Starship Krupa

My mom was a big Brubeck fan, so I was exposed to plenty of Mr. Morello's playing when I was little. She also had a copy of Herb Alpert Presents Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66, and I love love love Joao Palma's playing on that record. That clip from the Sammy Davis Jr. show. There are actually at least 3 great drummers on that stage (probably 4, don't know who was playing in Sammy's band at that time but he had to have had some chops to keep up). Sammy, among his many talents, could tear it up on the drum kit: Prince never mentioned being influenced by Sammy Davis Jr. (at least that I know of), but the whole "brilliant multi-instrumentalist and dancer" thing, Prince was my age and must have watched a lot of Sammy as a kid. I remember Sammy tap dancing in platform shoes on the Flip Wilson show, just killing it. Prince never reached Sammy's level of acting talent.😂

Well, I think you can tell from my handle whose jazz drumming I prefer. Buddy was a technician, a brilliant one. But I think of him as the Yngwie Malmsteen of drums. Amazing chops, but is it musical? Do I ever want to throw on an album where he's playing in a band, or is it just YouTube videos of his solos? Gene could drive an entire big band. With Buddy it was all about his spotlighted solos. Elvin Jones is another fave of mine because of the way he could drive a band. Early on in my drum learning, I read a quote from Elvin saying that in a small combo, the drummer is the conductor. That was like a lightning bolt to my understanding of the role of a drummer, the power the drummer holds over the entire band's dynamics. A good drummer knows when to fade into the background, knows when to step forward to serve the music that's being created. I've never heard an example of Buddy doing that. With Buddy, the rest of the band wasn't important, he probably saw them as backing him up. For a drummer, that isn't a recipe for music that I want to listen to. I've noticed that most of the drummers I admire were/are somewhat humble regarding their role in the band. Elvin also said that he believed that his purpose in life was to play in the John Coltrane Quartet. He said that after he left Coltrane. Playing in that band was his masterwork. Neil Peart, famously reclusive. Ringo Starr, famously humble. Ever hear Alex Van Halen go on about how great he is? Nope, he left that kind of talk to his brother. Bonham? Yeah, he dissed Karen Carpenter when he lost out to her in the Playboy Poll, but I'll cut him slack for that one. Karen was a good soft rock player, but that was about it. Just my opinion, and of course not a popular one.

You were supplying him with his favorite drug, approval. The poor bass player was just another musician for him to need to feel superior to. There are certain personality disorders where the person must do whatever they can to boost their ego. This entails being as sweet as possible to people who supply them with approval and grinding down people who they see as competition, which is nearly everyone. Check Marie's behavior. She was as sweet as could be to the audience who was cheering her, but a total shrew to the other musicians. We all love approval and feel competitive, but this is those tendencies taken to a pathological level. My childhood was spent in Los Angeles and I got familiar with entertainment industry types. Not a group I would seek out for companionship.

Yeah, Marie....known to have some serious mental health issues. Ugh. Going all Buddy Rich on your band is a no-no.

The caravan to Aruba is not the road you'd choose...

Oh noes, Wikipedia contradicts itself: "The song, "One Bad Apple", written by George Jackson, was composed in the style of The Jackson 5 (it was not originally offered to The Jackson 5, though the Osmonds would later state that The Jackson 5 considered recording it)." My faith in the infallibility of Wikipedia is hereby shaken. When the song came out, I was in elementary school, and came up with the alternate lyric "One road apple...."

It's not uncommon for MeldaProduction. It's like a hotfix. Initially pushed out for people who are experiencing the issue, then rolled into the full release once it's shaken out. I've always just gone ahead and installed whatever version they put out, never been stung.

If we're going to include movies that used existing songs, I'll go with Donnie Darko: Some of the most brilliant combinations of songs and filmmaking. Most honorable mention for Coppola's use of The Doors' "The End" in Apocalypse Now.

Alan Moore! I wonder if Freakshow Industries watched this before making their promo videos.

That is a myth. Check it on Wikipedia. For bubblegum soul, they don't do a terrible job of it. Having the Muscle Shoals house band backing them up doesn't hurt. Yes, and "Show Biz Kids" would be an appropriate tune for them to cover. Hey, you're a drummer, check out Jay's technique on this tune. He's miming, but he actually played on the recording (they eventually got proficient with their instruments and played on their later albums). I wish I could get my wrists to do that when I'm on the kit. He's playing power rock strokes using trad grip. Tight little fills. Also: sweet stained walnut Luddies, complete with 70's approved set of 4 concert toms and Supraphonic:

Which kinda validates a point that I have brought up: while theoretically all DAW's should sound the same, we don't know what any of them is truly doing under the hood. Yes, Nyquist, Fourier, et al, but then we have Image Line.... Like Helmuth von Moltke's contention that "no plan survives contact with the enemy," I say that design principles are often compromised during actual implementation of them. Engineer: "it presents the recorded audio with no resampling, added jitter, or coloration of any kind." Marketing person: "great, is there anything we can do to make our program sound better than the competition?"

I detested Donny and Marie as much as any other teenage boy back then, but looking at it from an adult perspective, also knowing more about what goes into stage productions....that is some nice choreography. I wonder if it was still Jay, it looks like the style the Osmonds were doing in the "One Bad Apple" period. That stuff is hard work. Definitely a relic of the "knock 'em dead" era of entertainment. It's the intro to the show and they start off with a Steely Dan number that ends up with them ice skating backwards. I'd like to hear/see Donny and Marie doing one of the Dan's darker numbers like "Charlie Freak." I bet they could tear it up on "Haitian Divorce." No! A whole album: Donny and Marie Sing Donald and Walter. Marie: "No marigolds in the promised land...." Donny: "There's a hole in the ground where they used to grow...." Both: "Any man left on the Rio Grande is the king of the world as far as I know!"

A simple remote control app for iOS and Android. Here's another. It was a big factor in my decision to go with Mixcraft almost 10 years ago: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.acoustica.ControlSurface&hl=en_US&gl=US Simple transport control, but man, for situations like recording yourself at the drums, it's valuable. Of course, once introduced, you open yourself up to endless feature requests to implement mixer control and whatnot, but it is a very useful feature. AFAIK, at least Logic, Mixcraft, and Studio One all have one. Pro Tools, too, probably.

I'd like to clarify that I think there's a difference between "seems clunky" and "lacks a valuable feature" and "doesn't work the way I want it to." "Clunky," to me, means things that are needlessly obscure or complex, things that require too many steps or switching back and forth between different views. Case in point regarding obscurity, the process for deleting a marker. Why not have markers be selectable, then just hit Delete to delete them? And how about a nice context menu with "delete" being a selection? I love Cakewalk's PRV, but when I'm working in it, in order to rename a track or replace a synth, something I do plenty often when working in PRV, I have to switch over to Track View and then back. That interrupts the flow.

What you said about putting them in the the Help module is a good one. It might even get me to turn my Help Module on. I'm rather fond of tooltips myself. The confusing business about slip editing modifier keys, there could be a tooltip saying "hold Shift to edit single clip" when you click on a clip edge to do some slip editing and the edge either butts up against or lines up to another clip. When dragging a clip, "hold Ctrl to copy," that sort of thing. I know I've beaten the drum for consistency before, and I don't think it's ever had much attention paid to it, but I really do think that having more consistency in operation between the various views would make the program seem more polished and less whacked-together. Also stuff like being able to rename tracks and replace synths and the like in the PRV's track pane. Having to switch between views for common operations like those also leads to a perception of clumsiness. Double-clicking on a track's name to rename it should work everywhere you find a track name. If I'm working in the PRV, why have me open Track View to rename a track or replace a synth? It just wastes time.

If this would include having a single MIDI track being able to drive two different VSTi's, that's something I'd love to be able to do.

Which type of whine do you prefer? The whine of old timers who want everything to stay the same or the whine of new users who want things to make more sense? Or perhaps you savor the whine of those who think everyone else should just suck up whatever inconveniences they experience (or anticipate) in using the product?

I dunno. It's long been my belief that veteran users of complex software like this don't tend to use menu-hunting as a way to access commands. We tend eventually to go with keystrokes and context menus. That's my belief anyway. So fine, have two menu configurations, one for the people who would be crushed not to find Insert Marker in the global Project menu and one for people who would look for it in the Insert menu. Won't we all just wind up hitting M or right-clicking on the ruler?

After 5 years using the program, I guess I'm still waiting to get comfortable with the paradigm, because I think it's a mess. The global menu is for "global" things. What's in the "Insert" menu should be moved down to the "Track" menu and most of what's in the "Project" menu should be moved to the "Insert" menu. Some of the global menus really belong down in the Track View, they affect things like tracks or even clips. The global Process menu is not right for the Nudge command. The Edit menu is not the right place for Aim Assist. The only argument for having them there is that someone from another company (that being Cakewalk, Inc.) did it that way. It all looks like it was set up with little thought given to where someone would expect to find a given command. I just gave up and bound the Insert/Measures command to the Ins key because I was never going to remember where that command was in the heat of battle. If Insert/Measures belongs in a menu called "Project" that is 2 menus to the right of "Insert," then I'm out. Clunky.

I don't accept that excuse, never have. People on this forum used to patiently explain to me that the reason that some manufacturers' audio device names were so garbled up was that Cakewalk displayed what the driver told it. Well whoop-tee-doo. I don't care. Other DAW's are able to display this information in a way that makes sense. I wanted Cakewalk to either do that or let me edit the names. Of course, developers are known for not caring how some other company implements this or that feature, and y'know what? I don't care how past programmers supposedly made things hard to change. It's not an answer or an excuse or even part of the discussion. It comes down to this: the program works one way, but I would like it to work another way. If how Steinberg's or Ableton's programmers do it is off the table, then how Cakewalk's earlier programmers did it is also off the table. If the former is no reason to do it, then the latter is no reason not to do it. "Cubase does it this way!" Yeah, who cares? "Cakewalk has done it this way for decades!" Yeah, who cares? Sure, it would be nice if Cakewalk would parse the list of devices supplied by the driver and name and sort them out automatically, but the ability to create our own friendly names is such an improvement over what it used to be, and very powerful. Most DAW's do it pretty well, but I've seen a couple that try to and have it come out no better. Letting me edit the names bypasses all that.

People who can't think of anything "clunky" about Cakewalk probably either don't use or have given up on Drum Maps/Drum Grid/Drum Pane/Drum Map Manager. The easter egg hunt that searching through the various views' menus is for new users must also have slipped their minds. Anyone expecting the "Tracks" menu in Track View to be where you go to add or remove a track will be baffled. But wait! If you go to the "Track" (singular) menu in Console View, you can insert and delete tracks. The "Tracks" menu in PRV doesn't do either of those things. Back to Track view, you can add tracks using "Insert" from the global menu, but in order to insert a blank measure or a marker, you must use "Project" from the global menu. It's like each view is a brand new experience! After using the program for a couple of years, this stuff fades into the background, and that's when people start thinking "clunky? what? This program is totally effortless once you memorize how to do every operation you need to do" but when someone's new (and by that I mean the first several months, depending on memory retention), it's a big pain in the a55.

Very good sounding melodica, plenty of serials left.

I want it to ask me if I like movies about gladiators.

I'm wondering about a chicken-and-egg thing here.

Those are all cached Google hits from their spidering engine having read the old website. If you click on the actual links (try it) they take you to the current Cakewalk Sonar page, which has none of that pricing listed. Please be careful. There's enough FUD floating up. If you don't understand how Google's caching works, I can explain it. This is another reason why keeping the old Cakewalk, Inc. web server up and running for the past 5 years was....perhaps not the greatest idea.