Starship Krupa

On 3/14/2022 at 3:02 PM, msmcleod said:

I got them mixed up with Variety of Sound, which did re-release their plugins as 64 bit

Whoa, talk about happy accident, I hadn't known that VoS had finally done that. I used to like a couple of their plug-ins back in my 32-bit days, especially Density, which I see is now 64-bit.

This is great information, and to @El Orbhe, Variety of Sound make some great freeware stuff, check them out.

19 hours ago, Grem said:

It ended up being a USB hub that she was using.

Good shootin'. I'd guess it wasn't supplying enough juice for the 2i2 to provide proper phantom power to the mic.

At this point, I use a combination of tweaking note duration (and I remember those horrible MIDI songs from the 80's that seemed to use only one or two note durations for the whole thing) and manually fiddling with velocity. Messing with start times usually sounds "off" to me, unless as some have said, I nudge it behind the beat a click or two and do that consistently.

No, that's not the Step Sequencer's job. Step Sequencer is a way to enter MIDI notes.

As suggested, look into Matrix View for the kind of workflow you describe.

We hope that someday Cakewalk will get an integrated sampler, but until then, 3rd-party instruments and the Matrix are the only options.

You should use the Zoom's ASIO driver. Make sure that between the last time you ran the DAW and now that somehow ASIO4ALL/Magix Low Latency Driver or similar didn't get installed and hijack your driver.

And yes, when you say it's not working, what exactly do you mean? Does the Zoom not show up in Preferences as an available device? Does it otherwise function but with poor sound quality or high latency? Does it work with programs other than Cakewalk?

What is it not doing that you want it to do or is doing that you don't want it to do?

Hello, Yuri.

The first thing that I can think of is that since your playback devices are different between your main system and your notebook, Cakewalk just needs to have your notebook's sound device selected as its output. Check in Preferences to make sure you have selected the notebook's sound device as an available output, then choose that as the output of your master bus.

Make sure that you're copying over the full project folder, including the Audio folder.

After that, make sure that you have all necessary plug-ins installed on both systems and are using the same version of Cakewalk.

That's all I have. Good luck!

Oh, BTW, just so you know, even though it isn't the computer you're having trouble with, Cakewalk is now no longer officially supported on Windows 7. For Cakewalk use, it's past time to upgrade.

4 hours ago, John Vere said:

get rid of any 32-bit plug ins

This. There should be nothing you need that is only available as a 32-bit plug-in.

Modern Lost Angel is an effect that is especially unnecessary with Cakewalk. The much better CA/2A (also an LA/2A clone) is right there in your ProChannel, and it doesn't get any more compatible than that. I think the rest of Antress' FX are also 32-bit and they're mostly clones of hardware that other people have since cloned as 64-bit freeware. Analog Obsession is a good source of such things.

If you want to find good 64-bit freeware that's been checked out by other Cakewalk users, there is a thread in the Instruments & Effects subforum that has more than you could probably ever hope to use.

Suggestion for future inquiries: put a taste of the issue you want help with in the title of your post. It's a better way to attract people with knowledge about it. Everybody who posts in this section wants answers.

9 hours ago, SkG RAVEN said:

Hi guys , i just bought a bm800 condenser mic,v8 soundcard (plus cables,stand and everything)

Since i wanna use all that equipment,can i produce proffesional music?

Depends on how hard you're willing to work.😄There's nothing about that package that would prevent you from it, and if your budget for mic and interface was $50, you're not going to find better. I'm not one to tell people who've already invested in gear that they should have spent more money and gotten something better. If you had asked before buying the package, you may have gotten a different opinion from me.

The better the quality of the gear, the easier it gets to get good results because you're not fighting its limitations. In this case, fidelity of the mic, and possible noise floor of it and the interface. But that's not to say you can't get good-sounding results with what you have, it'll just take more effort and learning your mixing tools.

As others have mentioned, entry-level Chinese condenser mics tend to have a presence peak, but in my view it's better to capture the information and subtract some of the highs with EQ than it is to try to add highs where they're not. Noise can be gated or edited out, especially if you're only using the mic for voice. When you record, if you stick the pop filter in front of it and move in close it will help emphasize the body of your voice. Who knows, maybe you have a voice that the BM800 will flatter.

If you stay with making music, as your listening skills develop you'll surely outgrow the mic and interface, but by that time you'll know if you want to stick with it. The next level up for vocal recording would be an AT2020 and Scarlett Solo (or Studio 2|4), the pair of which would cost $200-ish new (but are available on the used market). And you'll still be able to use the pop filter, stand and mic clips from your $50 bundle with the better quality gear. Win.

4 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Incorrect information

I know that, of course. I was throwing a bit of Socratic Irony at Mister Troll. So much more fun (and effective, if you want them to shut up and go away) than attempting to refute them directly.

When I suggested that CbB was based on SONAR X code, well, isn't it, at least to the extent that SONAR Platinum was? 😉

5 hours ago, Ric said:

It was different in the States

Distribution in the States was a WAY different story in the physical media era due to the geographical enormity and population size. Touring still is of course. I get a smile whenever I see the phrase "UK Tour." Geographically, that's about equivalent to touring the state of California.

If for whatever reason your label ran into a snag getting your records on the shelves, it could blow your whole career. There's this band from the '70's, Crack The Sky, who were attracting album-of-the-year reviews for their first record, being compared to a heavier Steely Dan, etc., but their label got the radio station copies around before they were in the shops. They wound up very obscure except for in one major urban center, Baltimore, Maryland, where somehow a dj liked them AND the label got records in the stores. So in one single city they were like Styx, and everywhere else like....I dunno, Hatfield and the North or Mogul Thrash were in the US. A few cognoscenti might have known, but that's it. #3 on the bill everywhere but Baltimore, where you better have a big enough venue for their headlining appearance.

To this day, if you're an underground-ish act doing a van tour, if you make just a little extra effort to stop and play the college towns between the bigger cities, or book shows an hour or two's drive from whatever larger city where you're part of the "scene," you can make the kids deliriously happy, because they're starved for live music. There's less to do in those smaller towns. If a band from (gasp) San Francisco takes the trouble to play there, you'll sell out of merch and get treated like rock stars. Really quite wonderful if you're used to comparatively jaded big city crowds. Kids will come out whether they even like your style of music or not because it's where everyone's going to be that night. And they're so much less "cool" and standoffish than city punters.

I've never heard President Zelenskyy's speaking voice, but it would surprise me to find out that he speaks English with a Southern accent.

Nice, performance, though, whoever it is, and the guy does kinda look like him.

After these troubles subside (as soon as possible) I want to hear his new standup routine.

I was surprised at first at the lack of moaning, but then I thought about it and considering the....audience....for Meldaproduction's products, we're not usually of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it/I just want it to work" attitude.

We're more toward the  "wow, this thing's great, what can I do to customize it?" attitude. Would you rather buy something with too many features or too few? 😄

I hope for the sake of the "32-bit Windows 7 that never connects to the net" crew that he allows the old 32-bit versions to coexist with the new 64-bit versions, but as a customer with "lifetime" licenses, I say it's about time. Dropping 32-bit eliminates extra debugging and QA.

1 hour ago, PavlovsCat said:

I was an excellent rock drummer back in the day.

I am, at 61, still trying to become "excellent" at anything musical. 😂 Still trying is good, though, I think on good days.

I'm not without my own injury stories.

When I first started playing drums, because I took no lessons I was holding my sticks so that they went right across the second knuckle joint on my middle finger, and the rest of my middle finger started getting numb and tingly. Even though I'm Starship Krupa, not Starship Bonham if you get my drift. I tried tape, I tried laminated bamboo sticks, then finally I remembered that I had had a similar issue when I started playing league softball 25 years earlier, but with my thumb joints. I changed up my grip so that I was gripping the sticks at a pad, between joints, and the problem went away. A teacher would have spotted that before it started to injure my nerves, I think.

One drummer friend of mine uses those sticks where they drill out the core and replace it with rubber, and dang, those things do absorb shock. They feel odd to play with at first because so much less vibration goes up the shaft. I'm sure you've tried them.

For programming beats, not even playing them on a controller, I am sure I'm better at it for having learned to play drums. There's a skill to listening to music and knowing, as a drummer, what will work. Even in hip hop and EDM, one of the guidelines is to try to avoid programming things that would be impossible for a human drummer to play, given our finite number of limbs. That rule is broken all the time, of course, and that's an integral part of some genres, but it's a valuable one to know. Moreover, you have to be able to imagine a beat before you program it (even it that's done as you go along).

I'd always been a guitar and bass player until about 20 years ago I started taking piano/theory lessons, which stopped when I cut the end of my left index finger off with a jointer. Fortunately a good hand surgeon was on duty that day, so while my left index finger is about 1/4" shorter, it still works. It didn't exactly improve my guitar playing. Tony Iommi'd. 🙄

16 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

I'm quite sure that you have more talent than me in every area (music and production)

You haven't heard my drumming! 🤣In the 10 years since I took up that instrument, I consider it am achievement that more people have invited me to play than have asked me not to play. As a guitarist, well, I'm probably a good guy to jam with because I'm unlikely to try to take a solo on unfamiliar material (although I can do that well enough on keys, where I've learned my scales). I understand theory better than most underground rockers of my acquaintance, but that's because so few of them understand any at all.

I think I'm getting fairly okay at understanding and executing mixing concepts, but I wouldn't have asked you for stems if I didn't think I needed the practice myself. 😄

Sure, why not?

As one who has a dedicated switch box so that I can try my mixes out on all 4 of my sets of monitors, I say the more the merrier. The more speakers/systems you listen on, the more likely you'll flush out EQ issues.

7 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

The only problem I might have with the Arturia is one I made for myself. I ordered an open box because it was much less. Hopefully someone else didn't register the keyboard software. I have a feeling they probably did.

IME, as long as you have a receipt from an official retailer hardware companies will honor the bundling deal. Open box or not. But here's hoping the the previous buyer didn't get around to registering it.

On 3/11/2022 at 9:53 AM, usalabs said:

Bandlab took it over, and called it CbB Sonar Platinum

Did they? I was unaware of that.

On 3/11/2022 at 9:53 AM, usalabs said:

(completely different to Sonar X3 PE)

Completely different? I never used SONAR X3, but my understanding is that Cakewalk by BandLab was originally based on the SONAR X series code. Of course, I was never aware of anything called "CbB Sonar Platinum," is that something that BandLab did before the Cakewalk by BandLab that was based on the SONAR code and has been under active development for 4 years came out?

2 minutes ago, Philip G Hunt said:

If you want to shell out some money, you can rig the system.... But you still need a great song.

And in this case, "great" means "one that people want to listen to over and over."

So true. Chart numbers only pique interest; you can get all the exposure in the world, but if people hear what you do and don't want more of it, you're sunk.

1 minute ago, PavlovsCat said:

Dropped the ball on sending you my project files largely because I'm embarrassed about my vocals

I can't imagine why you would be embarrassed about sending stems of your dry vocals for a relative stranger to listen to solo'd up on a very revealing monitor playback system. 😂

(Just upgraded my interface and then spent a couple of days restoring a vintage Crown D-150 to use as my studio amp and I can suddenly hear all manner of reverb tails, transients and trippy little stereo effects in records I thought I was familiar with)

I've told you before that I think your vocals have character and they will sound even better with judicious application of psychedelic era Beatle-y processing. Whenever you're ready, buddy.

I don't understand precisely what you mean.

On my system, with both Track and Console open, the buttons on the FX racks follow each other no matter the state.

They dim when the rack is bypassed and turn grey when the individual effect is bypassed.

Are you using a custom theme, by any chance?

I just upgraded to an interface with more flexible routing, and yes, I'm ready to try patching in some outboard gear.

However deeply it's baked into the code, there is some demand here. Friendly bump.

Re: James Hargreaves video. The "UK Chart" that he says his song got on was "Physical Singles." I can't imagine that it represents a huge market.

Was it bracing for this plug-in 'ho to watch this guy demonstrate getting his sounds using the ugly-***** DXi stock Vegas FX? Anyone here use Vegas ExpressFX on their master bus? Good lord.

Re: The Troll. Yeah, it was. Obviously, with the hit-and-run, he's not interested in an actual discussion. Bonus, though, and one of the things about this forum that continues to amaze me, is that a troll post didn't wreck the thread, rather it was fertilizer for a pretty interesting discussion. Are we all enough veterans of online forums that we know better than to get wound up and launch ad hominem attacks at trolls? I used one of my favorite anti-troll tactics, which was to ask them to elaborate. In my long experience, that's a troll kryptonite. Stay reasonably polite, keep asking them reasonable questions.

Re: @Philip G Hunt's excellent points, #7 is especially important. Once you get the attention/success you think you want, will you be able to embrace it and live with it? As Spock wisely put it, it is often better to want a thing than to get it. I'll add that it's best to figure out as much as possible what you want from a music career. "To earn a decent living" is NOT enough. There are many avenues for musicians to take toward this goal. Member of live touring band, sessions, teaching, casuals. One thing I know about myself is that my creative process takes a long time. If I were in a situation where I had to cough up new gems every few months, that would be hell on earth. So I have to pull back. What is success for me at this point in my life? First I want to make music that pleases me. Next I want to put music out that people enjoy and I would also in some way like to connect with the people who enjoy it. The pie-in-the-blue-sky goal would be to be able to take the stage in front of an enthusiastic audience (this is the least realistic goal, but I would love to make it happen). If I make any money at all from the process, that's gravy. That's why Bandcamp plus a YouTube video for each song suits me. With Bandcamp and YouTube, it's easy to know what reach you have with each song. You know how many times it's been played and/or purchased.

When I was putting together hobby bands, I took my goals one at a time. If we managed to get a club to book us so we can play in front of people, that was success. If we got more shows, success. Get a following, success. Record a decent-sounding demo, success, get it played on the radio, success. With my last band, those were the boxes I ticked before Philip's point #7 seized the other members and they wandered off. And I'm happy with that. How many people dream of doing those things and never get to do them? I've played on stages in San Francisco! I've heard myself on the radio! I put together a cool band, wrote songs and played lead guitar! When I watch other musicians playing, I've felt the strange autopilot in-the-moment bubble they're inside, a feeling like no other. That zone which is outside of normal perception of time and space. How many people get to feel what that's like?

Ah, so it seems to be that they decided to put up the bundle installer so that those of us with anything from it could access it, and stripped the serial requirement out of everything.

That would imply that I still only technically have licenses for the two PB freebies in the package, and the other ones just happen to work. Ah well, I'll use the other things in the bundle, and if the software police come and knock on my door I'll plead confusion and point to this thread as proof of my attempt at diligence. The owners of the products are probably too busy bathing in Dom Perignon while lighting cigars with $100 bills to assemble a legal team to come and get me.

10 hours ago, paulo said:

for whatever reason in CW it doesn't show up in the plug-in manager, so I can't add it to my custom menu

Odd, it's showing up over here. Maybe rescan all?

Okay, I see. If you scroll allllllll the way to the bottom of the product page they say that it comes in VST and AU, but it doesn't say how to get the plug-in version. The button makes the cursor change to the hand, but clicking does nothing.

However: when installing it on my laptop I watched the installer shell closely and saw that at the very end, it installs a VST3. It just doesn't allow you the options that installer shells usually do. I rarely install standalones.

Anyway, this is an amazing-sounding plug-in, quite worthy of being payware. A set of pianos and strings that sound this good and the download is only about 210MB.

And it did its job well, too: I bought a Studiologic SL880 20 years ago, best action ev-ar from a weighted controller, so I was interested to see what Fatar/Studiologic were up to. Turns out they've been busy. Keyboard controllers still, of course, but now they have many more really good-looking synths, pianos, and a compact drawbar-equipped clonewheel organ. Brian "Oblivion" Auger is the star endorser. If I were gigging on keys, I'd surely look closer. They obviously have some talent coding their sound generators.