John Bradley

Actually, what am I saying? The system using the ten year old i7-960 is my actual studio computer, where I do my work (such as it is). I was running into dropouts on the 'Afterglow' preset using the much newer throwdown system I built in November 2019, running an i5-9400F, which should be somewhat quicker. Certainly the rest of the system (memory, video, etc.) is considerably faster. (And yes, it has a real audio interface (Scarlett Solo) in ASIO mode.) Can replicate with a single track CW project playing a simple single-voice melody on auto repeat. No significant load (hovering around 20-30%) on any of the 6 cores. Can't even tell if CW thinks there are audio dropouts occurring, because there's no measurable activity on the in-CW thread/core meter to hover over. Upped the polyphony from 8 to 29, just in case it an example of very unpleasant note-stealing. That didn't help either. But really, it's not that important. It's a single preset in a free synth I probably won't ever actually use, what with all the others I've installed and forgotten about. As noted, the many other non-Jacky Ligon presets I tried out behaved perfectly well.

For an example, Ozone 8 is not a thing you want to add to any of your tracks or buses until after the recordings have been finished.

So new? I run an i7-960 which was apparently released in 2009. Though I think I built the system in 2011. I just think it's weird that I can get glitchiness with some of the (heavier?) presets in this synth even though the cpu meters in Cakewalk (and Task Manager) are barely registering any load whatsoever. 'S all good, though. There's an easy and obvious solution to all "it hurts when I do this!" complaints. 😏

"This is the gnu. The gnu goes 'moooooo'."

Yeah, it's very likely the plugin to blame. Had a similar issue a while back with one of the Arturia synths (the Prophet, I think) incorrectly rendering when doing a freeze. (Didn't respond to volume changes.) They fixed it in the next version. Until then, I just had to remember to do a real-time freeze on that particular synth.

Indeed, stop trying to use ancient VSTs. You're just asking for pain, and the state of the art has improved dramatically since the early 2000s. And I say that as a guy who wrote a (non-music) app* in 1994 that people are still using to this day. Why? Who knows - it wasn't that great then! * Though we called them 'programs' back then.

Thanks! Had a sore throat for 2 days after recording the lead vocals... I don't have much cause to yell and/or growl in my day-to-day life. 🤕

"It's got a great beat - you can dance to it!" 🤩

Jacky Ligon/Keys/Afterglow Jacky Ligon/Keys/Harmonicscape To be fair, 'Afterglow' was the very first preset I loaded, which left a negative impression. I've since gone through most of the presets in the main 'Polysynths' category and didn't have any problems, so it's probably 'just one of those things', rather than a major issue.

Enter Sandman Not quite '80s... (August 1991). Missed it by that much. Still, it came out a few weeks before Nirvana's Nevermind made everyone notice that the '80s were officially over, so close enough for rock. Note that they end the song by deconstructing it (basically doing the intro in reverse), whereas I stay in full 'rock' mode until the end. That's because a subset of these tracks would serve as backing tracks for my 3pc band, and that's how we always performed it. Sorta quaint, now that 'performances' are a thing of the past. --- Drums: Session Drummer 3, as per usual, running into a big ol' BREVERB 'hall'. Bass: IKM's MODO BASS "bass man" model, for what little that matters. Doing the amp/fx thing within MODO. More than a little bit of shaping and crunch added with the ProChannel EQ and Tube Saturation thingies. Percussion: none. Metallica don't need no cowbell! Synths: none. Throw enough guitars at the mix and you don't need synths, either. Guitars: The acoustic bit that starts the song (and reappears during the breakdown) is a pair of acoustics playing the riff an octave part for faux 12-stringy goodness. From there they go to a bus that's got two different phasers on it (Blue Cat's freebie Phaser, and Native Instrument's freebie Phasis) and a very wet hall BREVERB. A lead guitar (with wah) comes on top of the acoustic bit. Done in Axiom. (a gate into a wah, into an amp, with some reverb on the output). Later in the song an Arturia Delay ETERNITY comes in during the actual solo. When the main riff kicks in, the lead pans hard right and a second guitar comes in panned hard left. Additionally there's the "double the root of the guitar on a bass's D string" trick running through a dual-amp setup panned hard left/right. It's very subtle, just adding a slight bit of girth to the bottom. I hear it if I solo the guitar bus and mute/unmute the track. Not sure it adds anything to the mix at all. The second guitar and the bass thing were also done in Axiom. Vocals: The main vocal is double tracked all the way through the song. The two tracks are each processed their own instance of NECTAR 2. The 'lead' of the pair has a single-voice unison harmony effect (in Nectar), panned slightly left, and the 'doubled' track is 4dbs quieter and panned slightly right. Other than the fake harmony on the lead, there's no 'digital' fx (mod, delay) on either track, just gate + compressor + saturation + EQ + de-esser + limiter, in that order. And then a BREVERB on the 'lead vox' bus. Backing Vocals: There's a single voice during the prechorus ("Sleep with one eye open"), a second voice at the start of the chorus ("exit light"), and both of them doing some actual harmony with each other (and the lead) on the "take my hand" bit. The first voice also holds down the low end in the second verse ("dreams of war, dreams of liars...") while the lead voice goes high. Finally, a third voice enters right before the final double-chorus. ("It's just the beast under your bed") All the backing vox are doubled (legit!, not via an effect) and panned left/right to varying degrees. No FX other than ProChannel gate + comp + EQ +sat on each track, and some reverb on the bus. Spoken section: Both the adult and child tracks run through their own set of Blue Cat Phaser + Blue Cat Late Replies + BREVERB. Not having a child handy, I'm pretty sure I used Melodyne to screw with the pitch/formants on the child track, but it was a destructive process, so I'm not sure at this point. Helium was not involved, of that I'm certain. Went with a spacey echoey thing for the spoken section as a "look over here!" misdirection from the not particularly realistic child voice. Melodyne Studio 4 making the vocals listenable, and Ozone 8 sitting on the master bus being all master-y.

Me too, if for slightly less long (CW 5 was when I got on the bus). That's a part of the excuse for this track: mute the tracks we can do live in my 3pc band, and the rest serve as backing tracks. Though I also try to turn these into finished standalone tracks for my own amusement. That way, when one or more people in the band veto the song, at least I've still got something to show for the time. Also, the fact that I haven't even seen my band since February has made that particular aspect more relevant. Let me say that I appreciate your wife's BUT... and yours as well! It could just be my pathetic thin voice, or perhaps my recording technique, as the wet version isn't much brighter than the track with all the FX disabled. Or the vox on any of my other tracks. Maybe it's just my taste; while some are famously All About That Bass, me, I love the high freq air. Either way, point taken. If it's noticably extreme, I should sand off the pointy bits a bit. Something to look out for on future mixes. A little more a/b action with the reference tracks may be in order. Thanks for that rarest of things on the internet: constructive criticism.

Can confirm. It's been living on my kick/snare/tom bus since I picked it up 2 months ago. It seems to like being there, and I like the results... "Parallel character compression/saturation" for that big drum sound status: SOLVED. Need to buy any more compressors status: NEGLIGIBLE. Until the next "I'd be losing money by not buying this" deal comes along, at least.

Same here. Some dropouts on some of the designer presets, for no readily apparent reason. Price is nice, and it looks versatile and powerful, but overall not very impressed with it, compared to recent near-free purchases (Babylon and Hybrid). Haven't run into a preset that's really wowed me so far.

Obviously, they all make a very similar rhythmic fwapping sound, though presumably at different pitches. Eventually, someone will collect enough samples to produce a Kontakt instrument, ideally with lots of articulations. The sound is in the hands, after all. A skilled fwapper can excel with even the cheapest, most poorly constructed of dorks.

If you have a limited set of plugins available, here's the obligatory plug for the MeldaProduction FreeFX Bundle. Good versions of most effects you might need, and y'know... free. https://www.meldaproduction.com/MFreeFXBundle There's also the Free VST Effects thread somewhere on this forum. Lots of goodies to play with in there.

Alternatively, you can stick an EQ on the track, and automate the bypass/enable to bring it in and out as you see fit. That said, the Sonitus EQ doesn't expose 'Bypass' as an automatable parameter. The ProChannel EQ does, as will nearly any other EQ you'd care to use.

Thanks, glad you liked it! What can I say, I always enjoyed reading the liner notes, back when music came with art, information, and packaging wrapped around it, instead of being pile of MP3 files. Always been interested in how things get built. I don't need (or want!) a 12 string -- hard to play, hard to tune -- but I really should get a second cheap acoustic one of these days and set it up in Nashville tuning (low 3 strings up an octave, high 3 strings at normal pitch -- basically the 'other half' of a 12 string). Double that with a normal-tuned acoustic playing the exact same chords/positions and the result is huge. You're too kind!

I concur completely. Even $99 was too much for basically a Melotron. (CZ and Synthi? No interest in either.) Throw in the OB-Xa and the $99 at least becomes something I'd think about. Wish they'd do more 'mainstream' offerings in the future, though I suppose their choices get limited once you start talking about ROMplers and other '80s-'90s synths that can't simply be emulated, they need actual copies of samples etc. that the companies still own. Korg and Roland aren't going to be in any rush to let them do an M1 or a D50 for example, as they both already sell (or rent!) their own VSTs of same.

$299 to update from V6 to V7... gee, thanks Arturia, but I'll pass on that. It's like they don't want free money from their customers.

That's just embarassing! However, the cringe does cover up the fact that the plugin doesn't sound very good, so there's that.

No, I'm not looping. I've got a region I want to record marked out with autopunch, and I've got the Now marker positioned a couple bars before the punch region. Hit 'R' to record, and if I make it all the way through adequately, hit space to stop and rewind, ready to listen to the last take and/or record another. Or hit space to stop somewhere in the middle if the take is blown, followed by ctrl-Z, a sip of coffee, and hit R again. If I were looping with an autopunch region set, as per my use-case, then one would either have the loop points extend further than the autopunch region, and hit space after passing the end of the autopunch but before looping back into the autopunch region again. On the other hand, if you have the loop set to the same points as the autopunch, yeah, you're always going to get one more (incomplete) take than you want... which you'd want to delete (and not have the other takes split oddly). Point being, if you have an autopunch region set up, and you stop recording before you get to the end of the region, that's probably not something you want to keep. But not definitely, hence an "auto undo that last take" with the option of 'redo' if the aborted take was useful in some way. But most of the time, it's not; that's why you aborted it in the first place.

I'd imagine it's not a video card issue per se (as in, a specific card or a specific driver), but if you have an older/slower video card and you zoom in further than you should during playback, Cakewalk will flood the card with "now draw this" requests faster than the card can keep up with. This causes a backlog of drawing requests to build up (they are queued, one would imagine), and the program gets unresponsive until the queue is emptied... which possibly only occurs once you're past the end of the song and there are no more waveforms to display in the track view. Or maybe never. Not that I know, but that's my semi-educated guess. Presumably there's some way for CW to know that it's going overboard with the drawing requests (some way to tell how many outstanding requests there are in the buffer?) and just stop updating the display until the buffer empties out or whatever. Or something like that.

Here's the situation: I'm in Comp Recording mode, and I've got an auto punch in/out region set up. If I screw up somewhere in the middle of the take I hit SPACE to abort the recording and rewind the transport to start point. This leaves a partial take behind which I would (almost) never want, and all my old takes are now split at the end point of the aborted take; also undesirable. What I'd like: If I stop recording before the end of the autopunch region, I'd like the new take automatically deleted ('undo') but left in the history so I could 'redo' to bring it back if I really did want it for some reason. Make it a user-setting buried in Advanced Settings or wherever ("Keep aborted takes") for folks who prefer the current behavior. Or keep the current behavior as the default and give me a "Delete aborted takes" setting somewhere. Either is good.

If you need the same effect(s) with the same settings done in the same amount on all of your guitar tracks -- that is, you want to treat the guitar submix as a single track for effecting purposes, then have all your guitar tracks Output to a guitar bus and put the effects there (in the FX Bin). On the other hand, if you want to apply the same effects with the same settings, but to varying amounts (example: less reverb on the rhythm guitars), create an aux track per effect, and have each of the guitar tracks have a Send going to each of those aux tracks. Then for mixing purposes you'll probably want to have the Output of all the guitar tracks and the aux tracks holding the guitar effects all going to a single Guitar Bus. (Or maybe two: I typically go with a 'lead guitar' bus, and an 'all other guitars' bus.) And of course, if you want the same effects but with different settings, or different effects altogether on your separate guitar tracks, just stick said effects in the FX Bins on the tracks.

That said, do whatever you want to the Staff view. I don't use it, and those who do seem to think it's broken already. At least, the vocal ones on this forum.