Shane_B.

Happy belated birthday!

That's lie number one that we've all fallen for. I had a huge reply written to you yesterday but decided to delete it so here's the abridged version. The DAW and VST developers want you to believe it's possible to make a professional studio quality recording in your home on a laptop and headphones. It's a lie. It can't be done. You must have a decent sounding room. There is only so much you can do with software. You have to look at software like a fancy tape machine and go from there. In my opinion the room is probably the single most important thing when recording, if you are doing vocals and micing cabinets. You can achieve that in a small room with room treatment but it's tricky. If you are fortunate enough to have a house, even a small one, you can dedicate an area and treat it just for recording. That said .... you can still make great sounding recordings at home that rival "pro studio's" with or without a great room. Especially anything that has come out of these so called "pro studio's" in the last 25 + years. Almost all the studio's that recorded the great sounding albums are closed now and you are shooting for something that sadly doesn't exist anymore. Def Leppard may have written some of their own stuff but they didn't record themselves. They did it in a pro studio with pro help. What you and the rest of us here are doing is trying to accomplish a monumental task of writing to mastering. Normally there are a LOT of people in between that start and end point. That 'sound' you are hearing on those recordings is more the room and how the mics are placed on the cabinets. You cannot duplicate those sounds with just an amp. There's more to what you are hearing than just the amp (or amp VST) is what it boils down to. The other thing is, while the chord possibilities and lyrics are endless in how you can put them together, there is actually a very narrow path of what people actually like if that makes sense. It's extremely hard to write something new that's unique that hasn't been done before in one way or another. I'll give you an example. My father in law loves Joe Bonamassa. We sat down and watched a couple of his live shows on DVD one time. Apparently Joe hasn't heard of Bluray and HD yet. W T F Joe? Anyway, throughout both entire shows I kept saying, Oh wow, he's playing a riff from this Led Zepplin song in his song, or a riff from this group, oh wow that's Heart!. By the end when I pointed out that he was basically ripping off a lot of peoples riffs and recycling them my father in law got pissed off at me and never mentioned him again. One of the biggest if not thee biggest ripoffs of all time was the intro to Stairway To Heaven. Anyway, what I'm saying is it's extremely hard to be unique. Maybe take some songs you know and like and change them a little to get ideas? Have you thought about Band In A Box? It's great for just pumping in chords to see how they work together. It's a great writing tool. It seems you have two major issues plaguing you. The writing aspect and the recording aspect. It just takes time, and the fewer people in the process makes it take even longer. It's just the way it is. The fact that you are so torn about it says to me you are not really ready to give it up. It is a hobby, but it's an emotional one. Music triggers chems in our brains. It can absolutely become an addiction and it is really hard to completely walk away from.

Ditto. I joked about about Weird Al but the man is an incredible musician. So was Frank Yankovic. Funny they have the same last name, play the same main instrument, but aren't related. Jimmy Sturr, Big Joe Polka, and many others. I'm actually a big fan of a Polka fan. One of my favorite songs to do back in my band days was a Polka Medley we arranged. I used the accordion and tuba banks on my Korg X5 heavily and did backing tracks. It was very convincing. That old ancient Korg has some great sounds in it. Being in a Wedding band and playing at all the legion type places and banquet halls in the PA/NJ area it was a requirement to know polka's or you didn't get hired for a lot of gigs. Going from memory here and I know I'm forgetting some, we put together Beer Barrel Polka, The Pennsylvania Polka, and parts of My Melody Of Love by the Polish Prince himself (Bobby Vinton). I have a recording of it somewhere but the vocal tracks were just markers we did while recording the backing track and they are messed up. We took the hooks from them and strung them together and I think it was about 4.5 ~ 5 minutes long IIRC. My Melody Of Love is such a great song on it's own. Utoob vid of it here.

I loved this show. Still do actually although I haven't seen it in a *****'s age. Edit: You've got to be kidding me right? Seriously? IRT the *'s. Whatever.

Lloyd, "So, what happened Harry, some little filly break your heart?" Harry, "No, it was a girl." Lloyd, "Ooooh!"

Hell, I can't even remember what the question was. So my advice now, after 4 pages, yeah. Whatever it was, screw it man. It ain't worth the hassle. Unless it's music related. Then by all means, do what makes you happy and don't listen to anyone else. You know the old saying regarding what opinions are like. Edit: Make that 5 pages. I really think this thread has the potential for 6 ... maybe more.

Sorry to hear that Steve. Who knows, you could have been the next Weird Al Yankovic.

Alcohol helps quiet that subconscious. 👍🏻 Start saving now. To give you a rough idea of how this works ... Fallout 4 is almost 7 years old. I have a modern card that is nowhere near the 'low end'. F4 can't even detect it and automatically set itself to max resolution because the card is too new. It's about in the middle of what's available now. I have a 12GB EVGA RTX 3060. It runs the older Fallout's that are 10 + years old smooth as glass maxed out in 4K but I have to kick the resolution down and lower the graphics details for Fallout 4. Pretty amazing considering the recommended 'high spec' cards for this can't even hold a candle to the 3060. The top card you can get now is a 3090 Ti. They are going for around $2.1K and I'd be willing to bet it still wouldn't run this with all settings set to max. That said, it runs great if you lower your expectations and settings of the eye candy. F3 and FNV look much better than F4 IMO. And another odd thing, it actually looks better on console than PC and loads faster on console. This is why I got out of PC gaming originally. It's an endless money pit. On console you are locked, no options, you know what you're getting in to, and you accept it going in.

It sure is. Once I level up enough and don't have to sneak around I find it very relaxing to just wander around the desert in FNV and take in the eye candy. Between the ambient sounds and modding it with hi-res graphics then add in that Nevada Skies Weather Effects mod and wow. Just wow. Here's a vid that shows the options for Nevada Skies. It also allows you to adjust gamma, brightness, what the night sky looks like, among many other things all real-time in the menu screen without having to shut down and restart. It's pretty incredible and a little scary how these kids are able to write these mods.

I think they are small enough to where I can back up the vanilla game installation folders for each one on to a single 25GB disc. Then I can back up the mods to their own disc and just do a quick copy/paste then use the Vortex Mod Manager to install the mods if I ever want to revisit those. You can get official DLC sized and larger quest mod's for FNV that are massive. There's a couple out now and there are a couple in the works. One based in Mexico iirc. Then you can even get a mod called TTW (Tale Of Two Wastelands) that combine F3 and FNV and use FNV's newer game engine to drive both. You play both as one long huge game and travel to both maps seamlessly if I'm understanding the mod right. I skipped all those mods and went on to F4 but I should download them and back them up to disc. The modding rules are changing and in retaliation a lot of modders are deleting their content. Probably a good idea to download and backup what's still available. I managed to scrounge enough space after I used that Glary App Craig suggested. It took all night for F4 to download but it was waiting for me this morning. I love the building aspect of F4, but New Vegas set a pretty high bar. I got Skyrim and F4 in a bundle on Steam. I'm not even going to download Skyrim until fall. Too tempting to just sit here and waste the hours away. I don't mind in the fall and winter so much when I can't get outside to do anything, but as soon as it stops raining here I need to get back outside. Plus I'm putting heat in my shop so I can work outside all year round now so I'm not sure how much time I'll for this now anyway. These games consume your life. It's not playing COD or shooter. The whole series is VERY addicting.

It's really good on bass. That's what I initially bought for iirc. It wasn't until a few years later that I got the MPA II to pair with it. That's how I discovered the tube was bad on my originally one. Electric guitar was fine but bass sounded like the VLA II had a built in fuzz unit. Good luck with whatever you choose.

I didn't want to hijack the other thread where you mentioned this so I figured I'd post it here ... I got goose bumps when I saw this ... 😁

I've never used any other hardware extensively like I have the VLA II and MPA II gear so I can't compare how they sound and react to anything else. I looked up the WA76 and it says it's a Limiting Compressor so it's going to react different than the VLA II. ART's description of the VLA II on their website is 100% accurate. "natural sounding and sonically transparent compression ..." and "Mastering Quality Audio Signal Path.". That's how I would describe it too. Very natural and transparent and absolutely no line noise at all when using balanced cables. I use balanced cables through my entire signal path including the monitor cables. I only recently started using the VLA II for mastering and I'm sorry I never took the time to set it all up and do it years ago. I run my bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar (DI) and vocals all through the chain. Less is more with this though. You can easily overdo it without realizing it because it's so transparent and then things start to sound a little squished when you mix. I'll take more time and really kick in the VLA's compression when I do vocals but I'm a lot more conservative with the instruments and in some cases I just have them turned on for a cabinet emulator effect without compression kicking in hardly at all if at all. It all depends on the song, feel, and sound I'm shooting for. Just running everything through their analog path makes everything sound so much better to me. They remove the digital harshness like you are using a really good cabinet emulator. I think you'd be happiest if you paired it with an MPA II. It's an excellent mic pre/instrument input device. It feels like they designed them to work together and both are dual channel. The MPA II has an adjustable impedance knob to really hone in your mic's impedance. It makes a night and day difference on some of the mics I have compared to just going DI in to my audio cards pre's. I'm surprised I don't see the adjustable impedance control on more gear because it makes a huge difference, at least on the handful of mics I have. The other thing that is nice about these is all the knobs are segmented so you could take notes and put them back exactly how they were to recreate a sound. I've taken them both apart and they are very well made. The tubes are very easy to replace if you want to, but I never have. Before I plug in any tube based gear that is shipped to me I open it up and make sure everything is seated and hasn't been broken during shipping. As for modding or upgrading them, in spite of what you see on the net I don't believe changing the tubes on low powered gear in this price range will make a difference. In the very expensive gear with large power tubes maybe but not in low power driven tube gear like this. You'll more than likely get more of a change by swapping out the caps, diodes, and resistors for different values and I don't like modding stuff to that degree so I've never attempted it. Can you find other hardware that's the same price or more expensive that has a different sound? Yep. Is it better? That's up to the person using it. Will it have a cleaner signal path and be more silent like these units ... 100% no. I've detected zero background noise at ear destroying levels with both of these units activated and chained using balanced cables. When I got my very first VLA II it came from the factory with a bad tube. I asked Sweetwater or G.C. (can't remember which one I got it from now) to just ship me a new tube and they said they had to ship me a whole new unit and send mine back to the factory. They overnighted me a brand new unit and I've had it ever since. Well over 10 years. Probably close to 14 or 15 now. Still no crackle when I turn the knobs and it sits out in my portable rack unit uncovered 24/7. Still no problems with the jack inputs or the tubes, the VU lights still work. Hope this helps in some way. If you can, get it from some place you can return it just in case there's something about it you don't like.

I just installed and ran this. It found a ton of stuff in my registry and fixed it and 2GB of files it said were ok to delete. I didn't because some of them were very old files with weird file extensions in old programs I still use like IMGBurn. I didn't know what would happen so I left them alone. It also found a ton of files in Brave, hundreds of MB's but every time I clear out any cache in it I have to re-log in to all my web sites so I'm afraid to do that to. Hah. But ... it also found that two Firefox apps were loading during startup. I uninstalled Firefox months ago. It's nowhere to be found on my system. So I blocked them from loading. It's also said an internet client that a game downloader I was forced to install runs at startup even though I have the program set to not run at startup. When I checked the info on the file it said it is legit but is known to be used by hackers to slip malware on your system. This utility is very similar to the one I mentioned in my previous post but a lot better. Thanks for mentioning this.

Reminds me of the saying, "The silence is deafening.". I wish I had an original 45 of the song. It would be great for sampling real vinyl record pops and clicks.

I'm assuming you are referring to the horrible vocals? Sometimes these guys don't know when to quit. That was bad. Really bad. It was like he was tired and was singing flat the entire time and couldn't muster up the energy to get up to pitch. I imagine in ear monitors don't help if he was wearing them. I've seen so many live performers wear them for half a song and rip them out and leave them dangling over their shoulder. Two that stick out in my mind that I've seen video of ripping them out are Mick Jagger and Dave Grohl.

I'm going to check that out now. Thanks! I finished Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas and was going to download Fallout 4 this weekend ... nope. I got 23GB left on my SSD. The installer alone is 30GB, unpacked and installed I think it's around 47GB, then I'll probably mod the living daylights out of it and add another 100GB. I really need another larger C: drive but I don't have the strength or patients or knowhow to seamlessly and painlessly transfer the OS and everything without doing a fresh install. I could just add a drive but then I'd have to change the default install installation paths for the downloader and installer for F4 and I'm not sure how that will clash with mods and mod managers. Dealing with those things are like dealing with installing Dimension Pro and trying to put your samples in a directory other than the default. It can give you grey hair.

So glad I popped in to check out the replies while having my morning insulated travel mug of coffee. 😁 I stopped using those Freddy Krueger machines or whatever they're called and the fancy drip things with the timers and the super thin glass pots that break when you look at them and the filters and all that shtuff. I just use a good old fashioned stainless steel electric percolator pot. I make that stuff so strong and hot you could strip paint with it. Never need filters either.

Great cover! Both my parents worked at the private school in N.J. where J. Sebastian went. The school is in a tiny very rural town in NW NJ where the original Friday The 13th Part 1 horror movie was filmed. They ran the canteen there and got to know him. They said he was a really nice kid but I don't think they really knew who he was, or would be, until a few years later.

Because the Coffee House is a non-'daw'nominational music related discussion forum. Almost all of the people I communicate with here use Studio One as well as CbB (as well as most other major DAW's) and we talk about all of them openly here a lot. It is extremely rare that I frequent the Presonus forum and to be 100% honest, I never even considered going there to ask. But if the powers that be want to delete, no biggie. Feel free to do so. I'm cool either way. Edit: Oh, and I forgot to say, I apologize if I ruffled any feathers with this thread. Wasn't my intention.

I got an email the other day offering me $10 bucks to take a 20 minute online survey for Presonus, if I were one of the first 2,000 people to take it. Or something like that. I don't remember the exact details because I deleted it. But now I'm curious if anyone else got the email and did you do the survey and get paid?

I've seen it and just checked it out again. It's good, but not great or mega-star good in my opinion. I sincerely mean this, Danny Danzi, Batsbrew, and a quite a few others here are as good if not better. That's the kind of lead Clapton, Campbell, and John5 can do in their sleep. I mentioned those names because of the similarities of music and span of decades they cover. I can respect a great guitar player when I see one and Prince is a good but I just don't get all the hype around him. He's by no stretch a pioneer like Hendrix but I think people tried to make him this generations Jimi. Funny his name comes up. I saw a thing on Facebook the other day with side by side photos comparing other famous people to Danny Devito for height comparison. I was going to post it here because it had Prince in it but got sidetracked. Prince was only a couple inches taller than Danny Devito. I just tried to find it again and can't. In order from shortest to tallest in the pic was Devito, Prince, William Radcliff (Harry Potter) and some guy I've never seen before. It's amazing how much Dhani looks like his dad.

There's a lot of great music today. I still seek out new artists. I'll be 51 in a few weeks and my neighbor who is 55 turned me on to a new hard rock group out of Springfield MO yesterday. He showed me their latest Youtube video and said he talks with them on their Facebook page and just went to another one of their gigs last weekend. Some of the pop today is even good. I really liked some of Lorde's stuff a few years ago. She's gotten a little weird now. Even some of the EDM. Rap ... sorry. Not my thing whatsoever. But neither was classical and it's been around a few more centuries than rap. And as for Prince ... sorry, but the guy was extremely over rated. The majority of his lyrics were perverse and I have no idea how he gets the acclaim he does. There are a lot of great new country artists that are trying to stay true to tradition. And there is a whole new take on folk and rock music. People like Sierra Ferrell, Charlie Crockett, Amigo The Devil, Jake LaBotz (I love the duet he did with Puddles, that's how I discovered him.), The Avett Bro's. People like Pokey LaFarge who do harder music plus acoustic, plus a little jazz and some pop. The same guy who did this did this and this (pg-13). There's a ton of great new talent out there and they aren't locking themselves in to one category anymore and you never hear them on the radio short of the catching the local PBS stations maybe. Check out Heilung sometime if you want something really different. I can't stop listening to them. Wish I could see them live. There are a lot of new great artists out there that don't buy in to the digital age and making music with PRV and loops that actually perform live and sound the same live as in the studio but the self promotion deliver system has changed and they rely on the internet now to get their name out there. And it's actually better. You hit more people on the internet than you did passing out cassettes. Who are you playing for and what is your goal? I think this is the real question we should as the OP. Are you a weekend warrior wanting to play at wineries on the weekend or the rare bar that still has bands or a local coffee house? Are you ready to deal with the a-hole copyright snitches that go to bars now and nail bar owners and bands? We used to regularly play the animal circuit but I can't tell you the last time I saw a dance or gathering advertised at an Elks, Moose, or Eagles club or a Legion hall. Them and 3 bars in our area were our regulars. All of our wedding jobs and holiday parties came from those places. Do you want to play live for a living? Do you just want to write and put your stuff out there to get some feedback like in the Songs forum here? The weekend warrior thing with no real asperation to go anywhere is about the only scenario I can think of that you wouldn't need some kind of an online presence.

I hear he's pretty ***** about his sax. Quite the perfectionist. Really? I got asterisked? It means very picky ... 😁