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bitflipper

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Everything posted by bitflipper

  1. Glad to be of service, Craig. If we ever meet in person, I'll tell you how I met my wife...not a story for public consumption, albeit music-related.
  2. Back in the 70's I answered an ad for a keyboard player that sounded promising, as they advertised themselves as a 6-piece working band with immediate gigs. I showed up on a Thursday for rehearsal, and was informed that we'd be heading out the following Sunday for three weeks in Montana. OK, I thought, I'm a quick learner, I can do this. Then on Friday I learned that the entire band had quit the previous week, leaving only the drummer as the "band". Not a good sign. But I needed the money. On Monday, our first night of six in Bozeman, I found out the drummer was a meth head who kept a loaded gun next to his bass drum out of paranoia. After a six nights it came time to get paid. That's when I was told that the drummer was paying himself double what any of us were getting, because he owned the PA and the two vans, and we shouldn't complain because it was still more money than we'd ever seen. (It wasn't) The next week, in Billings, things got weird(er). The drummer, now in the throes of methamphetamine withdrawal, would periodically stop playing mid-song and stare at his feet. The second night there, the bass player had a nervous breakdown in the middle of a set and crumpled to the stage. Turned out she couldn't stand the drummer and was there only because he was her landlord and had threatened her with eviction. On the third night, the guitarist got so frustrated he threw his vintage Les Paul onto the dance floor and walked off. I contacted the bar owner and told him we wouldn't be able to finish the week. He was cool and said he had a local band he could call in. Next day, the drummer loaded up the trucks and left - without me and without the guitarist. We were left behind in Billings with our gear (including my 400 lb organ and Leslie). We had just enough money from the previous week's gig for the motel and airfare home. I had to pay a moving company to return my organ. Lesson learned, I thought. But the lessons weren't done yet. A month later I got a letter from the musicians' union fining me $100 for "quitting without notice". I sent them my union card with explicit instructions as to where they might place it. Fortunately, the Supreme Court had just ruled that nobody could be coerced into joining a union, so every musician quit the union at once. The musicians' union had been just a mob-affiliated shakedown racket anyway. In short order the only union members left were the Seattle Symphony. Sorry for the long story, but reading Shane's account got me angry all over again. And this was not my worst band experience.
  3. Reminds me of the Larry the Cable Guy joke: Sushi, that ain't bad. Take it home and fry it up, tastes like fish!
  4. I dunno. The thought of hanging out with a bunch of vegetarians...how many times a day can one proudly proclaim their devotion to veganism, especially when everybody else is already one themselves? Anybody up for a band dedicated to bacon burgers? I'm thinking "Slaughterhouse Five" if it's a quintet.
  5. Well it just keeps getting worse more interesting. We had rehearsal on Thursday and the pressure was taking its toll on our singer, who's married to the drummer. She and the guitarist let a trivial disagreement bloom into a big argument and he left in a huff, never to return. This is unusual for us, as we all generally get along really well. So yesterday we brought in a new guitarist and spent 4 hours working with him with the goal of deciding whether or not to cancel this week's gig, too. It's a good gig and we don't want to lose it - scenic location on a river, lively audiences and a decent-sounding room where we get to use our own PA. To everyone's delight, the new fellow really stepped up to the challenge. It looks like we'll go ahead with next Saturday's gig, even if it's with a somewhat truncated repertoire. The drummer has new drugs that are greatly alleviating his treatment's side effects. We're rehearsing again today and will get in at least one more session before Saturday. For my part, I am doing my best to project confidence that it won't be a train wreck. But there's a bit of a strain relief coming on Tuesday. I'm going up to Bellingham to see Penn & Teller, treating my daughter and granddaughter who haven't seen them live before. And since I'm not the one driving, it will be a pharmaceutically-enhanced evening for me. Brownies!
  6. Back in the mid-70's I'd been shopping for an electric piano and had settled on a Roland product, mainly because it was only $400. That was nearly half my monthly day-job income at the time, but I'd managed to put aside just that amount out of a summer's worth of gigging. The week I was going to go down to Guitar Center to score it, my buddy - the band's guitarist - asked me for a loan. His old girlfriend was coming for a visit, and he wanted to show her a good time. The deal he proposed was that rather than paying cash for the EP, I'd instead finance it and give the money to him. He'd then make the payments for me. True to his word, he did make the $40 monthly payments - for exactly 10 months. Unfortunately, that left a balance of $150 due to interest. He claimed he'd satisfied his part of the bargain. That led to a falling-out that nearly killed the band and kept hard feelings going for a long time. In the end he agreed to keep making the payments until the bank said it was done, and we remain close friends to this day. But I've never forgotten the lesson I learned: don't lend friends money. That's why, when my current bassist needed a Sansamp, I just bought one without discussing it with him and gifted it to him on his birthday. That's why, when our former guitarist needed a new amp, I just bought it with the understanding that he'd buy it from me someday. Still waiting on that, but if any of us could ever become wealthy rock stars it would be him.
  7. Back in the day it used to be an ongoing joke that a band would break up as soon as they ordered business cards. It was more often the case that band members just got sick of each other after enough time on the road. Or it'd be a fight over a girl. Or someone insisting on doing their original song that everybody else hated. Such trivial reasons to give up. And I just bought a new PA, too. I reckon I've got about 90 more gigs to go before I break even on that one. Can't go solo - I need at least one other bandmate to help move the bass bins.
  8. Our drummer is undergoing radiation therapy for cancer, and the side effects are proving too much for him. We've cancelled Saturday's gig and will probably have to cancel everything else on the calendar. I am seriously bummed. Most would say "just get another drummer", but it doesn't work like that. Even though this band focuses on vocals and vocal harmony and exploits that as a differentiator from other bar bands, what keeps me going is tightness. I remember seeing Tower of Power in the 70's, at a bar long-time Seattle residents will remember, the old Aquarius Tavern. I sat there slack-jawed, unable to comprehend how a band could be so tight, especially with so many players onstage at once. Some day, I thought, I'll be in a band like that. Well, it's taken 50 years, but I'm finally in a band like that. And it's the drummer who's the glue that makes that happen. No band can ever be tighter than its drummer. My buddy Mark is a frickin' machine when it comes to precision, be it rock-solid tempos or never missing a cue. He truly is the glue.
  9. If that's true, grab it quick. Excels at uber-squashing. [EDIT] Just checked and it's $149. My guess is they were adjusting (read:raising) prices and mibby just caught them mid-edit.
  10. I've never tried the UAD endorsed above, but I've got a boatload of Hammond emulations to compare. And this one is the best of the bunch.
  11. Here's an obscure one. Well, I remember seeing it peoples' record collections back in the day, but I don't think I'd ever given it a listen until today. I pulled this up after watching an interview with Leland Sklar in which he included No Other by Gene Clark in his list of his five favorite albums he's played on. High praise, given that Lee has played on literally thousands of records that run the gamut from straight-up pop to serious jazz and jazz-rock fusion. Many were huge commercial successes but most are appreciated primarily by music nerds. No Other falls into the latter category. I can see why this album wasn't a hit - there is still no tidy category for it. It's not Country, but has Country influences. It's not exactly Eagles-style Country Rock, although it does feature Timothy B. Schmitt on vocals. It's not folk rock, but Clark's former Byrds bandmate Chris Hillman plays on it. Here's the Wikipedia entry, which links to the impressive pedigrees of all the musicians who contributed to this album. I call it Country Prog. Some great melodic and inventive guitar work (7 guitarists are credited), and of course listening to Sklar is a master class for bass players. Here's a link to the full album. It's all good.
  12. George gives me hope. He'll be 80 next week, still a one-of-a-kind talent and sharp as a tack. He relates detailed anecdotes beginning from when he started out on ukulele at the age of 7, remembering the names of every mentor and every great player he ever met, as well as the melodies of the first thing he heard each of them play.
  13. Pretty cool software, and free to boot! I presume you've already been in contact with those folks? I see that although the product is free, support is not. I read a bit of their user manual. It seems to reinforce my theory that the Speakerphone problem is due to the browser section of the UI not being an actual subwindow, but rather drawn directly onto the main UI graphic. You are effectively interacting with a single window, the whole plugin interface being one window. Consequently, there are no standard Windows shortcuts nor NVDA shortcuts that will let you set focus to that portion of the display. If my hypothesis is correct - and I am not certain it is - you may have to find another product. That'll be tough, since Speakerphone is unique as far as I know. Unless AudioEase can suggest an alternate method for loading presets. That's what I was thinking when I suggested track templates. If you load Speakerphone with a specific IR file into a track, then save the track as a track template, every time you insert that template into a project it will include the plugin and have that preset/IR preloaded. I do this with complex instruments such as Superior Drummer, so I know it works. However, I do not have 400 presets in Superior Drummer, only 3. At best, the track template workaround would only be practical if there were only a handful of Speakerphone presets that you use regularly. A crude workaround, granted. Another possible avenue might be a VST3 wrapper, a VST2 plugin the serves as a VST3 host. I found this one, from the people who make the Sequoia DAW: https://www.xlutop.com/buzz/zip/vst3shell_v1.3.1.zip That's a direct link to the plugin. Here's a link to the KVR page: https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=565924 Sorry, this post has been a long stream-of-consciousness speculation dump, but I'm shooting in the dark here, so to speak.
  14. Surely you're referring to the east and west coasts of Florida, no?
  15. Never heard of a VI doing that. Dropped notes, yes, but throwing in extras? That's a new one. Are you sure your MIDI file doesn't have duplicate events? Easiest way to check that is to create a new MIDI track and manually draw in a few notes via the PRV.
  16. I don't know why this custom keyboard layout hasn't caught on yet...
  17. Could the Narrator feature in Windows 11 address this? Or is it only capable of reading Windows screens?
  18. I am truly in awe of your ability to navigate the DAW this way. The elaborate mental constructs it must require has got to translate into almost supernatural compositional skills. I'll bet your kitchen is very well-organized, too. I'm sorry but I have no experience with Speakerphone and can offer no useful advice here. I assume those sample packs are listed in a scrolling tree list, which would make them discoverable via keypress in most Windows applications. However, plugin makers usually ignore Windows conventions and draw everything themselves using a library specifically made for plugin interfaces. If there is a way to work around the limitation outside the plugin, meaning via the Windows file system, that might be your best option.
  19. This has apparently been a problem for a couple years, but I just started noticing it about a week ago. When I'd do a warm boot (the normal shutdown/start procedure, not a restart) it would take two or more minutes before the task bar populated and the hourglass pointer went away. Not surprisingly, yelling at the screen had no effect whatsoever. Fortunately, even though Windows refused to do anything else during this time, Task Manager would still come up on command. That's where I found the culprit, a process called Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser. This is a process that kicks off with every boot, and every day at 3:00 AM and every hour after if your computer's running at that time of day. There are also two mysterious "custom triggers" that the Task Scheduler won't explain nor let you customize (trigger editor says "This type of trigger cannot be edited in this tool"). Although you're limited in how you can customize this scheduled task, you can disable it completely. When I did so, my computer went back to its expected behavior and now comes up very quickly. I'm always cautious when disabling Windows processes, lest there be unexpected consequences. According to Microsoft, this one "sends data to Microsoft on a regular basis in order to improve the system and improve the user experience." Whatever the frick that means. Sounds like spying. Most important, though, is that Microsoft says it's OK to kill it. So what does it actually do? Again, going back to Technet for answers, all they say about it is that it collects performance data that gets stuffed into a database over at Microsoft. It also checks for Windows 11 compatibility. Not something you need for music production, nor anything else. It's supposedly a "voluntary" opt-in program, although it's enabled by default and you have to opt out. If you're not familiar with the Windows Task Scheduler, just google "Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser". The vast majority of results are instructions on how to kill it.
  20. bitflipper

    Trash is back

    Holy crap, the conspiracy theorists might be onto something...I just got a YouTube recommendation for a video titled "How to Use Trash". I haven't watched any videos on the subject in 10 years. My only possible keyword leak occurred just now, when I called Trash "trash" in this thread. The eyes are everywhere! Yes, I watched the video. Even in the hands of an iZotope product specialist it still sounds like trash. But now and forever, YouTube will be sending me similar recommendations. Guess I'll have to pull up a Flat Earth vid just to keep the algorithm on its toes.
  21. bitflipper

    Trash is back

    I, too, was cool to it at first. Try the tube models, both broken and clean. This is where I usually land when I want to add just a little edge. What makes Saturn shine over other similar products is a) it's truly multi-band, and b) its envelope-follower modulation. The latter can work magic on a dull bass to make it pop. I'll have to give Thermal a try. Like I said, more tools in the kit is usually a good thing.
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