Starship Krupa

Swatches fans, remember to download the latest version, which includes 10 or so patches from this pack, free.

I have to wonder about the name of Rebelle (say it out loud). Phonically, it sounds as if someone was being cheeky in regard to "Rebelle" vs. "Corel."

In order to do it (that is, make graphical changes to the theme rather than just color changes), you must use Theme Editor along with a graphics editor like Paint.NET, Photoshop, or Paint Shop Pro. The best resource for learning how to use Theme Editor is The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to Theming Cakewalk. Once you have Theme Editor set up, when you find the image(s) you wish to alter, you can launch your graphics editor directly from Theme Editor, make the change(s) and then save it back to Theme Editor. Theme Editor stores the color settings and images in proprietary files with the .STH extension. Near as I can tell, the step sequencer buttons in SONAR 7 don't look a heck of a lot different from the standard ones in the current Cakewalk. If you read the bit in The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer you'll see the result of some serious spelunking I did in regard to figuring out which of the 12 cells of the Step Button image go with what button states in Step Sequencer. You can weigh for yourself whether it's worth it to try to approximate the old ones. If you get stuck figuring out Theme Editor, we will try to help get you unstuck.

To be fair, if you're doing video editing, a nice graphics card is a good investment, same for painting programs like Painter and Rebelle. I have Painter, and its complex brushes and Wacom support get smoother the better a GPU your system has.

Prepare to have yer mind blown. In the TTS-1 UI, click on the rectangular button at the top of a channel strip: That will bring up a dialog that will allow you to choose from hundreds of sounds, including multiple drum kits, which come complete with all of the percussion instruments you see on that GM note list. That said, if you like TTS-1, wait until AIR's XPand!2 shows up on sale for $10 or less and get it. Over 2000 sounds, including the aforementioned drum kits, and they're better sounds. It was the first virtual instrument I ever bought and I still use it. Whoa, yer in luck, Xpand!2 is currently available in a bundle for $9.99. I'll vouch for DB-33 as a decent tonewheel clone: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/81-Bundles/58-Instrument-Bundles/7743-AIR-Legends-Pack

Definitely the comfiest cans in my collection. A VO actor friend of mine describes them as "they feel like kittens on your ears."

It looks like Rebelle has come up in Humble Bundles in the past....I'll snag it if it does again.

Dang, that does look like a nice program.

I got this bundle when it rolled around, what was it, a month or two ago? I've had some fun doodling with Painter and the Wacom tablet and messing about with Paint Shop Pro, but a caveat: Painter is, at least on my system a "save early and often" affair as regards stability. It crashes, and when it does it just vanishes, straight to the desktop. As for Paint Shop Pro....I got really good at Paint.NET while I was doing Cakewalk themes, could really make it do what I wanted as a pixel editor. It of course has its drawbacks, like a much smaller collection of fancy filters and textures and so on than Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Since PSP is the more full-featured one, I'm currently in the learning stage of forcing myself to use it instead of my former go-to so that I become familiar enough with it to decide whether it will replace or augment Paint.NET. It's those odd little things that somehow end up being different in every pixel editor, like anti-aliasing, settings for the paint bucket tool, selections and how they transfer between layers, etc. It's still too unfamiliar to make the call. Nice to have around for those cool special effects at least. One drawback so far is that it's one of those programs that really, really wants you to use it to organize your photos, which I may want it to do someday, and in the meantime don't pester me or act like it's the golden gateway to my digital images. I want my photo editor to open up in ready to rock mode, no froofy opening screens. But the program seems resistant to that, it wants to go back to its "simple" startup screen that asks me what I want to do today, that kind of hand-holdy crap. Fine, if you like that sort of thing, but I don't right now. Whatever else, there's no way under the sun if you do graphic s on your computer that the two of them together aren't worth $30.

I am solidly in the grey=off, lit up=on camp. After all, in the FX rack, lit up button means "effect active." Why invert it in other areas? The argument against it says that the buttons should be lit up to alert the operator that something is not "as usual." This is how we think of the Mute button, after all. And yes, I finally just set it right using Theme Editor. Unfortunately, this won't be possible with the new Sonar coming out, not on its initial release and possibly never. This is my mnemonic: "In the racks FX are off when the button is grey In Mix Module when its orange the FX have gone away" It's a tribute to the famous segment of The Court Jester:

Speaking as someone who is just dipping his toes in the water of orchestral scoring, this seems to me like an essential feature to have. It seems like a good one to add to Sonar to distinguish it as a tool for pros.

Does this sound like it might apply to your situation? Caused by Dell's extra system monitoring software service:

How did I know it was a Dell? 😄 Well, 'cause I am a (no pun) fan of their products, specifically the second-hand office workhorses that get retired by large companies 3 or 4 years after purchase because, y'know, the new employee can't have a better computer than her manager, or they get bogged down with crapware and accused of being "too slow," etc. I'm typing this on my Dell Latitude 7480, which replaced my trusty Latitude 6410 a year ago. The 6410 had been a freebie from an IT manager friend who got a stack of them for his kids at a corporate yard sale and had one left over. It was a great Cakewalk slab right up to retirement, and I'm planning on sending it up to my mom, who wants a Windows laptop for when her documents can't print from her iPad. 8G of RAM and I souped it up by replacing its i5 with an i7. I also ran an Optiplex 7010 as my main DAW up until a year and a half ago. i7-3770. This Latitude cost me all of $50 on Craig's List, from another corporate yard sale, and was lacking a main drive and memory. Total outlay for the computer, a major system update: about $125. They're rugged as hockey pucks and run forever. At one point I dropped the 6410 about a metre to a concrete floor, was sure I had killed it, but it booted up and ran as if nothing at all had happened. No screen damage, not even any case damage except for a scuff on the corner that hit first. As I said, with anything Dell, make SURE you download and install their latest driver packages. They are the most picky about this of any manufacturer I can think of apart from Apple. The generic or component manufacturer specific ones that Microsoft installs are not enough and will likely lead to just the kind of behavior you're seeing. You might later get better graphics results from installing nVidia's updated drivers, but always start with Dell's. If the nVidia driver borks something, you can roll it back. Also, along with this, make sure your BIOS is updated to the latest. For your computer, the most recent one came out in 2021, so if you've never updated it you're at least 5 years overdue. Dell's support pages show only the major reasons for BIOS updates, of course the engineers sneak other improvements in there as well. With Dell, no worries about a driver or BIOS update causing trouble because of the position and reputation they must maintain for corporate users: you can't roll out an update and have it brick 1000 or 10,000 critical path systems. Glad to see that you snagged HWINFO. Great tool, I use it often to see what my system is up to under the hood. It helped me figure out that my Latitude 6410 was having overheating problems after the CPU swap, which I went in and solved. The system will put your system into a throttled state if it sees your CPU getting too hot. And that's one of the reasons you need to get with Dell's latest drivers and BIOS: that's how your system monitors all this stuff. If it's suddenly getting the (true or false) idea that your system is overheating, it will turn the fans on full blast and throttle the CPU speed down to protect it from damage. HWINFO includes a history feature to show you what the peak and minimum stats are, so let your system go into that error condition and then check what the temps and clock speeds jumped or dropped to. Yes, dust blast it. Check HWINFO's temp stats before and after and see if it makes a difference. Also observe whether a huge dust cloud comes out. You shouldn't need to run any special fan control software. That's treating the symptom, not the cause. The Dell BIOS and drivers and so forth should take care of it.

This. And this is definitely a case where we need to know make and model of your computer. Especially with laptops, and especially with Dell laptops, having the latest system drivers from the laptop manufacturer is essential. Sometimes you can update individual components like the NIC driver, but the chipset drivers, which include the ACPI driver that handles things like fans, are specific to the model of laptop. Also, have you given the ventilation ports a good blast of compressed air lately? Laptops act like stationary Roombas when it comes to sucking up dust, and of course dust impedes performance of the cooling system. Go into your BIOS settings and check to see if anything has been reset that shouldn't be, like C States or anything else you wish to enable/disable.

Damn, that's some tight playing. Your drummer is solid! What is your instrument in this lineup?

I rather suspect that at this point in time, the reason so many YouTube videos have folks using SM7B mics is because so many YouTube videos have folks using SM7B mics. 😏 Which is neither to say that they are not superior mics for spoken work nor to invalidate the idea of using industry standard equipment. It's just that they are a path of least resistance for would-be YouTube talking heads and podcasters. This person who is doing what I want to do uses THIS critical bit of gear, so I'll get one too. The other option would be to try out a bunch of mics to see which one sounds the best with your voice, but that is a more difficult path, deciding which mics to audition, where to find those mics, how to audition them....just get a 7B and 7B done with it. Plug it into your Scarlett Solo or 2i2 and you'll have a hardware chain capable of any level VO task (after which the next frontier is working on the recording environment). I watched a YouTube video the other day of some guy testing (IIRC) an old Shure Beta Green vocal mic for VO. He hated it because among other stated reasons, it had a problem with picking up plosives. I got the idea that he had learned the word "plosives" in the last week or so and wanted to take it out for a spin. He had the obligatory SM7B-on-a-boom behind him and was eating the poor Beta Green, straight into the end, lips within an inch of the grill. If he had taken the huge foam rubber ball from the SM7B and stuck it on the Beta Green, his plosive issues would have vanished. Not surprisingly, he also thought the mic was boomy. I didn't see his technique with the 7B but my guess is that he speaks across the diaphragm at an angle rather than straight into the end. Most YT 7B users I see speak into them at an angle, probably so the camera can see their faces, and I don't doubt that speaking into the mic in that off-axis way helps it to sound "clearer" than other mics. Disclosure: my vary favorite snare batter mic (and I have tested multiple of the industry leaders in that category) is a Beta Green 3.1 (similar in features to an SM48 in that it looks like a 58 with a mute switch). That thing has so much off-axis rejection that my snare recordings after I started using it need much less gating to keep out the hi hat bleed. I think I paid $6 for it at the local Salvation Army. I am predisposed against those who would make sport of lower end gear, as so much of sound recording is about placement and the environment the mic is placed in. I generally like cheap unsung "sleeper" mics. My preferred kick batter mic is a Peavey 580i dynamic "vocal" mic that a friend gave me (he wasn't using it). When I first checked it out, I gave it the "hey check one TWO" test and my voice sounded like it was coming out of a Marantz receiver tuned to an FM station and driving a nice pair of Advents in 1974. I had hunch that if it sounded like a classic FM jock talk mic that I should try it on kick, and I was right, by golly. It has also fought off some tough challengers costing multiple times its original sale price. My search for the best mics in those categories long since ended. And I am a gear hound. If I thought there were better mics for my application I would get them.

The deal breaker is that the Solo only has a single input. Hence you'd not be able to record your voice and your guitar at the same time. The M-Audio Duo would do the job you ask of it.

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The best interfaces that I could find that meet the criteria of costing under $100 and allowing simultaneous recording of 2 tracks, 1 guitar and 1 vocal, are the PreSonus Audiobox USB 96K at $99 and the M-Audio M-Track Duo at $69. Personally, I'd go for the PreSonus. I have a similar model, the PreSonus Studio 2|4 and the sound quality is excellent. My larger interface is a Focusrite. They're both great, really. Can't go wrong with either brand, but CAVEAT: Focusrite has saved costs on the lower end models like the Scarlett 2i2 by omitting a MIDI interface. PreSonus still make theirs with the standard 5-pin DIN MIDI connectors.

I know I am way late to this topic, and there's already been a lot of helpful advice, but had I noticed it earlier, I would have suggested that 75 tracks seems about 65 tracks too many for a first lesson. Maybe someone reading this in the future will take my suggestions. A better idea would be to start with the standard rock band configuration of drums (kick, snare, overheads and toms), vocals, guitar, and bass. Keyboards and/or 2nd guitar. Replace instruments as necessary to fit genre. I've been at this for a while and I believe I have yet to have a project go over 20 tracks. Learning how to mix is, IMO, like learning most things: it's best to start with a simple task and work your way up. You wouldn't have someone learn to drive by starting them on a cross-country trip or entering them in an autocross. You start them in an empty parking lot learning what all the controls do. You wouldn't start someone first learning to read on Moby Dick. Go from a simple project to a more complex ones as you learn the basics. Otherwise there's a danger of getting bogged down for days or weeks at various steps just trying to juggle that many elements. Gain staging a project with 8 tracks is much easier than doing one with 48 tracks, and the same with applying effects, panning, setting levels and so on. The level and tonal balance of every sound in a mix interacts with every other sound. Rolling off bass in one sound makes another sound bassier and so on.

We're not supposed to do anything. Unless we set that specific goal for ourselves. If the driving motivation is to have fun playing around with sound, there's nothing less "valid" about this use of the tools. Part of the fun for me is to produce finished pieces that I like enough for other people to listen to, but it doesn't have to be. At age 62 I have no reason to front like I'm gonna be a music star someday. If I spend $80 on Chromaphone and put on headphones and spend a few hours going through the presets and having my mind blown, I've gotten my money's worth, just as if I'd spent that money on any number of other fun (and probably non-repeatable) activities. Not wasted time any more than 6 months of Netflix.

MusicBee. or AIMP. They let me use ASIO and event-based WASAPI to play back my FLAC's and internet stations. Using those drivers for audio playback isn't just about latency, it affects the sound quality (a lot, actually).