StudioNSFW

Quicky shortcut - Buy Karaoke tracks to sing against.

LOL @ Kama Sutra Records... Our motto is "We'll screw you in ways you've never even heard of!" He Ain't Heavy (He's my Brother) - The Hollies

I think I met my new bass player when I paid for that pizza.

For me it mostly Countrys and Funks and sometimes Pops...but I wouldn't mind it Rocking more 🙂

First thing to check would be the driver mode you are using I think. If you don't have an ASIO capable interface you need to select WASAPI or something else. It in the preferences pane near the top.

Louie Louie - The Kingsmen In honor of Bassist Norm Sundholm, founder of "Sunn" Amplifiers

"Rocket to Uranus" - Vengaboys

No new gear acquisition here or even seriously considered but I was sort of blessed in a weird way by the Shelter in Place order - I had literally just finished tracking the keyboard parts by an really good pianist for a debut album for my ex-fiancee when the word came down that the whole county was now "Shelter in place". She's got one of THOSE voices - real Adele/Celine Dion quality, power and range, but is also a day-jobber and so getting her in the studio to record the vocals had to be worked around her erratic schedule and subsequently the project was just creeping along. Suddenly her job was just not there and as she still lives here in a spare bedroom, suddenly she was basically confined to the studio. While living with an ex is a very special kind of experience, it's made up with by the fact that we can suddenly take the time and really work on each song until we're both satisfied with the performance and still make much faster progress than what was happening before the Rise of the Covids. I haven't been this deep in an album for years, and it's been great to not even bother watching the clock to get the tracks just so. We've now got a couple "In the can" and a several queued up to be mixed, with I think 4 songs to go for vocal tracking.

The most important thing is to remember mistakes and not repeat them, but always move on to bigger, better and more innovative mistakes. At this point in my career, my mistakes are truly world class!

Any one know how I can map the pot on each fader to map to the gain knob for a given channel in CbB, then toggle it back to a pan pot for L/R stereo after?

If I was going to guess, based on a VERY similar experience, you had write automation turned on and forgot to turn it off. I had a similar experience. I was setting some levels with the faders with Write Automation on, then, a second time through I started tweaking some knobs on Reverb and compression to find the right settings. . Since I forgot to turn off the Write Automation, Cakewalk dutifully paid attention to what I had done and kept doing it and my knob twiddling was recorded for posterity.

Deric, If it makes you feel better...Cakewalk used to cost $500. So it's still within your budget, but it was always worth the money. I used to be religously anti-Mac and Sonar was the best choice for full on production and mastering . The built in pro channel is a great starting point and inserting plugins couldn't be easier.... So far as "How is it free" the cynical part of me has to say "If something on the internet is free, then YOU are the product" . Then again, If the BandLab assistant isn't actively running it seems very well behaved and CbB runs without it running as a background service unlike, say, Adobe Creative Cloud which definitely is NOT free but constantly runs a licensing service to operate. . If Cakewalk needs to sell my usage data down the road to some advertising company to try to get me to look at ads for Guitar Center, hey, why not? I don't think Zuckerberg is getting that data for free, anyway, and if he's buying it I hope BandLab gets top dollar for it. The social/collaboration thing could have legs if they can can hit some adoption and usage inflection point, and it's a hell of a lot more functional than, say, Instagram. My big concern would be that if the company goes does a Gibson suddenly, then ultimately the activation servers could be shut off. By the model, you'd have a short period of time to finish anything in flight and then transition to another platform, If it happens, we'll deal with it but I think the best way to make sure there is always a Cakewalk is to use Cakewalk and BandLab, and tell your friends about it.

David Bowie - Space Oddity "Ground Control to Major Tom..."

I actually did a reinstall of CbB last night in a failed attempt to resolve the GUI bug I hit (posted as "Control Bar does not respond to Mouse" in the QA section). Since I am Win 7, I don't think any effort will go into addressing it unless it also exhibits in Windows 10 instances, and I have workarounds so it's not impacting me much- it would be different without a control surface. All plugins are showing in both X3 and CbB, and other than the Control Bar wonkiness everything seems to be fine. Appreciate the help along the way to my happy place.

Yeah...I'm old and have a hybrid signal chain - lots happening outside the box - and I track a lot live, plus whirring fans bug me anyway. If you're going to build your own you can factor those preferences in. The current DAW didn't cost much to put together because I was able to scrap the power supply, 10Gb NIC card and case from the olde one, along with that antique Delta 1010. One advantage to going into a custom built PC is that usually after the first one you have some components that can be repurposed into the eventual replacement.

Well, the end of my chorus saga... I was able to get my hands on my X3 install media by cruising through very old backup files on some media that is DEFINATELY offline...now I remember why I put that removable drive bay in the current DAW, and why I seldom throw away old harddrives if they haven't failed yet. So now I have parallel installs of X2, X3, AND CbB - no .dll hell to report at this point (fingers crossed!). The bundled Nomad BT chorus in X3 indeed was able to provide the subtle chorus I was looking for, The Acon Multiply was pretty dern good and is a close second. I don't really like the BlueCat - despite the marketing it sounds WAY too modern for this track. Once I had the X3 thing in the rear view I was able to relax a bit on this but will be trying the demo on the Native Instruments offering as I've always liked their stuff and have high hopes, but for this mix, the bundled plugin was precisely what I was after.

Silence isn't cheap ( ask me about my divorce!) . A silent power supply capable of putting out any sort of decent wattage is around $300 (or at least it was when I bought this one), Passive CPU coolers are $50 or so, a decent case is $100, etc, etc. Rest of the components are good enough and I don't think you could save enough on ASUS Mobo, etc piecing it together to justify the lack of any hardware warranty, sorting out drivers from the various vendors or time and frustration in getting it to work, flipping BIOS settings and boot orders and stuff. I'm thinking like someone who has never built a PC,..and I have built a lot of them. Assembling can be fun if you're a nerd like me, but I don't view it as a cost savings but a way to make sure something meets the specs for what I need (like the PCI slot for my ancient Delta 1010 - something you don't find on a system on the shelf at your local Costco.). Edited to add: Then I went in and actually configured it with something other than the basic config and...Holy Carp! You are right. Silly expensive. Expensive enough to justify learning the arcane art of PC building and optimizing! HP used to be like that and maybe still is (I stopped working on HP PCs for that very reason) but Dell has built to industry standards for a very long time. In fact, they usually have a hand in creating the standards. There was a pin out on the power supplies on stuff around 2005 (Specifically the Dimension 8100) that was flipped but that is the only exception I can think of. Dell drives and builds to standards because commodity hardware is what makes their business model make sense...They pay a lot less for the hardware because they order it by the container load and have excellent credit for 180 days payable to the vendor. You buy a PC from them one day 1, they pay for the components 6 months after the system is shipped, having enjoyed 6 months of "Float" on your money. Same would go for XPS and Alienware - I fed my family for a couple years as a Dell phone support person on the consumer side and got to know that hardware intimately. XPS and Alienware are sweet machines but they are optimized for gaming, not DAW, so money is spent on the wrong things for a DAW, like superduper graphics cards for zombie killing excursions. Note that the BIOS on a Dell is proprietary and the mobos are specific to Dell for the most part, and the image from the factory will include bundled craplications but that's the extent of the custom components

I have a ghetto M Audio Keystation 61 an ex left behind. Works fine with Cakewalk. Runs on USB power from the PC so only 1 cord needed.

I prefer a bare bones system and install my own OS rather than one with a corporate image with associatted craplications I didn't ask for. But no reason not to just buy one anymore. Back in the olden days when we had to whittle our DAWs out of fine mahogany for the best tone it was different because the off the shelf stuff wasn't optimized for the storage capacity and speed needed to run, and the only reasonable interfaces for latency had to sit in the PCI buss (Although an ISA powered SoundBlaster 2496 was better than anyone ever gave it credit for). These days, interfaces are usually offboard on a fast buss (USBc being the latest hotness and I really like it). I'd simply look for a system with enough available USB3 or USBc ports, ability to support 2 drives: at least ONE SSD, either SATA, SAS or NVMe for the OS and apps, second one could be rotational rust for capacity if you aren't putting your storage offboard ona NAS, plenty o' RAM, and a decent CPU. No point into getting anything super duper for a graphics card. Personally Id pay attention how loud the system fans are too. This one is the sort of thing I'd personally be looking at...figure you need to add storage and an OS. https://silentpc.com/powerhouse-pcs/coffee-lake-tower-pc

“D B Cooper” - Todd Snider

Great tips, the Blue Cat is ok for guitar but just "OK" to my ears, and crap for the vocal effect I am after - sounds more like a flanger ...so the search will go on for a bit. In other news, I pinged support and they sent me a nice list of ALL my licenses (I forgot I had the CA-2A but since I am always looking lustfully at vintage LA-2As, now I miss that one too...). However, I did not sign up for the SSO when it was offered (I was dormant in audio and didn't think I'd be back in the game at all...) and they cannot edit that read-only database to add me at this point . I get it, such is life. I can't get into the command center to download this stuff, so I'll toss the closet one more time for the X3 installer (and now that CA-2A). Several lessons learned and relearned on this little quest.

Rockaway Beach - The Ramones

Probably closer to 2012, but I will ping them. Thanks

New account creation is disabled for Cakewalk Command Center. Although I KNOW I had an account it was a LONG time ago and none of my e-mail addresses seem to be in there (retrieve password says no account exists for any of the e-mails I would have used back then). But enough of my woes during this transition... Back to the basic question... I am going to test fly the BlueCat Chorus for a bit. I don't need much, but I had nothing. Recommendations for anything else that someone likes for a vintage chorus would be appreciated

Recently upgraded to CbB. on version 26.01.0.28 My install is on Win7 64 bit (Yes, I know and acknowledge that I was warned...). Sonar X2 Producer is also installed. As I am trying to transition off of X2, I am now opening older projects in CbB and have found that portions of the Control Bar is unresponsive to the mouse; keyboard commands and the V-700 works as expected. Same behavior is seen in new projects. I have found if I collapse the modules, the controls work correctly from the pulldown view...and resizing the transport control back up returned mouse functionality in that module. Most all of the other modules do not work when they are expanded in the control bar but do work from the pulldown menu if they are collapsed and operated from the pulldown. I went back into X2 and everything is still working as it ever has there. Edited to add: the resizing trick works sometimes but not consistently. Transport is again inoperative from control bar, works from collapsed view via pulldown