coffincoffee

Hi again. Thanks for your reply. Bought this laptop in 2012. Here are my system's specs: Asus n56v Windows 8.1 Pro 64bit Intel Core i5 3210M @ 2.5 GHz 8 gigs of DDR3 Seagate 1 TB sata III, 5400 rpm Realtek Hi Def Audio As far as stability is concerned, in the almost 3 weeks of use to finish that little piece, CbB did not crash or hang even once. Everything was smooth sailing on smooth sea, I only had a few stutters in audio output but was quickly fixed by playing with the buffer size. But then it was less than 10 instrument tracks. If in future I'm gonna need some heavy processing, I'll just use the freeze button to conserve ram, that's what they say anyway. So up to this point I think I'm still fine. Just downloaded some more free pianos, but havent got to try them yet, in case I need to uninstall the other version I have here, Sonar X3. Or maybe I'll go your route and get the license. Thanx again guys.👍

That's a rather good alternative to dying in front of a DAW from exhaustion and burnout😁. Too bad, we dont have natural snow where I live, but if I could convince 10k neighbors to dump the ice from their fridges at a stadium close by, I might get somewhere close to skiing on snow! Yes, I already have Cakewalk SI-String Section installed and have had a few hours playing with it. However I notice that the ranges of these insttuments are different by a few notes compared to the string vsts I got for free (vst4free.com). Not a big deal really, unless I was going to have my music played by real musicians which can never be the case today. Now that you brought this up, I forgot to mention it but when I decided to have CbB installed I had a friend, who knows much better than me abt daws, over to help me with the setup. I think he said something abt trying an earlier version of Sonar on my laptop to make sure it had the juice to run a later version of it. Yes it's still there, tho somehow there's no icon on the desktop. I wouldn't have known if you had not mentioned Cakewalk TruePianos. If I uninstall it now, would the pianos still work? I'll have to get by with those free piano vsts instead. Well some good news at last. I just finished 'writing' my first piece of music in a daw! It's not much, despite taking weeks, it's around 3 minutes, and only makes use of some strings and pianos like I intended and still not properly mixed but for a beginner I'd love to believe it's a good start! Thanx to all who have helped👍

I I have lived long enough and been thru quite much to know that I can relate to that. When I was in the first years of picking up the electric guitar (around 15 years or so ago! Yes, it's been a long unending journey with no end in plain sight..) I thought it would only take me 3-4 months at my pace (slow learner here btw) to be able to play 24th Caprice with a little bit of flair. How obnoxiously vain I and many people like me were.. There was a time though when I was closer to that specific goal and I could say that there was present a certain level of comfort as I went thru the routine of practising that piece. We all know the value of persistent practice..and practice is something I tend to screw up lately...I'd like to attribute this dwindling attitude to a lack of vision perhaps, not being able to define a clear set of goals..and the longer you stay away, the worse it's gonna get. Untreated it'd soon escalate into an illness and would become too bad arrriving at a certain point that a whole lot of things would almost seem to feel like a burden. Pluggin in the guitar and turning on the amp can put such a drain on the brain.. Often it's much more fun to be doing things with half a mind than to pour your whole heart into it, much easier to fool around for hours on end than to come up with something rewarding or productive. On some days you might get away with it, on some other days it's only going to hurt you pretty bad, push you many steps backward, and this in the long run is a ruinous tendency onto itself. The danger now lies in the how many more miles you're willing to tread on this path that one day you might as well end up resigning your brains to the murky waters in the drain. Anyways, I'm not the type that would allow myself to become overly worried about it tho, coz' I've come up with a highly viable plan which may only require a few minor tweakings and adjustments and some getting used to. I have a rather elevated degree of confidence in this and the key word here is motivation. Yes, in the face of a bleak uncertain future, that's the one thing we all honestly need, motivation, to enlighten the gloomy treacherous road ahead of us and to be able to discern and fully understand the challenges and difficulties we've come to pass, whenever we're required to to look back. I'd say, have a little faith, and many things will become clear as day. And yes to that glorious end, watching all these videos, disseccting all these articles and dwelling on all thes forums have to a certain level rekindled my hopes. I'm not ashamed nor reluctant to admit that the trials and tribulations you and many people like you have managed to conquer and to think of the kind of hell you must have been through that today you've grasped it all in your palms with power and ease, have bestowed on me a whole plethora of renewed, reenergized motivations... yes motivations...to just hurl my guitar out the window, burn my amp to cinder, wipe my laptop clean and start looking for a new, more realistic, much less painful hobby! :😁

bitflipper, again many many thanx for the input. I think I have enough recommendations and tips now to start hacking away at the daw. There is tho some sort of a foreboding sense that I'm going to require months to churn and assimilate all the info I get from just this one thread😁 but I also believe it's going to be one hell of a fascinating ride. Lotsa thanx again guys.

Yes I'm afraid this is so. The more we depend on the multitudes of today's sophistication the more we lose touch of how simple and effective they had been. The moment we break them, we stretch our hands forward and begin to walk in the dark and end up knocking down a whole lot of things in our journey to reach the..light switch. For the piano tracks: TruePianos Cakewalk that came with the default installation. For the string tracks: (some string instruments I grabbed from vst4free.com); Sonatina Violin VSCO2 Violin VSCO2 Cello Section Sonatina Cello Sonatina Double VSCO2 Double Bass with different articulations for each track. I am certain they're not the best around but for the purpose of learning and experimenting esp. for a beginner I believe they are more than enough. Scoring for an actual ensemble would seriously be a wild dream come true Perhaps in 20 years, haha, I would be there somewhere. Basically what I've been doing up till now is create a triad on the virtual piano (by using the guitar fret pane), keeping in mind to make the root the lowest note, and then copy or separate the notes into different instruments, e.g. -all the root notes go to the double bass, - all the 3rds go to the cello - and all the 5ths go to the violin/viola. I will then make some tweaks on the notes, like making a group of notes an octave higher or lower as long as they're within the ranges of those instruments and mostly making tweaks to the velocities of the notes. From here as suggested by these replies, I would just double each of these instruments with each track having different articulations, pannings, volumes, etc. Yes I'm aware of the many millions libs available out there and there's gonna be plenty of factors that I think will require some considerations on my part e.g. the capcabilities of the system I'm using here, and not least critical, the amount of $$$ I'd be able to spend. Thanks for the tips, will look further into this. Currently I'm on a pair of affordable (read: mediocre ) Sony headphones and also earphones. Probably won't get a more decent pair of monitors anytime soon. But hopefully when I get better at this I may get one. When I mentioned about 'music sounding too thin' I wasn't really referring to the laptop built-in speakers, but rather to my 10 watt single-speaker Vietnam assembled Marshall amp Enuff for mild bedroom guitar practice but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of it acting as a decent monitor. Lotsa thanks for a clear explanation, you nailed the answer to many of my burning questions on what it exactly means to 'move/nudge notes a bit to the right/left etc.' that I've been reading in the few articles and videos I could find on the web. This really has helped clear a whole lot of the confusion I got when I first used the piano roll view and started tweaking those notes to meet similar objectives above. This is undoubtedly the 2nd most important piece of info in my thus far brief journey, the most important pieces are of course, 'how to use CbB for beginners' For the time being I only have instruments taht are freely available mostly from here; vst4free.com. A lot of people recommend Dimension Pro and for my current purposes it looks like it will suffice but I'm afraid it would have to come later on when I'm a bit more familiar with using all these virtual instruments. Question 1: If I have an 'ensemble' track, does it need to be doubled too like the single instrument tracks? Won't this make ensamble track(s) sound muddy/cluttered? Yes, I've been playing with different articulations for the instruments I use and they do sound a bit realistic now than they did previously. <b>Question 2: Lets say I have a cello track for a rhythm section that lasts for a whole minute. Is a particular articulation meant to be played thruout the whole length of the track, or do I apply the articulation to wherever I want it to be and not the whole of the track? Or perhaps it's really up to one's taste? ----------------- Many, many thanx for all the replies and tips. Looking forward to making some great music with CbB, and uh, I used the word 'great' just now with a lot of freedom and most relatively i.e within the constraints that are on me. Oh, one final question.. Question 3: When I need to add some effects to a vst instrument, e.g. I'd like to add some delay to a viola, do I use the 'built-in' delay that came with the said instrument or do I add the effect to the track itself (e.g. the sonitus delay)? Or simply a bit of both would result in a better job? Lotsa thanx again.

Hello there everyone. I've just got Cakewalk by Bandlab installed on my rather ageing laptop here and I've been meaning to create music with it for quite some time, tho I really have to admit that this is all new territory to me. Until recently, apart from using it for a little guitar practice I had no idea how to go about creating complete music. The few videos I've watched these last few months really helped me set my bearings on where to begin tho they have also left me with a lot to ask. As for the moment I'm thinking of using virtual instruments esp. the piano and one or two string instruments: the cellos, violas etc. Lets say I'm planning on a little piece of music which makes use of a cello, violin and piano virtual instr. For each instrument how many tracks would be needed to make the music sound acceptably realistic and not sound too thin? Honestly I'm more worried of it sounding thin like listening to a song on a laptop built-in speakers...Pardon my analogy but that's what I hear when I take a listen to what little bits I've managed to create these last couple of months. Frustrating, yeah I know the feeling..:D Hope to learn new things from you guys here. Thanks :D