Teegarden

I'm as always very impressed by your composition skills. Very creative, great to listen to, many different and unexpected movements, nice! Some instruments sound a bit too synthetic to my taste (mainly certain violin parts and sometimes other instruments depending on the note played). It should be possible to improve that (maybe using an additional orchestral library? Some libraries are better at certain phrases or sound better with specific instruments than others, libraries often can be complimentary. Or a midi expression controllers like TEControl USB MIDI Breath and Bite Controller 2, ROLI Seaboard Rise 2, Expressive E Osmose?) Would be nice to hear it being performed by a real orchestra, the composition really deserves it!

Sounds great, I like the song, sounds professional. Entertaining video. Nice vocals!

I got curious after your cryptic post so checked your channel and tried my best to make sense of it. That was a trip in itself🤩... there's a quote about Spock having used too much LSD in the sixties. It never occurred to you that the reference may have been to you? Back on topic: We had a good discussion about this a year ago. It contains references and and more background info: best-plugin-for-extracting-stems Here are some recent reviews and comparisons between the different options: 5-best-stem-separation-software (Musicradar) best-stem-separation-tools (Musictech) best-stem-separation-software (EDMsauce) They came up with a free online tool I didn't know before as one of the best options: Gaudio Studio which seems to be good and straight forward.

Great work, must have cost some time! So you managed to capture what some consider the greatest musical genius of the century😁 One little thing: the drums, especially the snare rolls sound a bit robotic at times, maybe you could add some "humanize". Other than that: RESPECT!

Love the trippy feel😉 I agree with Nigel that the bass could use some work. Seems like there's a little crack at the start (or is it my internet connection?) Nice instrumental part, nice little fills throughout the song!

Nice song. Separation is good. It sounds a bit thin especially the drums; I do miss some warmth and it could have more bottom part, pronounced bass and base drum. Otherwise, very pleasant to listen to!

Really like your plugins. Never thought of asking the bakers to implement them in Cakewalk/Sonar? Would be nice to have them standard in the DAW...

Love the song. Could automatically imagine an extra major seven vocal on the chorus. When finishing the mix I would try to get rid of the a bit a weird pumping effect (too much gate?) with sounds falling away at moments which makes it a bit exhausting to listen to, and create a bit more distance/depth between the instruments. Otherwise very nice!

Like all your songs this makes me feel being back in the eighties enjoying the GRP All-Stars records which inspired my old band in several ways! 👍

Nice, interesting song!😉 Few comments: Vocals (mainly during the intro) seem not entirely in tempo and sometimes before the beat which was a bit distracting. After that the vocals mostly sound in tempo The drums are a bit clean/static could be more lively Love the change with the sax solo, except it sounds dissonant with the chords at moments making it messy. Maybe it is introduced on purpose to emphasize what the subjects experience. I don't think the song needs that, the unexpected change (sounds a bit hallucinating) is great by itself. If it's a sample, I would change the underlying chords to match it, or use Melodyne to change a few sax notes Love the changes to the different sections and you have a nice voice! We need more original songs like this...

Looks handy. Is a bit too expensive to my taste for just an extra keyboard with only one use. The backlit feature is nice though. it's not clear to me There still seem to be Cakewalk Sonar stickers for keyboards available like this: sonar-keyboard-stickers You can get a cheap second keyboard and put stickers (they do look a bit cheap and outdated though...) like that on it if it's for learning the hotkeys. I didn't pay attention but I guess most hotkeys will be still the same for the new Sonar.

Would be very nice if BandLab would pay effort to get the hardware manufacturers to make their new keyboards/controllers fully compatible with Sonar. If this will happen, why would it not be compatible with CbB? Sonar is just a name change and another update of a DAW that has many years of backward compatibility...

Just love it, great, much better! Anything else is mainly a matter of mixing taste.

Love the vocals. Nice song for a sunset on the beach.

Great drive! Gives energy, makes me want to write a new song😃 Like all your songs I listened to it just sounds pro and good (the video clips are nice too).

I agree with Nigel, For me its way to "toppy", for the rest a great song, well performed, would like to listen to it more often when "tamed"!

Exactly, the horns, I really love them! They sound good, nice licks, just some very unfortunate timing issues. Can't you use Melodyne to get them straight? Maybe some other stem separation tool? The lead vocal could really benefit from de-essing (again maybe Melodyne?) and perhaps some warmth. Other than that I think the feel of the vocal is nice and has the right cool vibe!

Love the song, really my kind of music! Few things I think c(s)hould be improved: Timing issues keep distracting me from really enjoying the song. Sound is a bit squeezed, gives me ear fatigue. Could be a bit warmer. Some de-essing, a bit more depth. To make it more interesting you could consider adding a second/third voice while the song progresses over time and some other little different instrumental licks, percussive sounds that keep the attention of the listener. I find the overall composition great, especially the chord changes/melody in the second part.

I get it, I thought you played it yourself. So the suggestions are just not possible. Well, then your ideas with other instruments and vocals are the only way😉 It is a very nice guitar part indeed anyway!

I like it!, sounds a bit different than your other songs. On point of critic (I've said it before, wasn't received tooo well...😰 but want to insist): After having heard the same chords being repeated a while I'm getting bored, expecting, hoping and waiting for chord or other changes, something that is unexpected and catches the listener: modulation, chord changes, tempo changes, different scale, different verse-bridge-chorus etc. Listen to the Beatles or whatever, there are so many examples. Check Rick Beato - What Makes This Song Great?   He gives endless examples. I like your sound, voice, the recording quality, I think there's great potential and it can become much better when taking the feedback here into account.

2.20Ghz is very low. The Opteron is a quite old processor. Older Ryzen processors are known to have some internal latency. Maybe the Opteron also suffers from that next to it being quite slow. Much higher clock speeds are preferred for DAWs. Did you run latencymon to check what could be the culprit? Do you also experience problems when using other VSTs (recording, playing back)? Do you have many background processes running? Did you do all the important basic stuff like disabling power management on USB ports, WIFI etc.? See for example: windows-11-pc-optimization-for-recording (Sweetwater) How-to-set-up-and-optimize-a-Digital-Audio-Workstation (Steinberg) unofficial-windows-10-and-11-audio-workstation-build-and-tweak-guide (Pete Brown from Microsoft who is also forum member) Optimizing-Your-Computer-for-Audio-Windows-10 (PreSonus)

Fully agree. I've played with some singers who manage record four voices on top of each other each in one take and most people who hear it think it has been done by many takes and endless manipulation of the tracks, they are that pitch and time perfect. And those are not even full professionals... This is the exact reason why I prefer recordings from last century. There are soul hits from the sixties that are at certainly not pitch perfect (vocals, horn sections, guitars,..), but they have SOUL. I love to listen to them. Same thing for timing and mixing: they were not perfect in the near past. It is exactly the little inaccuracies that make those recordings come alive and give them warmth to my ears (and the lack of dynamics due to exhausting exaggerated compression that today's recordings suffer from). Was by accident listening to some live recorded classical orchestra on my studio monitors yesterday (if I listen to classical music it's usually not in studio setting) kept listening while realising how much depth it had, how pleasant it sounded, and after a few hours still no ear fatigue (also realised how difficult it is to reach that sound with classical libraries...). High, mid, low, great dynamics, great timing, great pitch, it was all there without all retakes and the effects hustle that we use in the studio. Having said that, there's nothing wrong with using tools in order to get the sound and perfection you want to get (and not everyone is gifted enough to play like a pro, so might need to help from the FX section). In the end it's a matter of taste. And keeping the conversation civil won't hurt anyone😉

To come back to your title "If you were to do 70s Prog Rock today, how would you do it (production wise)?": Since I very much like the sound of the Yes recording I would like to match it as far as my very limited recording engineer's skills let me. I would use plugins with a good analog sound and reference plugins like Mastering the Mix Expose 2 and Reference 2, ADAPTR metric AB, Melda MCompare. To my ears older recordings give less fatigue compared to the extreme compression and upmixing of drums and bass these days. My kids teenage kids love the songs and sound of music from the fifties to the nineties (as well as a diverse range of more recent songs). I know many of their friends and class mates do too. So there shouldn't be any problem producing a new song sounding similar to those older hits.

I thought the same thing. However, the focus seems to be significantly different: Next focus: creation centric features (Easily turn your ideas into songs, offers easy to use yet powerful tools for creators of all stages) Sonar focus: production centric features (The ultimate music production package for creative minds, continued commitment to serving core audio production needs and providing the best all-around audio solution for Windows). Why keep wasting resources on a DAW that has a "complicated" code legacy while you've created an entirely new one with the legacy issues ironed out if it has not its own important place in the portfolio? If it is just to please Sonar and CbB DAW users, they might as well just provide the promised final update and leave it at that. You can keep using that one for years to come and if you want something better you just change to the Next (which you can keep next to your legacy DAW). I've got the impression that most new DAWs are more focussed on EDM and use of loops and samples vs real playing and recording of VSTs and line/mic recorded instruments. My impression from the very limited info so far is that Next is more in line with the former. So I wonder for a composer/singer/songwriter that is focused on writing pieces for bands, creates orchestral pieces, etc. (someone who is not mainly cutting, pasting and manipulating loops and samples) which one of the two is most advised. @Noel Borthwick any suggestions?

love it! can listen to this kind of music for hours.