Gswitz

@craigb I'm sorry man, that sux.

Might have been in the Subway at the airport.

I have long suspected the Russians use Cakewalk to steal my VST settings and sell them on the open market!

Nobody cares that while tipping a musician in an airport I dropped in all my change and the key to my strat case. Still stings 20 years later.

I wish over the years i did a better job of continuing to jam on old projects. I've largely been forward only. I vaguely remember tunes from ten years ago, but i can't really play them. With all the practicing I've done, i sometimes feel i haven't gotten good at any music... Just quick at learning the next song. I am particularly poor at remembering the last song. For 3 years I've been taking artistworks lessons. This has worked for me. I'm about to finish the beginner lessons. 😁 One reason it has worked is the lessons echo back to things you learned in earlier lessons. This makes it possible to learn trickier things in short time windows, which is helpful. @bayoubill i love taking mismatched rhythms and working something up. It really stretches me. You don't have to look for something that works with your playing... Grab something in the approximate tempo range and try to fit your having tracks in. I find one of the most important things i do is change the tempo. I'll practice a lot, shifting the tempo up or down with every session, so i don't get locked in to single tempo. At a friend's tonight, we played to a metronome for a half hour or so.

https://gswitz.blob.core.windows.net/tunes/20190630_ChrisVasi_23.mp3 If I only had a brain...

This is Jerry Garcia playing to Phil Lesh's son, Grahame on stage. Note he isn't wearing standard earplugs. I'm pretty sure those headphones do not have a music feed from the board. I think they are just like the things you wear at the gun range. I think this because of Phil's book. He talks about this photo in the book. This is Phil and Grahame more recently... I can't tell for sure, but it looks like Phil is wearing in-ear monitors. In his book, Phil does talk about how he felt in-ear monitors actually damaged their hearing faster because of the sound they were used to. He wasn't a big fan of them at the time he wrote his book. But if he's wearing them on stage now, he must have worked out some of the kinks.

I think this is a joke. High fidelity ear plugs just aren't really a thing. You can mess around to find the thing that bugs you least but they all massively distort the sound in the room. I'm not saying not to use ear plugs. I totally do when I'm listening to a loud band up-close. I'm just saying I think the search is fruitless. Honestly, I find cheap earplugs to be my go-to b/c they are easy to get at the drug store on your way to the gig.

I once went to telluride bg festival one weekend and the dead in Vegas the next. Telluride was heaven. Vegas was like the other place.

@craigb you aren't suggesting we give up cocaine are you? Just sugar, right?

Hang in there, Wibbles!

You don't have DPC issues, do you?

My grandfather wouldn't give any clues. They'd ask... do you drink? He'd say, 'If you can't tell, the answer's no.' 😛

My kid's school had a 2 hour late start due to the google thing. She said it was like a modern snow-day. (Since Covid, Snow-Days have been meaningless.)

I know I'm not the norm, but I'm just quick at rebuilding my system drive. I don't make backups prior to updates. My computer is just for my hobby. I don't impact clients when i reinstall. But starting fresh just isn't that hard for me. I almost never need to, but sometimes i swap in a new drive.

You don't have the track you're exporting muted, do you? In that case the time will show correctly on the mp3 and the now time will progress, but there will be no sound.

You do charge family and friends double, no?

Dweezil is such an amazing rock star! I never miss a chance to get out to see him. One of my favs.

Vocal sync is the cakewalk feature for tightening up vocal parts where people are singing together. It's neat in concept. If you have a group of people singing the same part with 100% isolation (no mic bleed) it can be used to tighten up the set without doing tons of manual adjustments. Mic bleed can complicate it. It can still work out with bleed. Your ears will tell you. I have used it sometimes. It's a tool I don't use unless it's required. For the type of music I tend to work with, I rarely need vocal sync.

So... First i love choirs Second... One way to get choirs sounding tight is to enter the midi for all the parts... Then, make a mix for each part and boost the volume of that part maybe 7 db louder than the other parts... Really significant increase... Now share the recordings with your choir and let them practice to it. This isn't a click track but it will have the same result. They will all be on time and singing with, or harmonizing with, the part they are supposed to be singing. This is tons of fun. It's like standing right next to a really loud singer who is perfect every time... You just do as they do. Now, when you pull the tracks together, you have a great starting place. Everyone is in key and on time. From there, you boost the vocalists that are tighter at any moment, trying to give them all moments to shine. You don't want to pitch correct more than necessary. It can help to have vocalists slightly off and slightly dimmed. It will make the singer nailing it Sound better. As long as the one who is tight is louder, it will be cool. The mix will sound like someone was pointing the Mic from singer to singer, a different Mic for basses and sopranos and altos etc. It will be magic that the Mics focus on the best singer at each moment. In this video, i show how to use melodyne to compare two instruments playing the same part... You can also accept multiple takes from each vocalist. Use panning and gain control to make your virtual choir super big and way cool. Panning different parts differently also helps. Don't be scared to move your parts around on the Sound stage, centering the most important part of the moment in ways that are impractical in a church. The centered part can be a little louder than things panned to the sides because it is coming through two speakers, not one. In lots of choirs I've worked with, they often change the score to simplify it because it is hard to do it right live. They cater to the weakest link often. But with this technique, everyone can sing it right with some practice.

unglued?

usually when someone says the sound changes on exporting they are either exporting more than they intend to or they are bouncing internally through the master bus then the bounced track is routed through the master bus again, doubling the fx on the master bus. If you select your song and do bounce to tracks, make sure the new track is routed directly to your interface and not to your master bus. Then select that new track and choose export.

ah yes oops

@Starise If you get some time, Mickey Hart's book 'Drumming on the Edge of Magic' is a worthy read. He often delves into discussion of music, spirit, and the magic of it. I started typing in a section and decided I would be typing too much for a post. Another interesting read of Mickey's is 'Song Catchers: In search of the world's music'.

I think music itself is soothing. I love having a way to express without words. I don't think having an outlet for expression by itself assures mental health, but it does seem to promote it. I think when you consider music as a profession and ask the mental health question, there are too many variables to show anything meaningful. Like, who is drawn to it as a profession. How often is it a profession of last resort? What are the weird pressures applied on musicians by how the money in the industry is choked to flow this way and that. How much impact does living around alcohol soaked people have on your life? Spending nights in bars? Getting paid in liquor? But then, most musicians I know have a better social life than non-musicians in my experience. That can be another mental health booster.