Craig Anderton

First, apologies...his name is Chris McHugh, and the full name of the set is Discrete Drums Series 2. Sonoma Wireworks bought the Discrete Drum libraries; the DVDs aren't available anymore, they've been incorporated into their drum plug-in. You can sometimes find the DVD set on eBay or Reverb.com. Although the listing ended, this is the droid you're looking for.

I've spent years finding out how to get the best possible sound out of amp sims. The bottom line is that you need to work with amp sims to make them sound good. Just like you won't get a good amp sound just by sticking a random mic in front of it, you need to tailor the amp sim to your pickups, intended result, and playing style. I think you'll find the following references helpful. 5 Ways to Optimize Amp Sims Use De-Essing to Obtain Better Amp Sim Sounds How to Make Amp Sims Sound More "Analog" Multiband Signal Processing Also check out the video for my Helix multiband presets on youtube.com/thecraiganderton, it has some audio examples comparing single-band and multiband distortion. All of my recent albums use amp sims on the guitars, and don't have the fizz. The albums Take Me Back to Tomorrow, The Singles, and Joie de Vivre also use a lot of multiband guitar processing.

Cakewalk works with EUCON controllers, I wrote an article about it that Noel posted on his blog. I haven't tested EUCON lately, I sold the Artist controller and bought a FaderPort 8 instead. However I don't see any reason why it still won't work. It was a little squirrely to figure out at first - certain things have to be done in certain orders - but if you follow the steps in the article, it should work. As to Avid, I doubt they would have any interest in supporting Cakewalk.

There's plenty of great advice in this thread. As to specific editing techniques, I wrote an article about editing speech and narration that describes how to deal with breath noises, plosives, etc. It's aimed more at video people who need better audio so the images show the techniques applied to Vegas software, but a waveform is a waveform, so it's easy to translate the tips to Cakewalk. I do a lot of narration for instructional videos, which is a bit different from "radio voice." However, here are some tips. Use a really good pop filter. I spent the $300 for a Pauly pop filter, which may sound outrageous (and it is!), but it's the best I've ever used by far. It gets rid of the pops but doesn't color the mic sound. One of the reasons room acoustics are important is because you don't want to be too close to the mic. The voice level drops off rapidly as you move further away from the mic, but the level of the reflections remains the same, so they become more prominent. As mentioned previously, moving closer to the mic isn't necessarily the answer, because of the proximity effects. Those acoustic shields that go around mics, like the Primacoustic VoxGuard, are a mixed blessing. If you don't set them up just right, they can make the sound worse. But they can also reduce computer noise and room reflections. I use one all the time, but you can't get too close to the mic or the vocal acquires the "sound" of the shield. I do a ton of processing to clean up my voice. My favorite feature in iZotope RX7 is the mouth de-clicker, it's saved me hours. I'm not a huge fan of compression to get an even level, because even a little bit adds artifacts. The phrase-by-phrase normalization technique mentioned in the article referenced above is my go-to for dynamics control. It's no different than just changing the level, so there are no artifacts. Then I need to apply only a little bit of limiting to control the peaks and give consistent dynamics, which nonetheless sound natural.

When I've had problems with Waves plug-ins, a "repair install" always fixed it. I'm not at the studio computer so I can't tell you where the option is in Waves Central, but IIRC you have to poke around to find it.

I've used the Discrete Drums loops by Chris Hughes for virtually all my projects since 2016 (except for the 2020 project, which is a different musical genre). Hard to find better IMHO, he's a pounder with finesse and style. You can hear the Discrete Drum loops on my albums Neo-, Simplicity, Joie de Vivre, and The Singles (except for the cut "Puzzle of Love").

Well, at least you got MIDI 2.0 As to program changes, I find them unnecessary in the studio, but important for live use because I switched over to using plug-ins for guitar processing well over a decade ago.

I'm surprised the deal was for an upgrade to 17, 18 came out last month. Anyway, for me Vegas has always been one of those "save often" programs although to be fair, it recovers what you were doing quite well. I have found that Magix cleaned up a bunch of little things in the interface, which I don't remember now because it's be long since I worked with a previous version, but it seemed like for the first week or so I kept running into little things that made life easier. I've had no problem using the ASIO drivers for my PreSonus or TASCAM interfaces. Based on scook's post I checked on the driver situation, and the Magix and Steinberg drivers are both installed. Maybe I'll remove them and see if that has any beneficial effects.

Remember, though, that EQ is an amplitude change - just in a specific frequency range. So for example, a bright sound's level won't translate over a system with sketchy high-frequency response. A lot of people consider listening to music on a phone or tablet's speakers to be acceptable. But then you won't get any bass, and the average phone is optimized for speech frequencies. I guess that's good in one way, though, you'll hear the vocals properly

And I might add...mastering is a hopeless task. Tonight when doing a final reality check on a master, I listened over four different sets of "pro" headphones, two sets of speakers, and bluetooth in-ears. The mixes sounded similar in terms of balance, but the "mastering" sound very different on each one. Yes, I know that a good mastering job is supposed to translate over any system...but it probably won't translate the way you intended. If you can preserve the mix's balance over a zillion different systems committing sonic violence to your music, that's about all you can do.

I pride myself on being the latter. An album isn't about me, it's about the artist.

As some of you may know, I've mastered hundreds of tracks over the years in a variety of musical genres, and even won an award for one of the classical recordings. I believe there are at least 20 viable ways to master any given piece of music, but the only one that's valid is the one that the artist likes because it furthers that person's particular artistic vision. I had a project where a pianist had recorded an orchestral double-CD, and paid beaucoup bucks to have a top-level mastering engineer (whose name you would all recognize) master his music. He wasn't happy with the results and asked if I'd give it a shot. I didn't know who had mastered it, and he wasn't aware of this person's stature...it was someone who was recommended to him. Long story short, he liked my mastering job much better. When I was asked him who mastered it originally, I was floored. But that doesn't mean I'm a better mastering engineer than the guy with a zillion platinum records on the wall. It means that I understood the music and the artist better, and was able to create a result that when it came out of the speakers, sounded like what he heard in his head. Lately I've been doing "reconstructive" mastering on some Martha Davis's songs from the early 90s (mostly post-Motels solo projects). The songs are great, but they all had flaws that prevented their release, and the multitracks are long gone. Here's an example of what mastering can do. One song had a drum machine where the producer had fallen in love with the sound, so the record sounded like an electronic kick drum piece with vocal accompaniment . There was nothing I could do with EQ to fix the incredibly overbearing kick. However, I was fortunate to find an isolated instance of the kick in the intro. I created a track parallel to the stereo mix, dragged a kick into every place there was a kick on the stereo mix, flipped the kick track's phase, and adjusted the level to cancel enough of the kick to where it fell into place with the track. On a jazz project, on one song the acoustic bass overwhelmed the stereo mix, and again, it was a situation where the original tracks were no longer available. I ended up doing frequency splitting, mid-side processing, and multiband compression to bring the bass into alignment with the rest of the track...and oh yes, it also had to be vinyl-friendly . But ultimately, it sounded like I had just pulled the fader down on the bass track to where it sounded balanced with the rest of the music. Mastering can involve a lot more than slapping dynamics on a mix and brightening it. FWIW I have retained one old school habit: to me, mixing and mastering are separate processes. Mixing is about creating the best balance of all the tracks. Mastering is about polishing that balance, and I do so long after the mixing is done, so I can bring a fresh perspective. But also, I still do albums. The songs have to work individually but also be a cohesive unit when played sequentially, and that's almost impossible to do unless you leave the mixing aside, and concentrate solely on mastering the songs. Also, a lot of my time spent mastering is sequencing tempos, key changes, and doing crossfades for transitions. That type of thing was a common responsibility of mastering engineers back in the days of vinyl.

What you may find is that for some reason, most VST3 sims can't accept program change commands, even if the VST2 versions can. I've tested quite a few plug-ins and had consistent results. I'm not sure why, there's no technical reason why it shouldn't be possible.

I aim for a consistent vocal level. I'm not a big fan of using compression for this application, I prefer to use compression for "character." So I normalize individual phrases to obtain a high average level in a vocal, without using any dynamics processing per se. Go to Figure 2 in this inSync article and you'll see what I mean. After getting a consistent level, then I typically apply some limiting or compression, but you don't need as much because the normalization already did a lot of the "heavy lifting." This means you don't hear the dynamics processors working, but you still have a big, present sound. Also, EQ in the 3-4 kHz range can bring out the articulation in voices, because the ear is most sensitive at those frequencies. However, a little goes a long way - you don't want the vocals to sound screechy. There can be too much low end on vocals, which makes the vocals less distinct, and takes up bandwidth so you can't bring up the vocal level as high as you want. I usually add a shelf or highpass filter around 100-200 Hz so that the overall vocal can come up a bit, but whether to do that or not depends totally on the mic and the vocalist. EQ doesn't really lend itself to "universal" tips. Since you probably will want to use compression at some point on vocals, check out the article Five Compression Tips for Vocals. You'll find more vocal tips in this article in the Full Compass blog. It's oriented more toward narration, but the same techniques work with anything involving voice. The vocal is the most important part of any song. Unfortunately I don't have any Cakewalk-specific book on vocals, but I wrote one called How to Record and Mix Great Vocals in Studio One. If you look over the table of contents, you'll see that most of the tips translate easily to other DAWs. In fact many of these tips were first developed on Cakewalk projects, and translated over to Studio One for the book. Hope this helps!!

Your memory is fine! Spotify.com says : Target the loudness level of your master at -14 dB integrated LUFS and keep it below -1 dB TP (True Peak) max. This is best for the lossy formats we use (Ogg/Vorbis and AAC) and will ensure no extra distortion is introduced in the transcoding process. If your master is louder than -14 dB integrated LUFS, make sure it stays below -2 dB TP (True Peak) max to avoid extra distortion. This is because louder tracks are more susceptible to extra distortion in the transcoding process. So if a company whose livelihood depends on streaming says that you need to reduce true peaks to avoid distortion, they've probably done their homework. Although they only specify Ogg/Vorbis and AAC, the same issue also applies to MP3.

Make sure the audio setup is to the Yeti mic and not an onboard audio chip.

I just checked and it's indeed at C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core But it is a system file, so perhaps Variorum's advice will solve your issue.

It may not seem Melodyne has an influence, but it does. Try different algorithms and see what happens. I get very different results on the same material if I use different algorithms, even if it appears Melodyne isn't actually "doing" anything.

Try different Melodyne algorithms. Sometimes it seems the percussive one works best, sometimes it's the others.

Here's an article I did about using the PX64 with drums. In the Sonar X1 Advanced Workshop video, there was also quite a bit of information on using it with bass, which is one of my favorite PX64 applications. Unfortunately I have no idea how you could find this, but the info in the drums article should get you started with bass as well. Have fun - it's a great plug-in!

It depends on what you mean by "export." If you want to export for use in a different DAW using OMF, you would need to export the audio and MIDI separately. Or, render the MIDI tracks into audio, and export everything as audio.

The Sonitus effects, which remain wonderful despite being over 20 years old, were updated to 64 bits and are included in CbB. I still use the Sonitus plug-ins, especially the delay and modulator. If a program doesn't support DX plug-ins, I use a wrapper and they work just fine.

Probably your best option is to learn about Lenses, which doesn't allow for an interface overhaul necessarily, but does give you the option to hide elements you don't want to see or find on menus.

Also note there are DIN-to-USB adapters for getting older gear to work with USB. I use the ESI MIDIMATE EX because I played into it with an insane amount of polyphonic aftertouch, turned off local control at the synth, and feed the processed output back to the synth. It didn't hiccup at all.

I've used both Sonar and Studio One since version 1.0. The reason why was mastering in Studio One, multitrack in Sonar. Over the years I realized I could do most of the work in Sonar, then export what I had done as tracks that I could then import into Studio One. So, I could take advantage of Studio One's Song page/Mastering page synergy . As I mastered, if I needed to make tweaks, I didn't have to go back into Sonar, do another mix, export the mix, etc. I could make the tweaks on the Sonar-generated tracks in Studio One, and bounce over to Studio One's mastering page. This was an incredibly efficient workflow that took advantage of what both programs had to offer. In those days, Sonar was IMHO a better mixing environment than Studio One and handled MIDI better, but Studio One had better mastering, analytics, and export functions (like DDP for CD duplication houses). I did the same thing with Ableton Live. Do live sets in Live, record them, then import into Studio One for mastering. The point is there are many ways to approach solutions. To think that "one DAW rules them all" can prevent you from seeing the solution that's going to work best for you. Admittedly, I've been doing this a long time, so it's clear to me what I need to do, and which tools are best to do what's needed for me. At the moment, most of my work is in Studio One because it has particular features that I find essential - but those same features might be irrelevant to other people. As to Cakewalk vs. Reaper, either one will let you make music. The limiting factor will always be the musician's talent, not the program. That said, because I want to know how to pilot a session with any DAW for professional reasons, I've tried Reaper several times. It never quite did it for me, it always seemed to be missing some crucial feature - eventually it would get that feature, but then other programs would have also progressed and leapfrogged ahead of it. I certainly found Cakewalk a far more comfortable, and useful, environment than Reaper. And now, Cakewalk's free. I don't see it as a difficult choice.