John Bradley

That's nice and all, but if you want to rebind the mouse operation to be more in line with how other DAWs do things, then kindly go use those other DAWs and leave Cakewalk alone. I live in the PRV, and don't need 20+ years of muscle memory broken just to have my DAW behave more like some other things that I don't use nor care about. Sort of like how the idiots doing Photoshop development these days just arbitrarily decided one day "hey, scaling by dragging a handle should be proportional by default, and shift-dragging should be 'freeform' -- the complete opposite of how it had been since forever". It was a move that didn't much matter to new users either way, and royally POed all their loyal 'power users'.

Wanted Dead or Alive More '80s, though in a less synthy vein than normal. This one goes out to all my fellow Italian cowboys from New Jersey! (Full discloser: I'm neither Italian, nor a cowboy, and I try to avoid the blighted hellscape that is New Jersey as much as possible. Also, I've never ridden a horse, steel or otherwise. But the point still stands.) Drums: Session Drummer 3, as per usual. Bass: IKM's MODO BASS "flame bass" model, for what little that matters. Doing the amp/fx thing within MODO. Percussion: Several TX16Wx's playing various samples from my library (shaker, ride bell, a different bell, and a tambourine). Strings: Two instances of SI String Section playing the low drone that goes on throughout the acoustic guitar hook. One Spitfire Epic Strings providing the string section that comes in on the first chorus and continues through the rest of the song. Synths: Arturia's Moog doing the high 4-note line that opens the song (and recurs a few times). Arturia's DX7 doing a similar but warmer sound that leads into verse 2. Arturia Pigments for the Prophet'y 'sync' sound that leads into the guitar solo. Another Pigments doing the wind effect that opens and closes the song. Native Instruments FM8 doing the windchimes at the very beginning of the song. TruePianos Cakewalk for the 4 notes of piano that lead into the guitar solo. Guitars: The acoustic riff is double tracked, panned hard left/right. The left is just the raw piezo, the right is going through a Taylor impulse I got from somewhere or other. There's a third acoustic, playing whatever would be playing on the low 3 strings of the guitar, but up an octave. The real version is played on a 12-string. I don't have a 12-string, nor a second acoustic that I could leave set up in Nashville tuning, so we do what we need to. Two distorted electrics come in with the guitar solo, panned hard left/right, and a third guitar does the solo. All three were played on my '85 ***** Strat, recorded direct and processed through Blue Cat's Axiom. Vocals: Single track lead vox running through Nectar 2 (gate, de-esser, eq, compressors, mod+delay (16th), saturation, and another delay (8th), as well as a CA-2A for limiting, Blue Cat's freebie Chorus, and Breverb. There's a single track of backing vocals going though Nectar 2 (gate, de-esser, eq, harmonizer (2 unison voices panned out with some pitch/time variation), compressors, and mod + delay), another Blue Cat Chorus, and Breverb. And Melodyne 4, because it's more convenient than having a singer living in my house. Effects: GW MixCentric for extra 'yum' on the master, followed by an Ozone 8 doing something useful, one would imagine.

A common enough problem for Men of a Certain Age.

Random guess: in Windows, Settings | System | Display do you have "Change the size of text, apps, and other items" set to something other than 100%? There's also another scaling thing (might be the same thing shown in two different places) under Settings | Ease of Access | Display. Set that to 100%, if it's not. Possibly also related to the text size in Settings | Ease of Access | Display. Drag the slider all the way left if it isn't.

Question for anyone who has Falcon: I see it comes with a huge number of internal effects, including SparkVerb; is there any way to use them outside of Falcon, or alternatively have Falcon act as an audio effect host (rather than an instrument) that you can drop in the FX bin? 'Cause that'd be a nice selling point to help rationalize the need for a $350 synth.

I looked at the website design and the UI and said "meh, I'll pass". Then I foolishly played the video.

On many interfaces (Focusrite Scarlett, Behringer U-Phoria, etc.) you will get an audible click when the sample rate is changed. If you're using a single interface for both your Windows sounds and your DAW, set the default in both to the same sample rate.

Never remove the 'default' sound device. If you do, Windows will "helpfully" pick a new one for you, seemingly at random. I've got the Realtek chip on this computer plugged into some crappy computer speakers and set as the default audio device both for regular audio and telephony. I connect/disconnect a Focusrite Scarlett Solo as needed, and only use that for Cakewalk and standalone audio programs (e.g. Bias FX, Axiom, etc.). The windows sounds continue to come out of the Realtek always, and the default never changes.

FWIW, I think it's more likely to be a video card and/or driver thing rather than raw CPU performance, given that people can get it to happen on simple projects with very low CPU requirements. We all know that if there's one thing that can reliably lock up a machine, or blue screen it, it's the video driver. I get it (or at least did, until I learned never to touch the zoom control while the DAW is playing!) on my system, which is based on a Core i7-950 (3.1GHz) from a decade ago. Video: I'm using an Nvidia GTX750 Ti, driver version 432.00

Hey, but it's only $1468 per year if you want to subscribe! 😄

The Scarlett 2i2 is a perfectly fine interface. Been using one for 6 years. John Vere's suggesting a slightly more complicated routing that would have you send the output of the mixer into the input of the 2i2, which would give you the ability to plug things into the mixer and record them, but let's get basic functionality up and happening first. I don't see anything obviously wrong in your pictures, so let's just troubleshoot and take it one step at a time. Unplug everything (other than the USB) from the 2i2. Turn off the DIRECT MONITOR switch. Get Cakewalk running, using the Focusrite as the audio i/o device, load up some project, and loop some section of it. Play. Plug headphones directly into the 2i2. Do you have audio? Good! Unplug the headphones from the 2i2. Plug a pair of 1/4" cables from the back of the 2i2 into the LINE IN inputs on channels 1 and 2 on the mixer. Set the black gain knobs to the -10 mark, set all EQ to the 12 o'clock position, FX to -Inf, and pan channels 1 & 2 hard left and hard right. Set the white LEVEL knobs on 1 & 2 to the '0' position (12 o'clock), and do the same with the MAIN MIX knob. AUX RETURN to -Inf, PHONES to -Inf, and all three pushbuttons in their 'up' position. You should see the meters bouncing in time to your audio, and if you have amplified speakers hooked up the main l/r outputs, you should hear audio. You should also hear audio if you plug your headphones directly into the mixer's PHONES output and turn up the PHONES knob. Continue looping audio in cakewalk, and hook up the Soundblaster line-outs to inputs 5 & 6. Play a Youtube video or something else. Assuming your Windows audio settings are set to use the Soundblaster i/o (they should be!), you should now have output appearing on the channels 5/6 of the mixer. Turn up the 5/6 LEVEL knob and you should hear both audio streams simultaneously, both through the speakers (if hooked to the mixer's main l/r outs) and the headphone jack on the mixer. Adjust to taste. You can plug your headphones into either the 2i2 or the mixer. Plugging into the mixer lets you hear either (or both) audio interface in your headphones, which may be desirable.

Wait, midi take lanes even exist? I thought take lanes and comping were audio-only dealies. Learn something every day.

Awesome! It's been a while since I've bought any VSTs I don't really need, but can't afford not to at these savings!

Unfortunately, DrumMic'a doesn't get you anything in the way of upgrade offers. Though it's nice to have if you don't already have Addictive Drums or similar, and the price is right. Been trying to get onto the KOMPLETE merry-go-round for years, but they never seem to have the substantially less-than-$600 pricing it'd take to make that happen. And I own $300 of things that appear in KOMPLETE... those don't help, either. It's as if they want to keep the riff-raff out. 😏

Should've guessed! I don't think there's anyone under the age of 40 on this forum. 😄 But yeah, stick a CD in your drive, and then File | Import | Audio CD and select the tracks you want to bring in. And if you want tracks you don't have on CD, you can buy single tracks (as MP3s) from Amazon.

Same here. It says 'Untitled' at the top of the PC in the Inspector. If I put my mouse in that textbox the load/save preset icons appear.

Valhalla Delay - $50. Does virtually everything you could want out of a delay, except that doesn't look like an old piece of hardware. Which is a feature, in my book.

Or just go buy some single tracks from iTunes, Amazon Music, or whatever; it don't matter. As someone who digitized his 1000+ CD collection back in the late '90s, and hasn't touched physical media since (except one time each in order to rip new acquisitions into the library), I have to wonder how you don't have a large pile of music on your computer. But that's probably just an "old man yelling at clouds" thing, what with you kids today and your Spotifys and hula-hoops and loud guitars... 🤪

Sitarzan! He's a Hindu man! He's all you can stand, Give him a hand, Sitarzan!

Yep, that was the one!

"Reference tracks" just mean professionally produced songs in the genre that you're shooting for. Find a song from a Big Name Artist that's in the same vein as whatever you're producing, and use it as a reference to compare your mix to. Relative volume levels of the various instruments vs. the vocals, tone of the individual parts as well as overall tone of the complete mix. Overall loudness (hint: stick a limiter on the master bus to sound like any popular music done in the last 20-30 years). That sort of thing.

AudioSnap is what Cakewalk calls that same process, more-or-less. CW generates the marker automatically, and will let you quantize them automatically... which often ends in disaster. I always do the quantization by hand. It's punishment for not playing better. How else will I ever learn? (Been playing for 45 years; ain't happening!) Yeah, I'm talking splitting the signal path into two amp+speaker combos within a single instance of your guitar processing vst of choice. I assume Guitar Rig can do that. If not you can always do it afterwards by duping the track and using a different amp in the copy. That bass guitar thing is something I saw on Youtube. It's apparently a standard trick that certain big-name producer/engineers have been using forever on Metallica and other artists. Oh, and what markno999 said about muting the other crap in the mix during recording!

Performance: Obviously AudioSnap to get the timing closer to on-grid, and Melodyne on occasion to fix bends that miss their mark more than I'd like. Sound: double, and double some more. If I'm doing some heavy rock sort of thing, I'll double the rhythm guitar part, and have each track going through a dual-amp virutal rig. I pretty much use dual-amp configs on every distorted guitar part, so as to get a more complex/interesting tone. Also, there's the "hey, that's not a guitar, that's a bass playing up an octave!" trick - grab a bass and play the root of the rhythm on the 'D' string so that it's up in the same octave as the low string on the guitars, and then really crunch the heck out of it and blend in to desired effect. Because the D string on the bass is both fatter and much longer than the E string on the guitars it'll have a very nice 'heavy' tonality to it, without interfering with whatever the real bass part is doing.

Just for the hell of it, I uninstalled Kontakt 6 Player, and reinstalled it. Indeed, it never asks what type(s) of plugins you want, it just does what it does. On my system, I have a directories VSTPlugins 32 bit and VSTPlugins 64 bit under C:\Program Files\Native Instruments - which Native Access created by default, without me ever telling it anything, back when I installed the NI stuff on this computer, and when I reinstalled Kontakt 6 Player it correctly dropped a Kontakt.dll in each of those subdirectories. Are you saying you don't have a VSTPlugins 64 bit subdirectory at all? If not, are you even running a 64 bit version of Windows 10? (See Settings | System | About under the gear icon in the start menu.) If you're running a 32-bit Windows, then obviously you can't use 64-bit plugins. If you are running a 64bit OS but Native Access is not installing 64 bit plugins, I suppose it's possible that when you installed Native Access it might have asked which subset of possible plugin formats (32- or 64-bit vst2, vst3, aax, etc.) you want to use, and saved that as the default for all product installations. But that's entirely conjecture on my part, and I'm not going to uninstall all my NI crap to find out. However, I suspect it does not ask about such things when you install Native Access, because I never would have told it "yes, please install 32-bit vsts", yet there they are. So it probably installs/doesn't-install the 64bit vsts based on whatever it's sniffed out about your machine.

I hear you on that. Didn't like any of their presets, eventually made a couple of my own that I reuse on everything. Find iZotope's EQ somewhat weird to operate compared to the EQ in the ProChannel, though having 8 bands to play with instead of 4+2 is nice. Rarely every use the FX/Delay/Reverb modules; limited versatility and they don't sound that good to me. Mostly I use it for the gate, dual parallel compressors, de-esser, saturation, and limiter. It's nice having that chain of FX only take up one slot in the track strip, just from a screen-space perspective. Also, while not used on this track, I like the Harmonizer module. Often add on two unison voices, panned left/right and 10db behind the main, with a couple of percent of time/pitch variation to subtly (or not-so-subtly) fatten up a thin voice.