Starship Krupa

Event List menu abides still within Cakewalk yet workspace may hide

Those are some great-looking presets. Have you shared them to the Preset Exchange? It occurred to me: for those looking for "air" from the Melda EQ's, I wonder if adding harmonics would accomplish that.

Excellent. Psyched to try it out. Personal Meldaproduction tips: it's hidden in plain sight, but the saturation knob in MEqualizer is one of my favorite saturation effects. It's smooth, not as grainy as I find most saturation FX to be. At about 2:00 it generates the right amount of harmonics without turning fuzzy. Also if you, like me, were starting to get resource drain using their stuff (which is usually resource-friendly), go into the upsampling settings and turn off High Quality Upsampling. Especially in things like compressors and modulators that aren't as likely to generate unwanted aliasing. I set my upsampling to 2X, although I wonder if I even benefit from that with Cakewalk's built-in upsampling. How much upsampling do I need in a well-designed plug-in anyway?

MVocoder is the best vocoder I've tried. I spoke (favorably) of MTurboreverble earlier in the thread. I got MTurboComple as a PB freebie and it is useful (a vintage emulation by and for people who aren't much into vintage emulations). I have the non-MB MRhythmizer and dig diggity dig it. I got MSpectralDelay as a gift when they introduced it, and since then it has been used on exactly none of my tracks because I find it rather unfathomable (but not in a "whoa, that's messed up and cool" sense like Dumpster Fire). The rest of them....haven't tried them. MTurboDelay came with the Essentials bundle, but I've only had that for about 24 hours. My collection of delays is already crazy, so it will need to bring a lot to the table in order to inspire. Many of them are "MB" versions, and their fascination with multiband processing has never caught my imagination. Something that leaps out at me: if you feel you need two different rotary speaker simulations, they are present in the bundle. MRotary and MVintageRotary. I had thought that the rotary speaker itself was by nature a "vintage" effect, but who knows? Why is there no MRotaryMB? Why isn't MVintageRotary called MTurboRotary? Was it because with the much beloved industry workhorse MModernCompressor, they needed something "vintage" to provide balance? The world of Meldaproduction can be as inscrutable as it is comprehensive.

I really like Wavesfactory Trackspacer for this kind of thing. It does what it does so well and so easily that it feels like cheating.

Yes, in the thread I gave you the link for, you'll see a full explanation. The core Cakewalk by BandLab program has all of the features of SONAR Platinum/Professional, only with fewer bundled plug-ins than Platinum had. Your bundled Artist plug-ins will work with Cakewalk by BandLab.

Actually, I believe that the VST spec allows developers to declare the category, which a host can query. Cakewalk is the only program I've seen that bothers to query and sort accordingly.

Cakewalk by BandLab has the feature set that SONAR Professional had, including aux tracks, patch points, and the ProChannel. It has further features that have been added in the past 3 years. It's still supported and in active development. Also, free of charge.

Oh, right, it would be 6 euros. I screwed up the math again. Percentages trip me up sometimes.

If you go there and click on the "Steal" button, you can "underpay" and get a license for a variety of prices from $15 down to $5, also, reportedly, other prices depending on how you answer their question as to why you want to Steal it. Caveat: they say that the "steal" licenses are not eligible for support or future updates. I also don't see a way to upgrade a "stolen" license to the full one. I read that they had a half price sale last Friday 13, but there's no Friday 13 this year. I thought about waiting for a sale, but they'd probably rather have your $10 now than have you waiting for it to drop to that price.

I know we have a separate Deals subforum, and I hope this isn't violating the rules (if it is, mods please remove), but I know that not everyone checks it or knows about it. tl;dr: new users can upgrade your FreeFX bundle for less than $8. I've recommended the Meldaproduction FreeFX bundle many times to people looking for free FX to go with our free DAW. They're great, 37 plug-ins. The upgrade enables features found on their other plug-ins, like scalable UI, native preset system, upsampling, access to modulators and multiparameters for plug-ins that have them. It also removes the little banner at the bottom of the UI. Meldaproduction have an upgrade for the bundle to the "pro" versions, which usually costs 45 euros. This weekend they are having a sale for 60% off all bundles, including the FreeFX bundle. The price to upgrade the FreeFX to pro is 20 euros this weekend. Their other bundles also have the largest price cut I've ever seen them offer. If you are a first time Meldaproduction customer, you can get a credit of 10 euros for signing up for their newsletter. Also, you can use someone's referral code to get 20% off your first order. My code is MELDA1923165. (If you buy the bundle I get exactly 1 euro credit, so I'm not grubbing for free credit with this post. I just think it's a great deal that anyone who uses plug-ins in the FreeFX bundle should jump on.) All together this brings the price down to 6 euros or $7.17.

On my system, the only changes were to Element and adding presets to CLA Echosphere. Live 11? That's crazy. You have to test with Live for heaven's sake.

Yes, maybe not as much as you would like, but if you go into the settings, you can change the colors of all of the UI elements. Also, they have a theme editor like Cakewalk's, but in typical Melda fashion it reportedly takes an engineering degree to master. So there are user-created skins with flat or 3-d knobs and whatnot. I darken my Melda plug-ins to match my green Cakewalk theme and they look much better. The look is an acquired taste, I finally came around to appreciating the no-nonsense functionality of it. If I want gorgeousness on my screen I can always fire up BYOME or a SoundSpot plug-in.

@mibby, once again you are my Meldabud. Because @Shane_B. mentioned his smokin' deal on Mixing Essentials, I checked my account for the upgrades and I can get Essentials for 13 euro. Thanks also to the people on the forum using my code, I happen to have 12 euro credits, so 7 new plug-ins for no cash outlay. Also, for any first timers, I had it wrong in my first message, you get 20% off your order not 10% if you use my code, MELDA1923165. So for instance with the FreeFXBundle upgrade at 20 euros, sign up for the newsletter, get 10 euros, use my code for 20% off your order, that takes the price down to 6 euros or $7.17.

AudioThing Wave Box. I'm still waiting on a good $5-10 deal to pop up. I already have so many "creative distortion" plug-ins, including Waves Berzerk (freebie), iZotope Trash 2 (freebie), W.A. Production Screamo (came in a bundle), Cableguys Drive Shaper (freebie), as well as MBitfun, MWavefolder and MWaveshaper from the Meldaproduction FreeFX Bundle. And so far I haven't done much with any of them. I did get a really great "We Will Rock You" drum bus sound with Screamo, though. It's still in that category of "not sure what I can do with it so I can't know what I like" FX. I'm sure that once I get deeper into NIN-type productions, I will become more acquainted with these. If I start "hearing" that something needs it, I'll reach for Trash first, because it seems like the most comprehensive.

My reply is based on my belief that in order for this to happen, the software would have to either have been sold again to another company or released as open source. It would depend on what they were asking for it, what other options there were in the market at that time, and my level of faith in the ability of the new owners to keep it working properly. Since it would likely be a lower cost option than other comparable software made by companies with larger staffs and marketing budgets, I'd consider it. I imagine it being priced similarly to REAPER and Mixbus and Waveform, and I like it better than REAPER and Mixbus and Waveform, so yeah. If it were priced like it used to be in the SONAR days, up there with comparable versions of Studio One Artist, Cubase, etc. in the multiple hundreds, likely not. I don't have that kind of pocket money to spend on any DAW. This is a hobby. I'd be keeping a close eye on their development practices, though, because I believe that the free subscription allows the developers to focus on quality of code as much as or more than quantity of features. Much as I'm a CbB fanboy, that first version of it, unimproved from SONAR, was too buggy and crashy for me to consider it usable on my system. I was used to Mixcraft, and Acoustica put out a very stable bug-free product. I can't be sitting there watching the screen go white and panicking about when my last save was. Noel and company got on that stuff impressively fast, though.

They're having updates as often as they have sales.

I would like to recommend to anyone who hasn't upgraded their FreeFX Bundle that they snap this up. Especially if you can do it in conjunction with the other first-timer discounts. If it's your first purchase with Meldaproduction, there are 2 ways to get extra savings: while you're setting up your account, sign up for their newsletter, which gets you 10 euros to spend any way you like. When you make your purchase, use my referral code, MELDA1923165, which will knock another 10% off the order (I'll also get credits for 10% of your order). These discounts also apply to any other first order from them. Since the FreeFX Bundle upgrade is now going for 20 euro, this scheme would make your eventual cost 9 euro, or $10.73. There are 37 plug-ins in the bundle. If you have the FreeFX Bundle, the upgrade lets you use the plug-ins' preset manager (and download community presets), scale the UI, use upsampling, and access the multiparameters and custom modulators screens for plug-ins that have them. The plug-ins in the bundle that I use often, and which I believe to be at the top of their class at any price, include MTuner, MEQualizer, MCompressor, MStereoscope, MLoudnessanalyzer, and MMetronome. If the tuner by itself cost 9 euros it would be a must have. It's polyphonic and has a pitch-to-MIDI convertor. I also use MOscillator and MNoisegenerator when I need such utilities for testing. Many of the rest also see occasional use.

One addition to this: set the mix control of the reverb plug-in to 100% wet.

Even if you're not as into dark drone sounds as I, there is a joy to be had in uniting the flagship products from the plug-in company with the mellowest marketing pitch in the industry and the company with the most disturbing one. I don't know what it says about me that Serenity was one of the first instruments I tried Dumpster Fire on. Or even that I have both of them to try this with. The crickets and the birds were helpful. I did turn them on for the initial experiment. If I could still make them out, it let me know that I hadn't taken it completely off the rails with Dumpster Fire. I also found out some more things about Dumpster Fire: it may have some sort of threshold detection or something, I had things kind of manageable with the animals chirping away, but when I hit the rainstorm button, they got lost in this huge wall of sound. As I pointed out in my initial review of Serenity (in the Freeware Instruments thread), it's possible to do a sonic presentation of the biblical Great Deluge using its sound FX from left to right. Those humongous thick pads in Serenity actually work pretty well as fodder for filter-y and glitchy FX that impart their own rhythms. It's like rolling out a big blob of delicious cookie dough and then using cookie cutters on it. Rhythmic subtractive synthesis.

Excellent. Thanks for the share. I practice "harm reduction." One of my more effective strategies is "not owning a full Kontakt license." Freeware is my non-alcoholic beer. (Anyone else keep a few $5-10 trinkets in their PB wishlist in order to be able to jump on the monthly freebies?) My self-justification for the past year for grabbing every shiny object with a big price reduction is that it's been impossible to watch a movie in a theater or go out to eat at a restaurant, so I figure I'm spending my restaurant meals and movies on sound crafting tools. (not helpful I know)

Well, I, um, know this guy who is a CbB user, and he used his Cakewalk login to acquire Rapture Session, then he downloaded and installed the SONAR trial and noticed that the SONAR trial came with all these "Factory Pro" instruments that would work with the version of Rapture Session that came with Home Studio. So he carefully studied the file structure for Rapture's instruments folder and copied them all over and it worked! He tells me that you have to be one steely-eyed Cakewalk man to pull it off, though, it has to be done just right, and he messed it up a couple of times before nailing it. But yes, if you have a valid Cakewalk Inc. login, install your product with Command Center and it will work great.

I posted another topic about a favorite new sound design toy, Freakshow Industries' Dumpster Fire. They would no doubt be delighted to know that it has already inspired me to commit horrible acts. Only 3 days into the trial period. The one I wish to confess is that I put it on lovely, mellow, sweet Quiet Music Serenity (which I like enough to pay for the SE version that just came out). Yes, I took an instrument (accurately) described as "built on 10 different layers of sound to create a perfect relaxing environment, 4 layers of pad sounds and textures created with the Deepmind analog synthesizer, and 6 layers of high-quality sound from various field recordings we made" and used an effect (accurately) described as "THE SHIFTING NIGHTMARE" on it. Although I feel as if I have committed a grave sin, it actually sounds amazing. Dark drone for days.

Love mixing (and listening) on cans. In my teen years, I listened with phones out of necessity, the parental units didn't want to hear my music blasting away. I got way into The Moody Blues and the deep sonic landscapes they created in the studio. I still like "headphone music," David Tipper and Chris Zippel are a couple of fave sound sculptors. These days, I tend to have a delayed sleep phase, where I sleep from about 3AM to 11AM If I want to mix past 10PM, and that's usually when I feel most creative, it's all about the headphones. I just leveled up on the ATH front, going from M40's to M50's after a side-by-side test. Most reviews say that the M40's sound very close to the M50's, with subtle but audible differences in tonal balance. In my opinion, nuh-uh, no way, not even close. I put on a Chris Zippel mix that had water sounds in the background that were vivid with the 50's,but with the 40's, I could only barely identify them and that after I heard them on the 50's. Soundstage was way better, with the 40's it sounds like the soundstage extends about 2" away from my ears, with the 50's it's more like 6" or beyond. The first time I tried them on a project I've been working on for months, I heard this weird sound buildup between the kick and snare that I eventually controlled by gating the tail of the kick resonance. Never noticed it before. So I like how revealing cans can be. I also like my Superlux 681 EVO's. The tonal balance is similar enough to the M50's that it's not jarring to switch between them. I prefer to finalize things, especially mastering, on the speakers, but I check and reference on a variety of listening systems, including the car and my Altec Lansing Mini Life Jacket.

To answer your question, no I don't think it should. I understand what you were trying to do, but in order for it to "work," the track would have to be identical in timbre and also 180 deg. out of phase. The closest thing to what you are trying to do with that, which is have the snare track cancel the snare sound out of your hat track, is to use a gate in inverse mode on the hi hat track with a sidechain coming from the snare so that each snare hit triggers the gate to close. You can fiddle with the gating amount and attack and release to get this to sound as natural as possible. Now that I've answered your question, I'll offer other suggestions to help get you going. My first question is: how important is that hi hat track? In my experience there's plenty of hi hat in the overheads, perhaps it's that way with your intrepid recordists. I'm not a pro, but for perspective, I'm pretty happy with 4 mics on my drum kit. OH's in my adaptation of a Recorderman/Johns config, kick batter at an angle slightly below and aimed at the impact point, snare batter up and off the rim enough not to hit it with a stick, pointed at the center of the head . (This is not entirely out of laziness; I have enough good mics and 16 inputs between the two 'pods. When I started out, I tried mic'ing the snare reso and the kick reso and the resulting tracks were superfluous. Sometimes with a tom-heavy song I'll point a couple of dynamics at the mounted tom toms to get that stereo roll effect, but not often. I was actually uncomfortable at first because this was the first configuration that I tried and it sounded great. But I thought "that was too easy, I must be missing something, I'll learn more about it eventually." Nope. 7 years later I'm still doing the same thing. Every so often I try a snare reso mic and end up not using the track. I finally just had to go with "if it sounds good, it is good." I have friends who come to my dining room to track drums, so I guess it's okay.) Boz' Gatey Watey or another frequency-exclusive gating option would be another choice, or something really surgical like Unfiltered Audio's G8. Or simply automate them out, with gain and/or EQ. Since I got Gatey Watey, it's been on every mix, keeping hat out of snare and snare out of kick. Unlike Bruno, I don't like bleed in my close-mic'd snare or kick tracks. I tried leaving it in, but I got phasing and imaging issues, and it made it harder to control how much of whatever I was getting. It becomes a snare/hat track, not a snare track, where I can't give it more snare without giving it more (already adequate in the OH's) hat.