setup at the National factory in San Luis Obispo. He had a lot of cool old oddball guitars and amps in the store along with the classic vintage and bargain newer stuff. Just the kind of store that I love to browse.

I'll not get deeply into it because forum rules about politics. I'll just say that I call myself a "redneck liberal," which means that while I look for progressive solutions, I also have a low tolerance for nonsense, whether it comes in from the right or the left. And district attorneys who don't do their job is nonsense.

A lot of good advice here. I'll add my .02. A big mistake I made when I was learning full barre chords was that I thought I had to treat my index finger like a capo, holding down all 6 strings. Obviously, once you think about it, you don't need to fret behind the strings that are already fretted by your other fingers. So for instance, with an E shape barre, you only really need to use your index on the low E and the high B and E. This lets you curve your index finger, which is much stronger than when it's flat. Using a bit of @Byron Dickens pulling back with your arm muscles becomes more effective, too. I'm now at the point where I can play without planting my thumb. Of course I do use my thumb, but my hand doesn't cramp up from having to use my finger muscles and wrist tendons to clamp so hard. The other thing is, yes, take it to a pro and have it set up properly for your playing style. A good luthier will watch you play for a couple of minutes in order to see how hard you pick and strum. People who play harder need higher action, people with a light touch on the right hand can drop it lower. I'm not a basher, so my guitars are all light action. I've found that nut height is often overlooked in favor of bridge height. A good test is to capo at the 1st fret. If the guitar becomes much easier to play, especially campfire chords, then your nut is higher than it needs to be. Make sure your setup person pays attention to this. Last, the book that helped me the most in understanding guitar setup and repair was Dan Erlewine's. I recommend it for any guitarist, even those who don't want to do their own setups. Just understanding what's going on is valuable for communicating with your guitar tech. And there are some things, like setting intonation on an electric when you change string gauges, that IMO, every guitarist should know how to do anyway. As mentioned by others in this topic, if a guitar sounds good it IS good, no matter how or where it was built and how much it cost. Case in point: an anonymous neighbor of mine dropped off a CHEAP old Asian-made classical on my porch, complete with musty-smelling gig bag. It's so cheap that the headstock decal is a foil sticker. The frets were actually pointy on top and serrated. The bridge is held on with a pair of wood screws whose pointy tips I can feel underneath. The kind of sub-beginner instrument that used to put people off from learning guitar. But it actually sounded okay, so I leveled and polished the frets, put on a set of really nice tuners that a friend had laying around, took the bridge down, and it's an amazing guitar. Stays in tune, doesn't have the cardboard box tone you'd expect, records really well, being a gut string, it's easier to play than my steel strings. And rescue guitars are like rescue doggies: they return the love and are eager to please. If you think I'm kidding about that, I am not at all. I grew up reading Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang and watching The Love Bug, and have experienced it enough times to know that it's for real. My favorite electric is a Squier Affinity Telecaster (absolute bottom of the line) that when I bought it for $15, was literally in pieces. Some dip5hit had obviously tried to smash it on stage, but y'know, if you try to smash a Tele on stage, what you end up with is a stage with holes in it. The neck and bridge and control plate had all been taken off the body and the bridge pickup was dead. Tuners were missing. Multiple chunks of the thick poly finish missing from the edges. I put it back together, put some Schallers on it that I had laying around, a Mighty-Mite AlNiCo in the bridge, laid some Krazy Glue in the edge dings to smooth them out, and good lord. I'm not lying, I have at least four friends (I've lost track of the actual number, to tell the truth) who have told me "if you ever want to get rid of that guitar, tell me immediately." And they are all guys who are into really nice US-made vintage guitars. When people pick it up and play it, they get this look in their eyes....

I was recently stunned to learn through a mutual friend that Keith Kurciewski, who is a good friend of mine (used to live around the block from me in Alameda before he got a job with National and then started his own store), is shutting down 3Tracks and has already moved back to California. Who the hell moves from OR to CA? Then when I found out the reason, that St. Johns has become plagued with crime, I was even more stunned. I drove up to PDX 8 years ago to be there and help him out at the store's grand opening, and I though St. John's was a beautiful, charming area that was up and coming, with him moving in and a record store opening across the street. Now he tells me that the record store had to close due to multiple instances of vandalism and burglary, and he's shutting down 3 Tracks! I don't know if you remember, but several years back, there was a break-in attempt at his store that his amp repair guy (my former housemate and protege) fended off by brandishing a socket wrench. It made the local nightly TV news. Who did you find to do the work on your Gibby? Is St. John's the district you're referring to? People are placing the blame for this stuff on the local DA being as useless as bewbies on a boar hog. Me, I bought cheap guitars from Craig's List and learned how to do my own refrets.

More like "oh for the love of Pete, look how many freakin' plug-ins I have." 🙄 At this point, I don't buy mixing plug-ins unless it's to toss Saverio a few bucks. His VHS is the only one of his I use regularly, just for the EQ curve, not the room emulation. The only effect plug-ins that I'm interested in at this point are sound design-y ones. There are ones in the MeldaProduction MComplete bundle that I haven't even tried yet.

Indeed! 😄

Bought it to go with the rest of the HoRNet plug-ins I seldom use.

I'd say check the setting on that low limit pot.

And it seems even Avid have backed down and they now offer a perpetual license for PT. Studio One has a subscription option, Studio One+, which bundles Studio One Pro with a variety of other products and services. Which leaves Audition as the only DAW I can find that is subscription-only. $23 a month. I have to wonder if anyone other than people who have full CC subscriptions uses Audition.

Okay, I get it. Sorry for misunderstandings. I was going by the industry definition which I now realize that not everyone knows. I used to be a software QA engineer (Macromedia/Adobe, Berkeley Systems, Informix, Learning Company and others) and "feature complete" is a specific term that developers use. Noel is speaking in Developer. Here's the definition of "feature complete" from the Oxford English Dictionary: "denoting a version of a piece of software having all the functionality intended for the final version but requiring some improvements and fixes before release." (emphasis mine) From the Wikipedia article on Software release life cycle: "A feature-complete (FC) version of a piece of software has all of its planned or primary features implemented but is not yet final due to bugs, performance or stability issues. This occurs at the end of alpha testing in development. Usually, feature-complete software still has to undergo beta testing and bug fixing, as well as performance or stability enhancement before it can go to release candidate, and finally gold status." Sonar is currently past alpha and into beta, but it's not into release candidate phase. (The Early Access thing that used to be a part of CbB releases used "release candidate" versions.) I know all this is coming off as pedantic, but I guess that's how "old Euthymia" is sometimes. 😄 I really just don't want everyone to be all worried about the upcoming Sonar release and jumping to conclusions. I think/hope that BandLab are savvy enough to price Sonar where it belongs in the current market and not restrict it to subscriptions. That's all.

I forgot to mention: they're quite good. 😊

"Feature complete" ain't "release version" A program in development can have all of its features in place but still not be considered ready to release. Some of those features might not work 100% correctly. This Backstage Pass thing is a sneak peek. Probably also testing the waters as far as pricing. You remember my handle from the old forum! 🥰 I'm not that old am I? Is 63 old? Well, as you say, I do try to look good.😄 I did actually know about the Backstage Pass preview release thingie, I just don't consider it a true release. It's a preview. There's been no press or announcement about Sonar being released. Or has there? I haven't seen anything other than this sneak peek thing. My agenda is that I want to ease the panic and FUD. Wait for an official announcement that Sonar has been released and that licensing will be under this or that terms for this or that amount of money. Then we can raise the pitchforks if it's subscription only and/or you have to pay for a bunch of BandLab services you don't need. If that happens, my pitchfork will be waving along with the rest of them. I hope BandLab realize sooner than later that they need to nail down the pricing. Keeping us all in the dark ain't doing them any favors.

For my fellow fans of AIR's Hybrid 3 (best money I've ever spent on a virtual instrument), Sounds2Inspire have updated their Hybrid Ambience expansion pack. Best of all: it's still free: https://sounds2inspire.com/hybridambience/ As much as I love Hybrid 3, it's considered kinda old, so to see a soundware developer giving it some attention warms my heart.