Gswitz

@Craig Anderton you make me laugh! Depending on your hard drive type, defragging may be advice from the past. Ssds don't really require defragging. Older users tend to run virus scanners. If you don't need it, uninstall it. I have not bought third party scanners since around 2000. Windows defender needs configuring to stay out of the way of your daw. You don't want windows scanning all the new wave files every time you hit stop or bounce a track. Children have great success with lots of machines because their use-case is different. While gamers work cpus, they are not doing it concurrently with capturing gigs of real time data. If you have to wait a second for the next game world to load it doesn't really matter. Honestly, mac, Linux, Windows... They all work fine if you buy the right thing and set it up properly. Like so many today, i make my living as a computer expert. I'm good at what i do. That said, i don't build daws for a living. That is why i bought a studio cat pc from @Jim Roseberry. He does. I couldn't resist tweaking it after i got it. I've added to it over the years... 7 or 8 years maybe? I have no regrets. It makes me smile when i work that horse hard enough to hear all the fans blow. Did it last night exporting these videos... http://gswitz.blob.core.windows.net/tunes/20190630_ChrisVasi.html I use Linux and widows. I can use the same hardware for both. I boot to Linux using a ssd usb drive. Mixbus has some cool features and work flows. Check out Ubuntu studio if you are interested. With wine and Carla, you can use most third party vsts [like melda]. Only mixing, computer requirements come way down. Put your buffer to the max and have fun with a 25 year old pc. 😁 Recording large track counts live is a little different. No room for error. Honestly, i don't use cakewalk for that. If there is a problem, I don't want the recording to stop. @Noel Borthwick maybe a keep recording no matter what button would be a nice thing to have. Capture what you can, mark missed audio... Let me fix it later [or cut it]. Keep in mind you only need one good working solution. Like only needing one spouse. Once you are paired up, you can forget hunting forever.

Perhaps plug in a mouse in the USB and see if you can replicate.

Broken mouse?

I haven't seen anything like that except caused by IO drop-outs. Pop open task manager. Is anything using your hard drive competing for resources? Do you have 500 takes on each track?

So many people aren't sure if there's a moon landing. Those people are such suckers. As if there's a moon!

That was awesome. Until now, I didn't really have a picture of how the spectral analysis tools work. I think this is in part explains why when you take a pure sine at 440 and look at most of the spectral analysis tools, the spikes are not as narrow as I would expect. I would expect a very precise spike that goes sharply up and sharply down. But if you tighten your time window, your uncertainty increases which is why bars to the left and right of the actual frequency also rise with the primary bar. It also explains why drawing weird eq curves is expensive. I'm guessing the EQ tools apply a proportional adjustment to the curve using the same technique. Kinda cool. 🙂 G

Careful of politics in the forum.

yikes. Glad everything is fine.

This is an awesome feature. Basically it's a sidechain input where you can apply eq. I do this with my hardware eq. The Rupert Neve Shelford Channel has this feature built in. You can high-pass what the compressor sees. This helps you avoid over-compression on the low end or triggering the vocal compressor with the bass player who's booming. Another way to use the Melda EQ before the the compressor is if you want to use the compressor as an old school de-esser, you can just pass the S sounds heavily magnified. When your compressor is on a vocal track without much cymbal bleed it will work as a solid old-school de-esser. Having the EQ right there in the plugin just makes it easier to do this. Now practically, once you're done tracking, I don't see much advantage to this technique over using purpose built tools. But live, there's no other way. 🙂 And I do successfully do it for folks performing live. Mic in to the RME and sent out on 2 channels. One has the EQ for de-essing or passing the bass so it only triggers on the vocal itself -- the other for compressing and sending to the mains. With a band it can be hard to get the vocalist to be loud enough to not have the bass trigger the compression all the time. Idk. My experience. For a zero latency de-esser, there's nothing like and eq and compressor. The only drag is the hardware is heavy. I too am a heavy Melda user. Probably my most common plugin is MAutoAlign b/c I use so many instances of it. But I also use Spectral Dynamics a lot. Now, to be honest, doubling back to the old multiband compressors that shipped with Cakewalk a zillion years ago you can get almost the same sound by setting the compressor to always-on at a low ratio. The technique is what Spectral Dynamics enforces as much as anything. I mean, yeah, it's better than a 6 band compressor, but idk how much better. A little. The idea is the same. If you don't own Spectral Dynamics, try the LP MB (do they give that away??) with a really low ratio as always on. As another thought, it's awesome to perform with the fx in place. That way, you can control your S's as the performer, hearing the de-esser at work. You can sing into the compressor and work it. I think that's the coolest. I mean, it's great to apply fx after the fact that the performer didn't hear during the performance. That can help make a great tape. But if the performer can hear the impact during the performance, it can change the performance, enhancing it.

So this is so digital everyone will groan... I feed an output with some mics with stereo spread into win amp and a groovy display plays in sync with whatever is going on in the room on a 50 inch screen. It is plenty of light. I don't do it for everyone, but for friends i do.

yes. You can save and load pc configurations. You can also create project templates with the pc set up however you like. You can create fx chains mapping visible controls on the pc to pots and buttons in 3rd party vsts.

I would be thrilled if that was my hair in the morning because it would mean i have hair.

Well, the PC EQ is easy and already there. I use it all the time. There are heavier EQs that I own. Expensive ones. But I definitely work the Cakewalk PC EQ hard. I use all kinds of different FX from all kinds of different makers, but the PC modules are easy and convenient. Also, the Console view shows the power button light that shows if the gain in to any PC module is too hot. For this reason, when I drag VSTs to the PC, I often give each one its own FX chain so that the peak indicator (PC power light) will tell me if there are any gain staging issues.

My video is definitely not the best for how to do this. I have some 10 year old videos (I think by Craig) that are really good describing how to do this. @Craig Anderton Do you still sell those old vids? I have a nice X1 video by Craig and another by Groove 3. The Groove 3 includes how to quantize and loop. Craig? I know you have some awesome examples. I remember one where you took a complex jam and then made it sound awesome taking the tempo from 80 to 160 and back to 80. I think it was you. I never got good at that technique.

As another thought, Michelle Obama's dad had MS and she talks about it in her book Becoming. I loved that book. Tearful and belly laughs both.

My best friend person who I jam with weekly has MS. He's 55 or 56. He was diagnosed I think when he was around 30. If you want I can ask him to reach out to you.

In general, new users under-explore their reverb options. The first thing they do is put a reverb on the master bus and dial to taste. Then they discover that some instruments have too little while others are just right. So, to adapt they send all the instruments to a bus and put a verb at 100% mix on the bus then dial to taste. This gives them control over how much reverb goes on each instrument. Next, people realize that it doesn't really sound like a real room. So folks start trying to record room mics and mix that in with the close-mic and use a lot less digital reverb. Often, playing with reverb awakens a need for de-essing, and the user applies it directly to vocals. Maybe later tries applying the de-essing more heavily on the verb bus before the verb and staying light on the actual vocals. After a time, the user may decide to get playful and pull a digital verb onto every track and dial a different verb on every track. You can get really creative sounds from convolution verbs by adding your own impulses. The impulses can be manually created (like a synth sound for the impulse). This can be fun for generating long heavy verbs with odd development. It is common to add a delay after the verb as well, especially on vocals. Another trick is to play with side-chain compression on your reverb bus. This enables you to have a heavier verb that doesn't compete with the vocal. Whenever there is singing, the compressor substantially reduces the amount of reverb volume. When the singer stops, the reverb swells, developed from the full vocal, it grows into the audible range. For ambient coolness, you can mix 100% verb and 0% original for a pad-sound. When you record a bunch of takes on the same track, it can be fun to mix a reverb from one take with the track from another, especially when the takes are improvised and not identical. To be weird, you split the reverb left and right and apply complementary eq on the two sides, so you get more of some freqs on one side and the compliment on the other side. You can use this to balance frequency load on the different stereo channels. Keep in mind you can also flip the verb channels, left to right and right to left. This can be cooler than flipping the polarity of a copy of the main output and pushing it up a smidge because that impacts center channel and pulls down phase correlation on the pair. Hope this helps.

Two step

Got away in the mixbus

Comfort is everything for me. Open back definitely. I cannot wear closed back for more than a couple of hours.

Sorry to hear this. Sympathies.

I got to see him play in Denver once. So cool. 😎 Saw robin Ford too. He is short. Told him to look for me out on the road. I had big dreams then. And once i randomly got invited in to see jorma kaukonen at the boulder theater. He played an amazing heartfelt show. After, someone from a local music shop who's name I've forgotten asked me if i'd like to linger and meet jorma. Of course. So, there was a line of people waiting to meet him with records for him to sign. Jorma looked so unhappy as i waited my turn with nothing in my hands. I'm not naturally funny, but i did my best. When i got to him, i said hey and looked at him totally seriously and asked if that performance was the best he could do. He laughed hard and i went home feeling like i made a nice old man a little less miserable.

Watch out for tempo-sync'd VSTs on projects with varying tempo. Continuously changing tempos can cause clicking in many tempo sync'd VSTs. Synths tend to do fine as long as there is no tempo sync FX in the chain.

Yeah... The guitars were way expensive. Idk either about the inlay. It was cool, but not necessarily practical. 😁