bitflipper

I made the mistake of starting with a folding tripod-style table (made by Samson, iirc) because it was compact. But it kept falling over. At one point it dumped my mixer onto the concrete floor in my garage and took out one of the mixer's channels. Another time it bent the power supply connector on another mixer, making it impossible to disconnect. So when I invested significant money in a compact digital mixer I was determined to never let anything bad happen to it. Here's what I'm using now. It's lightweight but quite solid and stable, height-adjustable and folds up flat for packing in the van. Those speakers look like a nice solution. I have used similar powered speakers, the ones made by Bose. I was amazed at how you could place them anywhere and not get feedback. Their only drawback was we couldn't get a whole lot of volume from them. But for low-volume gigs they sounded lovely. No distortion despite handling keyboards, guitar, drum machine and two vocals. My monitor strategy these days is to run mine (QSC K8.2) at low volume but up close. It sits atop a speaker stand about 18" from my ear. Being a PA speaker, it's full bandwidth, which is important because I am often mixing the band from the stage and need to hear the full mix (keys, guitar, drums, bass and vox) in the same proportions that are coming out the mains. I only wish QSC made a 6" version that wouldn't block my view of the audience as much. I totally understand. It provides a depth and texture that you don't normally hear in live performances, and therefore makes you stand out from the crowd. It sounds great with my own PA, but unfortunately I often play venues with house systems that aren't stereo. Or for that matter, anything close to high-fidelity. Pearls before swine. But if I was, say, playing in a house band in a quiet restaurant with quality reinforcement, then I'd absolutely revisit Omnisphere. As well as Keyscape, for its electric pianos, and the IKM Hammond, and probably Zebra2 for synth leads. Sadly, that's not my world. Well, your first mistake is "refusing to go broke in the process". I gave up on that principle a while ago. That old washer/dryer makes grinding noises but still has a few years left, I can live with that leaky faucet a while longer, and my car is Italian and therefore built to last forever. I agree, using a controller that's designed for abuse by musicians is probably a much better idea than using a laptop. Assuming, of course, that it's rugged enough to be a key piece of your rig. Or cheap enough that you can afford a spare. I would definitely advise buying a nice padded hardshell case for it if it's going to travel at all. When I think about it, it scares me how many individual devices I have that could halt a show should they fail. So I try not to think about that.

I tried posting with crayons, but editing is a b*tch.

I used Omnisphere on a laptop for a few months, as well as VB3. It didn't work out as well as I'd imagined it would and I eventually gave up on the idea. The first issue I ran into was getting audio out of the laptop. I did not want to complicate the setup by adding an external interface, so that meant taking output from the headphone jack. I wasn't concerned that the audio might be less pristine than from a proper interface - it's live, after all. The biggest issue was that the connection was unreliable or intermittent, with the cable often falling out due to the weight of the adapter, requiring that it be taped down. Second issue was where to situate the laptop. At the time I was using two or three keyboards, in an L shape rather than stacked. I also ran sound, so that meant a mixer had to be situated next to me. Add a monitor on a stand (I can't hear floor monitors due to the keys blocking them) and now I'm taking up more stage space than even the drummer. There really wasn't anyplace to set the laptop where it was easily reachable and physically secure. That latter concern came to light when the little table I was using fell over and the laptop went crashing to the floor. Then I realized that Windows is just not friendly to real-time applications. At one point, it wanted to perform an update, so I had to stop everything and tell it "not now". Fortunately, that happened during sound check and not mid-performance. Because my laptop also served other purposes, I had not stripped it down to bare essentials. It still had antivirus running, for example. If I forgot to disable the network, it would interrupt me with messages that it couldn't download email or couldn't reconnect drives. I would not trust a laptop to be a critical component. It's also very clumsy to use a touchpad to select patches on a soft synth. A mouse is even worse. You really need a separate programmable MIDI controller, one more thing you have to figure out where to put. Another minor, but unanticipated issue is that when audiences see a computer on stage they assume you're playing to backing tracks. We don't do that. I will never, ever do that. I want them to know that everything they hear is being created in real time. What ultimately pushed me to abandon the idea was the extra setup time it added. I already had multiple instruments, pedal effects, stereo keyboard amplification and a PA system to set up. It took me over an hour. More if it was a challenging space, e.g. a corner or small area. Forget 15-minute turnarounds in a festival setting. Nowadays I've trimmed my gear back quite a bit - two keyboards, stacked, no external fx, no separate amplification. Setup time is now 30-40 minutes. I still require a lot of space compared to, say, a bass player. But it's do-able, even in cramped spaces. As far as special MIDI concerns, my first challenge came when I wanted to use a single sustain pedal for both keyboards. At first, I tried making a Y cable, but that never worked right. The solution was to pass CC64 events (and only CC64) from one keyboard to the other. The second challenge was switching between layering the two keyboards versus playing them independently. Fortunately, one of the keyboards provides a fairly easy way to do both, so it became my master device even though it was my secondary instrument. The third challenge was controlling a vocal effect via MIDI from a keyboard, which appears to be impossible due to the lack of MIDI options within the effect, e.g. no way to disable troublesome CC events. Every time I'd switch the Leslie speed, the effect treated it like a patch change. I'm still looking for a solution to that issue that doesn't involve more devices (you can buy an inline MIDI filter, for example). In the same vein, you also have to make sure that your laptop-hosted soft synths are configured to ignore patch change events unless you have a separate keyboard dedicated to soft synths. None of this is relevant if computer-based synths are your whole show. You could get a rack-mounted computer and use a single inexpensive MIDI controller. Total cost would be a little less than a high-end synth. But even then I'd want a spare laptop along. Bottom line: for live performance you want the simplest, cleanest, most reliable configuration that gets the job done. Using a computer complicates things.

Maybe this is why they had to change the name of Gearslutz.

I started a fresh project last week, hand-planted a click track in the PRV to drive the TTS-1, and chose a Kontakt library to serve as the voice for a basic guide track. But when it came time to record said guide track, I couldn't record any MIDI. I switched to a different keyboard controller to see if I'd screwed up something in my main synth's configuration (I have a special setup for live music and have to reconfigure for recording). Still no MIDI coming in. Checked my Sonar MIDI settings but couldn't see any problems there, which was expected given that I never change it. Tried a different soft synth just in case it was Kontakt being weird, but that wasn't it, either. Could my trusty Focusrite be at fault? Geez, I hoped not. But this is my third interface, the previous two having died, so that was a possibility. But I needed to exhaust every other possibility before making that leap. I am running a beta version of Sonar, so as with a brand-new car anything's possible. But an older version yielded the same results, so it wasn't that, either. So I did what I always do when I'm stumped: lit up a bowl and stared at the screen while drawing a MIDI flowchart in my mind. At each potential point of failure, I mentally drew a red X over each one that had already eliminated, until almost every possibility had been accounted for. Almost. The only thing left was the line drawn between the synth and the interface. "No way", I said to myself. MIDI cables don't break. Well, it turns out that sometimes they do.

Yeh, they used to do that. I attended a session at Guitar Center in Seattle, c. 2005/2006. It was pretty good. GC supplied the venue and sold a bunch of stuff as a result. I distinctly remember seeing one of the attendees afterward holding a pair of brand-new Yamaha monitors under his arms, being picked up by his wife at the curb, grinning from ear to ear. I remember wondering if his wife was going to be as enthusiastic as he was, and thinking "good for you, stranger - I hope you put your foot down and let her know that your happiness counts for something, too".

I actually passed on seeing the Beatles in 1966, even though they were my favorite band at the time. The reason? The concert cost an exorbitant $5 with no opening act. That seemed excessive at a time when a typical arena show would feature 8-10 bands, each of which had a current or recent Top 40 hit, for an admission price of $2. In those days, a whole five bucks would cover a night out, including gas, drive-in movie and burgers. Which is how I chose to spend my precious fiver. I told my gf we'd see them when they came back through town the following year, which they never did. Sheesh, Ed, you're we're OLD.

Holy crap, abortio* pills of all things. A new low even for those miscreants. Wookie must have slept in today. I just deleted 14 spam posts and banned three users. Those dipsh*ts are making work for me. I don't like it one bit.

As the article explains, most people who fall victim to this scam will never know it's happened. The scammers create a made-up artist and then use bots to continuously play the song so that they can then collect payments from streaming services. The only way the scammers might get caught would be to issue a takedown request, because only then would the original artist find out about it. That seems like a pretty dumb move. This particular outfit, FUGA, does look sketchy. Their website's front page includes no information, but it does display programming mistakes (e.g. the word "<footer>" ). In the terms & conditions, the sentence "You shall be solely responsible for your own content and the consequences of submitted the content to FUGA." might suggest that they don't verify squat. And have plausible deniability if caught out. It'll be interesting to see who initiated the dispute, and will hopefully reveal the scam organization - assuming it's not FUGA itself.

Speak his name and the devil appears... I listened to the clips and it sounds pretty good. Anybody can stack a bunch of oscillators and come up with a reasonable Hammond tone. So what I listen for is the one thing everybody struggles to get right: the Leslie, its tonal coloration, distortion, stereo spread, doppler effect, speed changes and model types. This one seems to be doing a good job at those things, maybe even equal to IKM's Leslie. All that's moot to me, though, as EZKeys is not a product category that I have any interest in.

"Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact." - Homer Simpson

That looks identical to the piano I grew up with. I even took it out to a gig once, but quickly gave up on the idea when I realized that moving a piano throws it out of tune. But I loved that piano because it had amazingly fast action. If you can score it for a couple hundred bucks, absolutely go for it. But if they want a thousand dollars, though, get him a digital piano with the most important feature for a learner: a headphone jack.

A true 60's icon.

My drives are littered with hundreds of "projects" that never got off the ground. My success rate for taking a doodle to finished song is less than 1%. Building a song from idea to completed composition within a DAW is a journey that can take surprising turns. I have some that I really like that began as nothing more than a synth pad but evolved into complex and interesting final products, guided by nothing more than "hmm, that sounds good" as a roadmap. Those successes, however, are the minority. Most just died because I didn't know where to take them next. By contrast, the majority of songs I'm happy with began life far from a computer. Most began on a piano or acoustic guitar, and had already developed into a fully fleshed-out song before I ever sat down at the DAW. Of course, once they became digital they quickly wandered off into new and unanticipated directions. But they all started with a prepared framework, which has proven to be the most common predictor of success. Or, at least, a finished product. The beauty of the DAW is that we don't have to choose one methodology and stick with it. It can adapt to whatever process works for us. If that means jamming with your band for a month, recording it and picking out just the best bits for a song, then fine. If it means plunking down colored bars onto the PRV and randomly scrolling through synth presets, that's OK, too. Whatever works for you. But what you don't want is to rely solely on serendipity to produce something you'll like. One of my favorite quotes is from Dwight David Eisenhower, famous for masterminding WWII military campaigns: "plans are useless, but planning is essential".

Does that stuff come in larger tubes?

Suggestion: try throwing in one verse in French. Maybe even layer in some accordion. Seriously. For some reason the whole thing sounds French to me, and I like it.

%appdata% is just shorthand for \users\Your_Name\AppData\Roaming. Less typing, and less confusing when the person you're explaining this to doesn't actually log into Windows as "Your_Name". You can simply type "%appdata%" as if it were part of the pathname. Also useful in batch files since the path works for all users. If in doubt as to whether you've found the right log, check its datestamp. If it shows the file was created 2 minutes ago, chances are you've found the right one. So yes, it looks like you are looking in the right log file. Bear in mind that each time you rescan with the log option turned on, the output is appended to any existing log. So the information you see at the top of the file is actually the oldest. I usually go to the bottom of the file (CTL-End) and then specify an upward search on the word "Logfile:" to skip up to the newest entries. Hit F3 to repeat the search, thus going backward in time within the log. If there are no warnings or error messages in the log, but the DLL does show up, then we can assume those plugins probably initialized OK. (I use the weasel-word "probably" because there are very rare circumstances where a plugin init fails so hard that the scanner stops scanning.) How are you assigning plugins? Do you use the browser or the context menu (right-clicking on the fx bin)?

Try a reset/rescan with the scan log enabled. Be sure to do the Reset. The log file will be %appdata%\Cakewalk\Logs\VstScan.log Open the log file in Notepad and search on any of your missing DLLs. Just seeing the DLL appear in the log means the scanner was able to find it and the problem isn't your scan path list. Keep searching for additional mentions of the DLL. If the DLL failed to initialize, there should be a clue in the log as to why it failed, e.g. a missing dependency or insufficient Windows permissions. One other thing to check is the exclusion list. I think the Reset clears that list, but I don't know for sure. Plugins on the exclusion list (assuming you didn't manually exclude them) usually get there because they failed to scan the first time around. Open the scanner utility and click on the "Show Excluded" radio button.

Nobody's gonna reprimand you for sharing this. However, this particular thread is specifically for feedback on the current release and it's to everyone's benefit that we all try to stay on topic. I know, it may sound punitive, but I'd suggest the Coffee House as a better destination for posts like this.

I prefer to let others do my deprecating for me. Takes far less effort.

Zebralette was what convinced me to initially invest in Zebra2 back in, hmm, 2012? It's been my go-to synth ever since. Here's my very first experiment with Zebralette from back then. Bear in mind that this little guy is basically just a single oscillator! But Zebra's oscillators are pretty impressive even before you start applying modulation, effects, filters and its fancy envelope generators. Everything you hear in this ditty is Zebralette - no fx, not even EQ. Needless to say, I will be purchasing Zebra3 on day one of its release.

On a related tangent, this YouTube music educator is worth checking out. While people like David Bennet address topics such as why Mixolydian mode isn't used often in pop music, this guy is all about chord progressions. Here he is dissecting Brian Wilson's key changes.

I see those little Chinese pickup trucks all over the Philippines, delivering everything from fish to concrete. I want one. But you can't buy them here. They are illegal. Sure, they're death traps. But cheap and seem to run forever.

A couple years ago my granddaughter took me to see Transiberian Orchestra as a Christmas present. I was looking forward to it more as just a fun outing with my granddaughter than anything else, since it was at a venue known for having the acoustics of an abandoned railway station. But holy crap, was I in for a treat. It was a jaw-dropping performance by world-class players, great lighting and surprisingly intelligible sound. Featured a melodic Van der Graf generator, no less.