bitflipper

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.

Whenever my Dad was asked "how's life?", he'd always reply "beats the alternative". But when I reminded my deeply religious brother of that, he said "well, not necessarily". I will never get into a car with my brother. Or an airplane (he's a pilot).

YouTube has a lot of helpful beginner content, much of which was created by your soon-to-be new friends right here on this here forum. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cakewalk+tutorial This Deals subforum is just for helping us all spend money we don't have on things we don't need, so I'm going to move this thread to the Q&A subforum in the interest of tidiness and organization. Plus you should know that those of us who hang out here are, um, stricken by the heartbreak of G.A.S. and don't always exhibit the best judgement.

By that measure, I'm on an equal footing with thousands of successful band members with recording contracts and hit records. Actually, I'm doing better, having netted well over a dime just this weekend. Thanks for that pep talk, OJ.

"...the drummer who lost his front man and the front man who lost his drummer." Plus he just lost his mom. I guess, as Ringo sang, you gotta pay yer dues if you wanna sing the blues. Yet Dave always seems so upbeat and genuinely happy to be a working musician. At least if he dies it'll be from falling off a stage, not mental health issues.

I have tried so hard to like Tool. It's a genre that should be right up my alley. Sophisticated arrangements, intricate melodies, adventurous sounds, impressive musicianship. But for some reason it just doesn't click with me. I can appreciate it intellectually but there's no dopamine. OTOH, if I was ever imprisoned in North Korea and being tortured for state secrets, I'd still prefer being blasted with Tool over, say, Kid Rock.

Holy crap, was I beat when my head finally hit the pillow early this morning. Yesterday was a record-breaking 3-Mocha day. That's three Starbucks Iced Mochas in one day. I should have been bouncing of the walls, as I normally don't drink caffeine. We've really been gigging too much this summer, I think. The band's pretty tight now, but we're at that stage where it's all becoming rote muscle-memory. I'll catch my mind wandering mid-song, admiring a hot waitress, wondering if the forecast rain will hold off until after loadout, how I should feel about Pell grant recipients getting a $20,000 break on college tuition, and whether another Chernobyl-class nuclear disaster might be imminent. And then a brief panic when I suddenly realize that a) I've forgotten what song we were playing, b) I think I'm supposed to be soloing now, and c) how come we don't have a single jam in Am? I'll have to bring that up at next rehearsal.

Already finished my first gig for today. Played the state fair, spent my earnings on an overpriced sandwich and came home. Next up: get back into Friday afternoon traffic for a two-hour drive to tonight's gig on Camano Island. Normally, it's 45 minutes, but Friday afternoons it's bumper-to-bumper all the way. Yeh, it's thankless work, bringing culture to the masses. But it's my mission.

It's official: old music is outselling new stuff. A factor he doesn't mention is that four people create the bulk of all pop music nowadays.

I like t-shirts that are conversation-starters. I wore my last semi-whole CW shirt to a concert just last week and sure enough, somebody came up and told me he was a longtime CW user. But not a frequent forum visitor, so I invited him to stop by and type hi. My "College of Winterhold Alumni" tee also gets smiles and comments.

I long ago broke my Cakewalk mug, and all of my Cakewalk t-shirts have holes in them. So here's another vote for a merch page. While they're at it, maybe they could figure out a way to add CA2A back into the offerings. I've still got my copy from SONAR days, so I'm asking for a friend.

I paid $10 for my chair in 1993, and it was at least 10 years old at that time. The wheels aren't quite round anymore, but everything else is fine. Mainly, it does one thing very well: I can lean all the way back, put my feet on the desk and take a nap without fear of it tipping over. What more could you ask for in a chair? It also supports my back well. When I had my back problems, this chair was my only pain-free refuge. I suppose it must have been an expensive chair originally. The office was closing and they just wanted to get rid of everything. I also bought the desk I'm still using, also for ten bucks. It's military gray and made of steel. It has a drawer. It may seem odd that someone who has spent so many thousands of dollars on software, synths, amps, monitors and microphones is content to sit on a $10 chair. But if it doesn't make sound, it's not a priority. I'm using a microwave I bought in 1979. I'd probably still be wearing jeans from the 70's if my belly girth had remained constant.

Sheesh, the hours - no, days - wasted on the original DOOM for DOS. Back in the day I'd pack up my desktop computer and haul it over to a friend's house where we'd network our computers and play DOOM all day long. He lived in a high rise apartment building, and when leaving after a marathon session I noticed that when the elevator door opened I reflexively stepped to one side as if expecting an imp to step out. Not to brag, but I was unstoppable in deathmatch, even against the Microsoft guys who apparently did nothing else at the office all day except play DOOM. You don't want to go head-to-head with a piano player in a keyboard-controlled game. At my last real job in the 90's, I made a DOOM map of the campus where I worked. The boss found out about our game sessions and tasked me with writing a program that would seek out and destroy all games from employees' computers. Which I happily did. It freed up a lot of bandwidth for the IT department, resulting in better framerates for our own sessions. Despite my onetime obsession with DOOM, Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior, Redneck Rampage, etc. I've had no interest in run 'n gun shooters for some time. Skyrim ruined those types of games for me. Nowadays it's gotta be an open world, story-driven and strategic. Preferably one that supports modding.

"D***s will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no d***s" - The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Hmm. Anybody else see something worse than "drugs" in the censored version above?

I downloaded this library - 'cause why not - and gave it a test drive. Yikes. Not only is it big, the .nki loads damn near everything by default. 6.11 GB loaded, took several minutes. At first I couldn't figure out why only one mic position (there are 6) was working, then noticed in the Kontakt header that samples were still loading. I had already composed a test melody in less time than it took to fully load. Looks like I'd been overly generous before, assuming there must be many velocity layers. Wrong, most groups have only 1 layer. I'd also been overly generous in assuming there was no pitch stretching. Again, wrong. Most samples are stretched over 5 notes. I'd been overly optimistic in assuming there'd be multiple mallet types. There aren't. But what about those 45 audio sources that can be blended in? To be honest, I still haven't figured those out. Every one I've tried added an atonal layer that was not pleasing. I'll give it another hour to prove itself, then I'm reclaiming 7.61 GB of disk space back.

That comes out to an average of 1.2 MB per sample, which may seem high for a 4-octave instrument without a lot of articulations. Most of my piano libraries are smaller than that, but then pianos (usually) don't have the option of banging them with different kinds of hammers. Plus this library has 45 other sound sources beyond the xylophone. So yeh, the size is probably justified.

Here's something Cherry Audio has so far neglected to do - post some actual sounds. If you're hearing Oberheim-like sounds, it's those 12dB/octave filters. This synth also offers 24dB slopes for a more Moog-ish profile. Note that this video shows the actual synth upon which the Cherry emulation is based.

I think this would be a great synth for somebody new to synths who wants to learn how to create their own patches from scratch. It's got every parameter you'd expect in a classic subtractive synthesizer plus some not-so-common features, all laid out in a logical manner. Back in the day this would have been considered an exceptionally full-featured synth. Sure, modern soft synths include more sophisticated features, but that also makes the process of learning to program them more intimidating. Plus, it sounds really good.