Starship Krupa

Unfortunately for your thread, before I got Channel Tools I already had Eventide UltraChannel, which does that harmonized microdelay pretty dang well (no surprise considering that it was pioneered using Eventide hardware). Channel Tools has some nice features, but they're ones that I'd already gotten used to using other plug-ins for.

I'd hit that installer again. I don't have it, but there's no way that a premium industry standard plug-in like Pro Q is only available in 32-bit in this day and age.

Interesting; there's now a selection button for "MStarterFXBundle," which selects a subset of the MFreeFXBundle. 16 plug-ins. I can't spot a logic to which ones are selected. Except for (the almighty) MCompressor and MEqualizer, and MStereoscope, none of them are ones that I use. Some are FX and some are analyzers or utilities. I wonder if these are going to give newbies the pro versions for free, or if the upgrade price will be reduced for these. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's not upgraded their FreeFXBundle to see if things have changed.

True, that. His betas are usually as stable or more so than some other companies' release builds.

I'd be very surprised to see the EA products get M1'd. I suspect their policy is that if you want those sweet EA algorithms, get Neoverb.

Really, faster than asking here and then waiting for a response.

What I did with my outbuilding was get a roll of Cat 6 cable and run it hard wired. The cable is rated for burial, but for the underground parts I used plastic conduit, then ran it along the fence line to keep it out of sight. I put an RJ-45 biscuit jack at each end, the cable came with a little plastic punch-down tool.

Are you referring to the "W" button in the Mix Module? That's for Write automation. It should toggle your ability to write automation if you press it. If you want to know more, look up the Mix Module and Automation in the documentation or Reference Guide.

That is some good-looking undeveloped real estate.

Indeed it will. If I ever ran the program with those panels floated, I would like that: one key to open, one key to banish. But I don't, I run with the panels docked. The only time I ever float them is when I want to banish them.

Anything in the local environment is a potential source of RFI. As Jim suggested, troubleshoot it by paring down the components one at a time, especially the ones in the audio chain. Get it down to the barest few components required to get sound out (presumably as he suggested, headphones plugged straight into the interface). Then add things until you start hearing the noise. Since it's a high-pitched whine, I'm going to go with "switching power supply" as the source of it. Most computer stuff is powered by switching power supplies, which generate a LOT of high frequency noise. The switching power supply for your monitor or the computer itself may well be the source of or a contributor to this issue. If it's on the same breaker as the mixer or audio interface, get it on another circuit, even if you have to run an extension cord to check it. His suggestion to put everything on the same circuit to test it is a good one, and I'll submit that when chasing ground loops, it's valuable to go the other direction too. Run an extension cord into your studio from an outlet you are sure is on a different breaker and try plugging each component into it one by one.

My recommendation is to figure out what's causing your instruments to glitch. The system specs you indicate are surely capable. Have you excluded your sample and plug-in folders from Defender's realtime scanning? Have you tried running Resource Monitor to see what's going on in the background when you use those instruments?

It functions, but only gets me half of what I want. The toggle keys open the pane, but then once they're open, if you hit them again all they do is collapse them. True, I don't usually completely banish either of those panes, but I do banish Synth Rack and Help. It's about screen real estate. When I'm on my 14" screen'd laptop, every pixel counts. Yes, I could use screensets, but those take extra time to apply and they pop the view back to whatever it was when the screenset was saved. I just want a one-click way to make any of them vanish completely. Adding Close to the Docking Options menu seems like the simplest, although a keystrokable command would also be handy.

A|A|S should offer people a free NFR license once they've acquired all of the soundpacks for a given instrument. Only half kidding.

Count off the number of people involved in creating Hysteria. You're one guy trying to emulate the work of an army of professionals and consultants. Metal is a very highly produced and engineered genre, was from the start. I suggest watching Some Kind Of Monster, or if you've already seen it, maybe watch it again. Proof that legends consider packing it in. From what I understand, the album that came out of their process is also proof that legends can produce clinkers.

I have a Logitech Marathon Mouse M705, which has 4 buttons plus wheel. Pushing the wheel left and right scrolls horizontally. I have the 2 extra buttons on the left side programmed for Ctrl and Alt, which makes for some mighty fine single-handed mouse-only operation. Any reputable 4-button mouse should be able to get you there, using app-specific button assignments.

On a system that has never had Cakewalk by BandLab installed, run the web installer (not BandLab Assistant). On a fresh system, the web installer should download a full executable installer. Copy it to the target systems.

Well, "recording" or maybe in your case "mix engineering" is only once facet of making music, and plenty of the time, I'm using parts of my brain that have little to do with playing. I do see it much like learning another instrument. Not everyone is going to enjoy or excel at every instrument they pick up. You tried "mix engineering" and got fed up with it. It sounds like you gave it a hell of a shot. There are countless musicians who never record themselves, have no idea about DAW's or whatever. I have multiple musician friends, but few I can talk mix engineering with. To them, it's drudgery or geek stuff or whatever. They like to play, sing, make up songs. Recording them is a complicated chore like doing taxes. I think throughout this thread, some of us, at least me, weren't 100% clear on what you meant by "call it a day." On making a career of it? On playing entirely? Now I get that what you were pondering was whether you should keep trying to hone your mix engineering skills. I'm glad it wasn't about making music entirely. So my answer is "screw it." It sounds like it was dragging you down. Do the parts of making music that bring you happiness. If you write songs, you've acquired enough skills (and equipment) to record demos of them. There are TONS of musicians who stop there or don't even attempt to go that far. I answer questions on this forum all the time from people who "just want to record my guitar and vocals." Also, when I started recording myself, it exposed areas of my playing that needed work (sometimes brutally!). It helped motivate me to become a better player (or at least more consistent). So if that's the case with you, your time and effort and money isn't something that wasn't wasted. I don't see where anyone was poking fun at you, it seems more that we can all relate (oh the nights I go to bed convinced that I suck eternally and irredeemably and who do I think I am, at age 61 trying to do the kind of music I do, yada yada), and take it with a wry sense of humor. And I thank you for starting a discussion that helped remind me what I want out of recording and mixing songs.

Thank you. This is what I meant by where does Cakewalk store user presets. I gave it a 99% chance that you'd be the one with the 411. I wouldn't have checked "ActiveMovie." 😄 I'll guess that if I want to transfer these presets to my second and third systems, I can export the keys from the main one and import them to the others?

I've done some spelunking around C:\Users\krupa\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Shared Presets and found where Cakewalk seems to be storing user presets for VSTi's, but not, for some reason, the same for FX. They must be kept somewhere, but where?

I have found this to be true as well, to the point where I don't use it anymore. I do hear a difference when activating 2X plug-in upsampling, which is a different deal, but not with 64-bit double precision. All the 64-bit thing has done for me is make certain instruments and FX get weird when they're trying to sync to the project tempo. And not weird in a cool, useful way, just doing the wrong multiple or beat division. Since I use tempo-sync'd instruments and FX on everything, I leave it off. Here's a discussion amongst the Cakewalk cave people about it. Note that Craig Anderton, Voice of No Small Authority kinda brushes it off: http://forum.cakewalk.com/Question-regarding-FX-plugins-using-64bit-doubleprecision-m3636118.aspx

What I mean is that whatever track you have the compressor on, you can filter the sidechain signal going into it all you want (freebie MCompressor has this built-in), but when the compressor is triggered, it affects the entire track, not just the bass. I tend to use basses with a lot of triangle-wavy oscillator sync'd goodness in the lower (and even upper) mids. If I just do a simple sidechain on it with the trigger signal coming from the kick, yeah, works fine, but it ducks my entire bass track, funky blurpiness and all. When mostly it doesn't need to unless I'm trying for a Daft Punk effect. I just want the low end of the bass to get out of the way, not duck the entire spectrum. The two plug-ins I know that can handle sidechain ducking of only a specific frequency range are Trackspacer (get it from Pluginboutique when it periodically goes on sale for $29), and MSpectralDynamics, which I also have but haven't entirely gotten a handle on.

I've tried a few, and I've also set up my own mastering stack, with a bus compressor, mid-side EQ, and limiter. Right now I am really digging Brainworx' bx_Masterdesk, which is available right now as a freebie from Plugin Alliance. Before that I had the lite version, Masterdesk Classic, and liked it. It's just a collection of all the usual tools you'd have in a mastering chain: EQ, compressor, limiter, stereo controller. Classic is fine, but the pro version gives you more control. Since I have so many excellent bus-friendly FX, I vacillate between using the Swiss Army knife tools and individual ones like Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor, elysia alpha compressor, Millenia NSEQ, Lindell TE-100, etc. Meldaproduction MLimiterX is my current fave limiter, but Sonic Anomaly Unlimited is also excellent. With Brainworx stuff, always be sure to remember that you can load factory presets from the "VST3" menu in the Cakewalk plug-in UI.

I know you already sorted this, but for the sake of lurkers, no, you shouldn't need to register any audio interface before using it. Download whatever drivers from their website and go. And Macs do have USB, so that Scarlett could be plugged straight into her computer, which is the way I would do it. Since the 2i2 is "class compliant," you can plug it into either a Windows or a Mac system and it will work without special drivers, but of course you always want to use Focusrite's ASIO for production work. I always plug audio interfaces straight into the computer if at all possible, and if at all possible, not even have them share the internal bus.

It only made sense after I gave it some thought. One way of looking at a compressor is that it takes something away to bring out something else. It can help make a track "pop" and it can also push it back a bit. So if my compressor setting was knocking off the attack (I don't remember at the moment what the settings were), it would leave space in the mix for the bass track's attacks and then go back to sitting on top of the bass track. Or the other way around, the arp might have been stomping the bass track's attacks and letting the sustain bloom. It's like EQ carving; dipping some frequencies out of the piano track to let the guitar track come through (something else I stumbled upon by accident and finally understood). Well, that's a challenge, trying to figure out just what I did to get that result. 😄It was serendipitous, to be sure, I was just turning knobs to see what I would get. A "mix with my ears, not my eyes or brain" moment. One issue with sidechaining is that it can be a "blunt instrument." Even if I filter the sidechain input, it still ducks the entire full spectrum of the target track. Here is where I sing the praises of Trackspacer, but I still think that I wouldn't have gotten the same results with Trackspacer without maybe opening the panel and messing about with the attack and release. Moreover, it was a good lesson and reminder that every single element of a mix affects the other elements.