Alan Tubbs

And some practical advice. If you are recording acoustic instruments, a high pass filter is the one piece of software you need first. Don’t “master “ (wrong term, to master means polish a finished recording for publishing) individual tracks just solo the track, enable your high pass and slowly expunge the muck below 60 HZ or 100 HS or 150; depending on the instrument. Like most sonic adjustments, go extreme so you can hear the difference, then back off until you can’t hear it unless you punch the filter out. You can be surprised how well this can work and how much noise and useless air you can remove and add back space between the sounds. That will clean up tracks individually and make your entire song more open.

A good mix comes from an OK room and access to a pro listing environment helps. You can’t fix what you can’t hear. Corning or rock wool are your friends and a cheap date to boot. Personally, I’ve got a pair of great speakers I’ve had for 30 years and know them well, but I still take home brewed recordings to a pro studio to check the bass, etc. spend time and thought on the song’s arrangement. The space in songs is important, as well as introducing new “elements” and instruments sequentially. Many musicians coming from bands have a hard time hearing the song as a recording artifact instead of live. One young band freaked out when I suggested playing a second rhythm guitar since they couldn’t play it that way live. This stuff happens esp. with cover songs. another thing is to buy a nice signal chain. Once that problem isn’t there and you can’t blame the tools anymore, you have to concentrate on your technique. lastly, it takes time. You didn’t learn to drive in a day or play an instrument in a. Hour. Recording is a skill. And if you are trying to record yourself it is harder. Even having a gofer around to bounce ideas off of, move the mics and asking a 3rd person which sounds better develops your ear for this stuff. The old studio system put one into a situation where you learned with those who had ears already as well as decent equipment (usually). Once you learned the basic bag of tricks and your associates’ tastes, you could adapt them to your own style. But it still took time. In the meanwhile, it is easy to do horrendous mixes and have no idea why. Don’t let that stop you. @

Peaking at -12 to -6 dB

Yea, the modx connects via usb 3 with the apps mentioned above, as well as user presets etc. online. using it over usb as an interface you can mix between the modx and return signal from your daw. It is all pretty easy. Go to the site(s) and download drivers and apps so you will be ready when the synth arrives. It is pretty slick.

I use analog for saturation. Just about every software saturation I’ve ever used comes off the track bus before I’m finished. I will use soft amps, however. Adds some air as well as saturation.

You might could find a used Dbx 160 series for cheap. The 160x was sub $100 originally and gives perfectly good service in the studio and better for live work.

Do pro and rap are staples, but it is hard not to like kontakt. There are libraries for everything. Synths, orch instrumentation drones and rhythm beds like Heavyocity’s stuff. Ni has sales twice a year and once you get the paid engine there are many free libraries. that being said, you can program dimpro as a sample synth, you just need to use a 3rd party editor to cut the sample. Then a text editor to use Sfz. Now import the sample into dimpro and filter and envelope away.

Noel, impressive list over time. Maybe someone should try to pitch It to the mags ...

Conversion is easy these days. That sounds like the early problems with algorithms and not enough processing power to do a good job of it. My favorite example was the old creative audigy cards. It natively worked at 48k but internally resampled to 44.1k. I still have clicks in my old lp transfers from that conversion which sound worse than vinyl scratches.

True that. I actually like the fact there are usually no glitches when loading in the latest updates. Still, I want some excitement and if bandlab releases new products I will be berry happy.

Sound on sound has done plenty of reviews of cake software. But there is nothing new to review, really, since bandlab bought out the software. That was the last big news to hang any writing on, and the last cake review I know of was in tape op talking about just that. If rapture pro 2 was released, or boardwalk by bandlab with large additions, the magazines would run reviews. But it it hard to write a new car review if all they’ve done is add new tires to last years model, no matter how smoothly it now rides. And as for the old complaint about money buying reviews, any publisher will look to review new products from advertisers. That is how the BUSINESS works. That doesn’t mean they will say 2+2= 5 or this $5 pre is a neve etc. If too many readers buy crap because of lies, guess what, they don’t buy your mag and your ad rates go down. Doubling your losses. That is how things work, not slipping money no one has under the table so a pet writer can waste their time trying to turn lead to gold. It is the same for any review writing, be it daws or cars or better home and gardens. So any conspiracy theories about payola is a an idiotic trope. Please stop. if bandlab releases new products they’ll get reviewed. Until there is something good to review more than stability fixes and ergonomics, any review would simply be plowing the same field. @ Ps writing on an iPad precludes a lot of easy editing, as you can tell from the copy.

Audio for Video originally used 48 K because of bandwidth limitations of the tape speed. Sony and the other manufacturers came up with the audio cd standard that was minimally suitable. Human hearing extends up to 20K at best and you needed twice that rate according technically. So 44.1 was chosen. It is fine and conversion is mostly artifact free to whichever sample rate is required. Tho they simply doubled the speed for quality, Lavry makes a good argument that somewhere around a 60K sample rate is the best. It captures the best ratio of sound for the sample slope. A 96 K introduces its artifacts and is simply wasted bandwidth, tho that isn’t much of a problem these days with cheap storage. And the study is old and his boutique converters have always used the standard rates. I do think he offers some 64 k options. Many pros, esp. the international studios use 96 k standard. A local studio that sounds excellent uses 44.1. The room and analog input chain rank way above which sample rate you use. @

Funny, I was just visiting w a studio and the owner brought up waves from a few years ago where they would book an hour and check your system for cracked waves. Then send bills and threaten owners. Nice studio you got there, shame if a lawyer happened to it.

Synths usually have built in effects. Acoustic recordings have room tone built in, which usually includes short reverb ( unless you are queen and live in a big ole castle). So I usually just add a reverb buss like above for vox and lead stuff. And use a nice convolution reverb. Use the best you have, it does make a difference. Kinda like using a condenser rather than dynamic mike for better detail and discrimination.

Record it well and the mix chain becomes less vital. Cheap mxl ribbon or a 47 into an RND II Chanel strip is sweet for guitar (as is just about anything going thru the Rupert Neve design unit), with the bass going into a tone beast di with a hint of saturation or just a nice round tone if that is called for. That makes mixing easy, when you are mostly cutting out frequencies to make the song work, not the individual sounds “better.” (The pc channel has an excellent eq). And guitars thru a buss with the ssl buss comp strapped on - my favorite use for virtual comp. and another buss for “lead” instruments (vocal and guitar usually) so they sound like they occupy the same sonic space. @

Try analog transformer(s) when recording.

Actually, band lab was downloading so slowly I thought it was broke. It was just soooo sloooow.

it looks like it is a busy fri night for the servers. BL Assistant wasn't froze, but pretty slow.

I was trying to get Rapture Pro back and ended up deleting Cakewalk. Now Bandlab assistant will only let me choose to install Melodyne and the Theme editor. No ability to add Cakewalk itself. Anyone have this problem.

The cheaper version, the rx15, didn’t include midi out though it had the jack. It wouldn’t output midi. That drove me crazy until I figured that out. And the manuals are unintentionally funny with the translation.

Musical rocks.

Looks really interesting. Granular is the new black.

I had Kantos , great effect.

One of the things that can add space is a nice “live” recording or two mixed in with the soft stuff. I know, many of us do that. I guess any one doing vocals. But VA only instrumentation makes it hard to add air to a soundscape naturally. Unlike a lead guitar with some room tone, or a persistent backing horn, or thick backing vocals. The better the room the better the gear and better the engineer makes for a better capture of your real, personal air, but most rooms can be arranged to be fairly neutral and most modern recording equipment is up to the task. We have all heard home produced stuff that sounds radio ready. just as Craig has advised to add a live cymbal to virtual drums, loops etc for rhythmic purposes, a live capture track or two can provide real tone and air.

Wants ni get their claws into you .... hard to resist deals for you wait.