bitflipper

I chalk it up to Germany's superior healthcare system, under which people can afford to regularly upgrade their optical prescriptions. My eyesight sucks, and Kontakt's tiny UI used to bother me. But over the years I've just increased the size of my displays until now it's just fine. I use a pair of inexpensive 34" monitors running at 2560 x 1080. I do realize that 34" is about as big as I can go without impinging on line-of-sight to my speakers. So if my eyes continue to degrade I'll probably end up with 60" screens and soffit-mounted speakers. Hopefully, virtual displays that project directly onto my eyeballs like a fighter pilot's HUD will someday save the day.

As long as you play any sequence twice, the notes are obviously intentional and therefore it's the listener who isn't sophisticated enough to understand your genius. In other words, it's not a mistake if you play it twice. It's jazz. If you ever get pushback from a real jazz musician, look at him condescendingly and slowly explain that it's indie jazz-punk fusion and he'd know that if he wasn't such a square. Great tats and a surly attitude will get you farther than practicing scales.

NI usually takes a different approach: discount the soon-to-be retired version and later offer a cheap upgrade to the new one. K6 is currently selling for $199, down from $399. If history repeats, they'll then offer an upgrade from 6 to 7 for something like $149-$199 ($79-$99 if you wait a year). This, at least, is how it's gone since I first bought into the Kontakt universe at version 2. So it's probably safe to go ahead and grab K6 now if you're impatient. In the end K7 is going to end up costing you the same - or less - either way. I have bought every Kontakt version since K2, and never paid even half the list price for any of them, just by waiting a year before upgrading. If you buy K6 now, it will do everything you need it to do until eventually some must-have library comes along that requires K7. That won't be for a while.

Odd that iZotope would snub Cakewalk that way, given their long co-history (e.g. Radius since SONAR 6). Several iZotope employees used to work for Cakewalk; I wonder if one of them holds some kind of grudge.

I dunno, some Yamahas could give Roland a run for their money. There's a midweek jam I sometimes attend. It can be fun if the right people show up. But the synth they have onstage is some 90's vintage Costco special that doesn't have a single credible patch on it. It makes up for its sonic shortcomings by having a keybed action that I swear was adapted from an accordion. But if everyone's drunk enough, I just play something lightning fast. Ooh, he's good, they'll say. If you go fast enough, it doesn't really matter what key you're in. It's a trick I learned from blues guitarists.

So it looks like Saturday's gig will have to be cancelled. Our drummer has injured his knee and can't play. He's freaking out that he might never play drums again. Meanwhile, I'm cracking jokes. I don't know the details, but you know how drummers are. I imagine a scenario that started with "hold my beer". Although knowing his wife (our singer), it could have also begun with her saying "there's something I read about in Cosmo I'd like to try". In my defense, I'm the guy who in the ambulance about to get a fentanyl injection asked the paramedic if I'd start robbing 7-11s next week. Or when lying on a gurney getting my crotch shaved for surgery, told the (male) nurse with the razor that "in my fantasy, you're much better looking". True stories.

If you're like me, many compositions start out as doodles. Just me noodling until I hit on a melody or chord progression that I like. Spectrasonics has added a nifty feature to their instruments for folks like us: the ability to capture audio, MIDI and synth settings without a DAW. It's also a convenient way to share patches with others. Free update for Omnisphere, Keyscape and Trilian users. I had a little trouble getting this update. When I brought up standalone Omnisphere and clicked on the Spectrasonics logo, it told me that my software was already up-to-date (v. 2.8.2c) and no updates were available. It lied. The actual current version is 2.8.4d. Then I loaded Keyscape, which did recognize that an update was available and enabled the "Get Updates" button. That took me to the online updater, where I was able to update Keyscape, Omnisphere and Trilian. Here's Eric giving a demo:

Thanks, but my tambourine tuner came with a triangle adjuster module.

"It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled" - Mark Twain People will often cite cognitive dissonance, expectation bias, apophenia, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, FOMO and other psychological quirks when mocking the misled, not realizing that such phenomena apply to all of us. And that we have all been duped many times in our lives without even noticing, and that once duped the dupization is often permanent. Which reminds me... I haven't had my aura checked in awhile. Need to make sure those crystals are still working.

Well, one thing you can say about it is that it, like most products from this company, is unique. However, I get similar-sounding effects from a much less-expensive ($49) gizmo, Irid from tritik. It's not nearly as fancy, though. Nor does it work on the same principle (regeneration vs. resynthesis). But it does do that trick where you can turn pretty much anything into an endless pad.

I once thought that watching a Flat Earth video would be amusing. It wasn't. It just left me fretting over the future of human existence. After all, we like to say that our species' survival advantage is our intelligence. But YouTube reckoned I was searching for some kind of Truth, and not only recommended literally hundreds of like videos but also many other surprising topics whose only similarity was that you'd have to be a moron to take any of them seriously. AI is going to be our downfall, I think. Recently I decided to listen to some bands that are widely ridiculed for being awful, to see if I'd feel the same way. Do you have any idea how many Nickelback videos are out there?

Try this: mute and archive everything except the parallel drum tracks. Archiving - not just muting - is necessary to take any delay compensation for them out of the equation. Are the two drum tracks still out of sync with one another? There is a clue, I think, in the observation that the problem goes away when you freeze the drums. I do not think this is a PDC problem.

I'd played this particular venue on several occasions over the years (but not with this band) and have often been in the audience, so I went in with eyes open, knowing it would be a challenge. That's why we showed up at 4:30 for a 7:00 start time, so we'd be able to do a sound check and then diplomatically suggest a few adjustments. My plan was to place my little TASCAM recorder out on a table so I'd have a reference to discuss with the guy. But when I dug out the recorder I discovered that the batteries had crapped all over themselves and the unit wouldn't turn on. Not a good omen. At least our singer uses a wireless mic and can stand out front to listen. Unfortunately, she has only one criterion for judging sound quality, namely that she's plenty loud. Bass and drum balance? Ya, ya, can you hear the lead vocal? So we were all set up before 6:00 but no sound guy. He rolls in at 6:30 and starts hooking up DIs and mics. (He does get credit, however, to not blinking when I ask for 2 DIs and a stereo mix on keys.) Then he informs us that we can't do a sound check until the football game's over. The game ends at 7:00, we do our check with a full house. I can't hear my vocals in the monitors, but there's no point in complaining because we have to go straight into the first set. Despite all that, it was a pretty good gig. The band was firing on all cylinders, the crowd was loudly appreciative. The room itself is acoustically not bad by bar standards. The stage is big enough for a six-piece band with keys, which isn't always the case at other venues where they seemed to have assumed that all music would be banjo and harmonica duos. Plus the gig's 15 minutes from my home, which with the early hours meant I was in bed by midnight. So I don't mean to demean the venue. We've already been asked back and happily accepted. Plus I get some comfort from knowing that at least we didn't sound any worse than every other band that plays there.

That's what I have planned. Something epic. I'm thinking Rick Wakeman after a tooth extraction.

Please don't be offended, Ed. What you do in the privacy of your own basement is between you and your inflatable groupie, and none of my business.

Half the gigs we play are in venues with fixed sound systems and a complementary FoH engineer. The other half of the time we use our own PA which I clumsily mix from the stage. I much prefer the latter scenario. Give me an empty field and one extension cord and I'll make it work. It should be a great convenience to let somebody else handle sound. Less gear to haul, fewer distractions so you can concentrate on playing. When it works, that's all true. Get a real pro behind the board who's actually listening, and you can elevate your performance to another level. Such was not the case last night. Feedback all night long. Muddy sound, except for the ice-pick 3KHz shrieks. "I've been doing this for 21 years", he said. Several times. Crank up the gain on the guy's mic who only sings one song and leave it up there all night. Yeh, and destroy the guitar tone while you're at it. After all what does the guitar player know about tone? Has he been working on it for 21 years? Well, to be fair our guitarist is only 28, so the sound guy probably has in fact been destroying tone for longer. Next week, we're playing from the back porch of a barbeque joint in the middle of a corn field. I'm looking forward to it.

Yeh, if you're doing a solo there are no rules. Put a tambourine between your knees if you want. Hum the national anthem as counterpoint. Anything goes. Just take pity on the rest of us and don't try it on a fretless bass. And for the love of all that's good in the world, tune up first.

I once had a bass player who loved playing chords. I hated it. Sounds like an amplified wet fart if you're not exceptionally proficient at it.

Somehow I've never heard Les just...talking. Cracked me up because I challenge you to listen to him speak and not hear "come on down to South Park and meet some friends o' mine". "Always lick the bait"

An asymmetrical waveform isn't necessarily a problem, nor is it necessarily the result of a DC offset or excessive VLF content. First, determine if the waveform is truly asymmetrical versus just being offset. DC offset doesn't usually distort the waveform, but rather just shifts it above or below the zero crossing. As long as you have a bit of headroom, that won't result in asymmetry. If you suspect DC offset, insert a sharp (e.g. 48db/octave) HPF on the master with the cutoff around 100 Hz and see if the asymmetry is reduced. If it doesn't, then DC offset (or excessive subsonic content, essentially the same thing) is not the issue. If it does go away, then I'd start investigating where that DC or VLF content is coming from. In either case, start by examining each track for asymmetry. If you find one, put a low HPF on it and see if that changes the waveform. Start with synth tracks, as they are likely suspects. It's possible that none have it and it's some kind of interaction with an effect. If that's the case, bypass all effects and render the mix. If the asymmetry isn't in the export, start adding plugins back in one by one to see which one's doing it. One thing it probably isn't is a malfunctioning compressor. Not that it can't ever happen - you can indeed distort waveforms with extremely fast attack times on low frequency content. Sometimes that's done intentionally to dirty up a bass track. The so-called "sync" effect in synthesizers does something similar. But in either case, you can easily hear the effect, as they generate gobs of harmonics. Neither of those situations necessarily results in asymmetrical waveforms.

Isolated bass and drums from the With the Beatles album. I'd never noticed how often McCartney utilizes chords on bass. Or how tight the bass 'n drums were (listen to the kick and bass on Roll Over Beethoven). Drum sound is clear and present, despite only two mics on the kit. You can really hear the pumping 670 compression on the rides. Great engineering. Keep in mind that this was recorded on a 2-track machine, so most of it is essentially live. Also worth remembering that these guys were all pretty young and still relatively inexperienced in the studio; McCartney would have been 20 or 21 years old at the time of these recordings.

I've had similar experiences letting kids play with a synth. So far, none of them have grown up to be musicians, but I keep trying.

Soundiron's Struck Piano is pretty unusual prepared piano. $69, although it was recently on sale for $49. Ever seen Blue Man Group's cover of The Who's Baba O'Riley, where they smack a piano with a large mallet? It's like that.

False-positives have been an annoyance for as long as there have been malware scanners. Anti-malware has gotten more sophisticated over the years, but it often still relies on "signatures", meaning a (hopefully) unique string of binary values that can identify a bad actor. But of course any random string of bits can occur that do not necessarily represent a signature. Developers use common libraries, so it's to be expected that innocuous software A might be using the same library as malicious software B. Software installers in particular are notorious for being flagged as malware, just because of the nature of what they do. The good news is that no audio plugin has ever been identified as a virus. Which makes sense; what mischief could an evil delay plugin really do? It's just not an attack vector that bad guys would be attracted to. Can you really picture a North Korean hacker gleefully informing his boss that "here's the thing - he he - they'll dial in a quarter-note delay but really get an eighth note"? It's one more reason to keep your VSTs well-organized: makes it easier to whitelist them from your virus scanner.

Oldies, mostly from the 60's and 70's but occasionally dipping into the 40's and 50's. Chick singer loves Janis Joplin, so lots of San Francisco pop rock, Tina Turner, Martha and the Vandellas. I sing rockers like Radar Love, Line on You, Crossroads, Tobacco Road. We also like more obscure but jammable blues such as Wang Dang Doodle and Boogie Man Boogie by Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. The lead singer and I are the best harmonizers, so we often back up the bassist or guitarist on lead vocals when we want some fat harmonies, e.g. Eagles stuff. So obviously, "culture" was a bit tongue-in-cheek. This ain't rocket surgery.