Shane_B.

My EMG's just gave up the ghost after 37 years in Kelly. (my black strat.) I have the original ones that David Gilmour designed his signature EMG Series off of. The off white with gold lettering ones. The gold lettering means they were alnico magnet based. I'm thinking of trying a set of Fender Noiseless Pickups that don't require a pre-amp/9v battery but it hurts to say goodbye to these. 😢 I originally put them in to get rid of the noise from bad grounds and neon signs in the bars. See sonny, why back in my day, neon was all we had before LED's.

But it says right in it's description that it's an "annoying dialog". I had to giggle when I read, "democratize access to music production" and "100% free . . . but we need money to make it free.". Looks like a nice clean DAW. That's my #1 complaint with most DAW's. Too much going on and I get cornfused.

Or is it?

I've found most forums are dead now. I think they're viewed as old school in this attention span-less world we live in now. It's mostly old timers here now and we're basically free tech support. I think that's the only reason the forum is here. TDPRI seems like it's still a pretty good forum but I stopped going there a long time ago because of the mods. There was one in particular who would attack everyone and anyone for absolutely no reason. He left me alone for a long time then suddenly started following me around in threads so I just left. Never engaged him or anyone. I just walked. After my tenure at the old cake forum I made a conscious decision to just walk away from everything that even remotely bothers me so I just left. Never said a word to any of the guys I had become friends with or anyone. I felt bad about it afterwards. I kept getting emails asking if I was alright but I never responded. I've learned that even if you're right about something, if someone disagrees with you, you always come out looking bad or like a troublemaker if you take a stand and it's just not worth it. For example, there's a thread here right now that accidentally got derailed into a BiaB discussion that I desperately want to respond to but I just have to walk away. It's just not worth it. They did something fun in one of the sub forums at TDPRI. Someone would post a backing track and all the guitar pickers would take a crack at doing their own lead parts to it and post and everyone would compare. I did so many that I got really good at making up riffs on the fly. I really miss that. It was always the same core group of guys and stragglers would come along once in a while. It was really cool to hear how different everyone approached the songs. I looked the other day and the same guys are still doing it and it's been 5 or 6 years since I left and they were doing it long before I got there. It would be fun to do something like that here. Sorry for the long post. I'm bored out of my mind. Think I'll go walk on the pond out back and see how thick the ice is. 🥶☠️👻

True! But ... if I get an interface where I can actually use all the I/O's, and go get 10 more compressors, mix everything ITB to stems, I only have to do it once. 😁 As for the ground loop thing, so far so good. The only problem I have right now is my speakers are making a WWII radio sound depending on how low I have my buffers set. It's not coming through my headphones and is not present in my mixdowns. I can work with it, but it's annoying. You'd think with all the hearing loss and tinnitus it wouldn't be a problem, but hell no. It's right where I still have some good hearing left. LOL! I had a blast last night. It was a bit of a pain I will admit, but it was worth it. I had a Drum, Rhythm Guitar, Lead Guitar, Bass, and Vocal track I ran through it separately. It did take a while but I just made supper while it was going. Then I used the new feature in Studio One 5 where you can simply draw out the peaks you don't want and I used Melodyne to take out the clicks on the bass. I'm afraid to listen to it now. You know it is, it can sound great while you've been at it for 3 hours, but then the next day it sounds horrible. I really wish I could emulate this ITB but so far I haven't been able to.

This is the one I'm looking forward to. I'll have to rip the 4th disc as it's Region B Bluray, but the other 3 discs are 4K Region Free.

The last band I was in up in Iowa was the best band I was ever in musicianship wise. They were far more skilled than I was. There were two of us who played lead and rhythm. The other guy and I got in to a heated discussion one night about what key Smoke On The Water was in. He was playing it in G Major and refused to change. The next week at practice just before we started playing it he leans over and whispers to me, "I looked at my sheet music and you were right. It is in a minor.". That guy was amazing on guitar but it was all gibberish to his ears. True story.

"Goes to show what a boy can become, without a sense of rhythm."

I'm having a blast with this. Now I need to upgrade my audio interface to something with more functioning inputs and go buy 6 more of these compressors to put on every bus. 😆 I just threw it on the drum bus in that tune I posted here a couple weeks ago and what a difference. I dialed it in in no time. My problem is my brain can't handle too many options. I've always been far better at mixing my songs on my old Tascam 8 track than I have ever been in any DAW. It's funny how we have VST's like auto dynamic EQ's but the ones I get the most use out of are the ones made to emulate vintage EQ's with just a couple of knobs. I can only imagine what it was like using the real thing in a real studio.

Endive. My mother used to make a bacon flavored gravy to put on it. Otherwise it's pretty offensive.

I'm really happy today. I got my routing problem fixed with my new Presonus Studio 1810c audio interface and I've been tinkering with mixing and mastering with the leveling tube comp in my sig. below. In a nutshell I had to disable the virtual mixer and use the front inputs that are controlled by the built in gain knobs. That's not in any of the manuals or tutorial video's that I could find. Just running through the unit with all the settings at their lowest so they really have no effect adds something that I just can't put my finger on. I can only imagine what a more expensive unit would do, but I'm very happy with what I have. I wish I would have done this a long time ago. BTW ... Amazon has those 1810c's at an even bigger discount now than I got on mine. They are listed as refurbished but mine came factory sealed, factory packed, and looked like it had never been touched. Maybe I got lucky. It's a great unit if you only need 4 inputs with mic pre's. I'm a happy camper. 👍

I really liked his later music. It almost felt like he was going back to his roots. Woman, Watching The Wheels, and a few others were great songs. I can only imagine what he'd be doing now. I'm sure he would have gotten back together with Paul. Too much money to be made not to.

Steve, I just thumbed up one of your posts to get you to 1,000 total member reputation. Do I win a prize? Perhaps a used Kemper? 🤪

Well thank goodness you got the correct Lennon woman song ... 😁

Sorry Steve. 😁 @bdickens ... If I have a song that starts in A and I change the key to B and it adds 7th's to everything after the key change, and according to you it's because of the way the samples were recorded, then why can I start the song in B and change the key to C and it plays the B's normal and adds 7th' to everything after the C? If what you are saying is true then every time I would have BiaB play a B it would be in 7th, no? Why can't it simply play the B after the key change the way it would if I had started the song in B if it's using pre-made samples?

LOL! You've been following me around on other forums haven't you Steve? I recently bought BiaB on hard drive because my internet connection was so slow and unreliable I couldn't download it. It was freaking expensive! 3 weeks later my internet provider went to a new 5G type network and upped it from 3Mb Download/1.5Mb Upload to 30Mb/20Mb at no extra cost . . . I was happy and pissed all at the same time. My very first tune in BiaB I tried to do a simple Christmas song. Get my feet wet with something I was familiar with. Starting on the last verse it changes key. The whole song is just in straight chords, no 7th's, 9th's, nothing fancy. I just wanted a simple basic straight open chord strumming with a simple drum/bass arrangement. Nope. Can't do it. After the key change BiaB adds in 7th's turning the song in to some warped sounding blues tune. Imagine the song Silver Bells done in a blues style. That's what it sounded like. I got attacked by the fanboy's when I asked how to make it stop doing that. Apparently that's how it's supposed to be. If you change key in a song 'technically' you are supposed to follow the original key and add in 7th's when the key changes. That was their excuse. BiaB has settings to force the program not to embellish key changes and chords that way. It doesn't work/it's broken. But tech support won't admit it and just says that's how it's supposed to be. So there you have it. If you change key in a song, you have to add 7th's. No if's and's or butt's. According to PG Music the creators of Band In A Box. BTW, it doesn't do it if you use their crappy midi files. Only when you try to use their Realtracks which are samples of real musicians. But still, that's the way it's supposed to be . . . BTW, I didn't realize Imagine changed key? Did we just get snookered? 😁

This is a hard one to answer. I've experimented with so many free synth's and samples. I use strings and piano as background and almost always go to a few patches in Dimension Pro and SI Strings. I've used pipe organ samples someone painstakingly sampled from a very old church in England I got off a Soundfont site many years ago that's no longer there, but I have the sf2's backed up. My main instruments are my guitars. Session Drummer 3 for drums. Dimension Pro for strings and piano and SI Strings. Guitar Rig Pro 4 for my amps and other special effects. You can run vocals through it and do some cool stuff. I like how you can record just the effects and save them as a wav. For mixing/mastering I use Ozone 9 Advanced, Melda AutoDynamicEQ, and the stuff that comes with Studio One Pro and CbB. I don't have the smarts or the attention span anymore to really dive in to new things so I tend to stick to what my muscle memory will allow. I mean, it just took me 4 days to set up a hardware loop on my audio interface. I fear I'm on a downward spiral. I'll have to dig out that pipe organ sound font set and do something and post. It was really good, especially when you know it's a real several hundred year old pipe organ.

I figured it out. What an absolute nightmare. I've been working on this for 4 days straight all the while being told it was my hardware that was bad by various people I've talked to. The big secret that's not in any manual or official video from Presonus is *drum roll* ... You have to disable Universal Control virtual mixer. And you have to use the Line Inputs on the front of the unit that have the mechanical gain knobs which I didn't want to do. 4 flipping days guys. Scouring the net. Reading their website. Asking for help on their forum from guys who have been using Presonus software and gear since day 1. I finally found the answer by some guy on YouTube who went in to detail on how to set it up and even took the time to photoshop up a flow chart. Oh my God I'm so happy and mad all at the same time. It's becoming clear to me that almost nobody uses this for external hardware or the internet would be rife with the questions I just asked. There is no way on Earth I or anyone would ever dream that the virtual mixer they force you to use for EVERYTHING has to be totally bypassed and you are limited to only being able to use the inputs that have the mic pre gain knobs. Not in the manual, their site, their forum, their youtube video's. Nowhere. Unreal. 4 days. Thanks for your help Bruno! EDIT 02/19/21 : I have to correct myself here in case someone stumbles across this looking for help on setting this up. After a lot more testing I discovered you can use all the inputs even without the virtual mixer. You just have to be extremely careful because there is no way to control the volume level. This goes against what I've seen in some setup videos that said you cannot use them without the virtual mixer. At any rate, you have to disable the virtual mixer or you get a bad feedback loop. You can manually adjust the levels by using the inputs with built in mic pre's or you can use the extra inputs but you just get line level with no way to adjust that except with your external hardware or the level come out of your DAW.

I can't believe he was 79. On a side less musically tragic note, Englebert Humperdinck's wife died a couple of days ago. They both contracted C19. He may not be far behind. He has a really good YouTube channel I subscribe to.

No I don't have loop back enabled. If you only have Artist, for a mere $15 dollars you can try the latest version of Studio One. 😁 😜 You don't have to use Pipeline. Supposedly it makes it easier to set up, but you don't have to use it. In Studio One you can send a track to an output on your audio interface, connect that output to your hardware's input, take your hardware's output and connect to a line in on your audio interface and assign that line in to another track in studio one and enable monitoring. It should be that simple. Pipeline allows you to compensate for latency but if you are just mastering like I am then you don't need it. I was trying to use it because all the video's made it look super easy to do. That said, I can't get that to work or Pipeline. I'm dragging the rest of my gear out of storage now and going to try and hook up monitors rather than just use headphones. I'm hoping that's the problem. BBL to report on my success. 🤞🏻 Tx.

I just installed Studio One 5 last night and somehow it scanned all of my drives and found Rapture, Dim Pro, Z3TA, Pentagon and all the other Cake stuff. It even found True Piano's. Funny thing is, I can't get Rapture to run in Studio One 3 or CbB, but Studio One 5 found it and it loads right up. Out of curiosity I clicked on the link that said 'True Piano's only works with Cakewalk click link to buy full version' when I loaded True Piano's 64. It's still available and you can still get a discount if you own Cakewalk. I couldn't believe it. I really like Rapture, Dim Pro, and Z3TA. I still use them. Z3TA can be used as a VST effect for guitar and vocal with some great results.

Wow! I just found out that they wrote Take Me Home Country Roads with John Denver. Never knew that.

Great song. Watch till the end. Look at that console!

LOL!!!!!!!!!!

Careful, you'll get the thread deleted.