RexRed

Great rock tune, I thoroughly enjoyed this! 👍 The guitar leads reminded me of Styx and the vocal Steve Winwood!

I would love to remix this. This is a great tune.

Hey awesome Cakewalk peeps! Here is a new song I just made. I am here for critiques so don't hold back! 😁💝😘 RexRed

Well, it is kind of a long story. I will condense it as much as possible. I am not sure what makes one core race as much. Sometimes it is terrible. I suspect is it plugins. Some plugins are buggy with Cakewalk, I do not blame Cakewalk for this because other plugins are perfectly fine no matter how many instances I have of them. For instance, Isotope Nectar, do not place it in a FX rack pre pro channel. During mixdown rendering Cakewalk would crash. I removed the two instances of Nectar from the FX rack and Cakewalk rendered fine. Nectar is buggy in Cakewalk in general (I could go into more detail but...) And the thing is with Nectar, I was turning off all of the internal apps except the live tuning one which I have grown fond of. In the windows front, I did not realize I could track CPU usage in the task manager even though I have seen the monitors thousands of times. My latest version of Windows 11/ Office 365 has a startup of Microsoft teams (that can be problematic, I have thousands of contacts). Also windows widgets can be problematic shut them off and anything else that is not critical. Once everything is shut off then it is a matter of getting Cakewalk's own footprint to be as light as possible. I have a RME Fireface UCX II and it has a lot of ADAT and other ins and outs that I never use. Shut them off so Cakewalk does not load them. Then it comes down to the dilemma of plugins, I have perhaps a thousand of them. Many of them I never use at all. I am not sure of how or if they load into memory and to what extent. I would assume they have no memory impact unless they are used but I could be wrong about that. Why have them resident if they will not be used? Having them resident also gives way to the possibility of conflicts between each other and Cakewalk itself and then there is the whole 32-64 bit thing and emulation running in the background. Why not disable plugins that you don't ever use? Are there any other ways to lessen Cakewalk's CPU footprint? Post your ideas here please. Sometimes I work all night in Cakewalk while I am dreaming and that does not take up any CPU cycles at all... 😁 Ozone 10, having all of these apps within one plugin, one wonders how good the load balancing is in those instances. Would it not be better loading each app separately into a bin and letting Cakewalk handle the balancing? The answer to that is beyond my skill. Also I use Waves Vocal Rider a lot, in some projects I might have ten instances of it. So far it seems to do well. But it only takes one buggy track with a corrupted clip in it and a floating pointer situation arises and finding the culprit is nearly impossible. We must mention Windows Defender scans here as well. And One Drive uploading, each time you hit ctrl S, sending your project all the way to Redmond WA.

Even the smallest detail is good to fix in a song because once it is done, it is pretty much frozen in time, especially if it ends up out in the stores and/or etched into vinyl. I can't go back and fix it then... 😁 Your input is very much appreciated Keith! 👍 I use Melodyne almost as much as I use Cakewalk. ❤️

I will look for the instances with "t" sounds and correct them Keith, I tried to manually align the "s" sounds between teh BVs and the Lead vocal but the "t" sounds may have slipped by me. 😁 Thanks for the suggestion!

Thanks for that tip Glenn, I have never heard of that program, I installed it and it is very helpful!

Bjorn, your suggestions were very helpful! As you can hear, I removed the jarring change at 2:25 replaced it with a more predictable interlude. I removed all of the sound effects except for one and now that gets repeated at the end as well. This song has 7 pads in it! The pads all appear at different times. It is less cluttered and also not as empty sounding in spots. I may revisit it if you can hear anymore things that could be improved upon. Thanks for helping me with this song, it was particularly challenging because I over orchestrated it at first. I am sure you all can relate to that. You know the elements you want but they can't all play at the same time so you have to make decisions and then work each section to get them right. Some songs just fall together and some need days of dickering over details. I felt like giving up on this one at times. But, I am happy with it now even though I may still make some minor adjustments. Please let me know if you can detect any other issues peeps. Thanks much! ❤️

Would Windows background tasks also not favor that thread? Is there a way to have the UI favor a different thread? Also, I had a notification in my Windows defender area and it wanted to do some sort of ram thing where it put items in a protected mode. This seems to have helped putting that on. I also put a lot of effects that would seems sensible before the pro channel instead of in the bins after the track.

Dan Fogelberg is great! 😁👍 Thanks for the awesome compliment on my song and the harmonies John B! 💝

Okay, I have devoted more time to this song, I removed the guitar from a lot of sections and filled in the spaces with new instruments to break up the monotony. I toned down the effects in the instrumental section and aligned them into more predictable places. Thanks Andy and Rik for the really nice compliments and very helpful suggestions. These suggestions are especially helpful when I become so myopic and can't see the scope of things. It is REALLY nice to have a fresh set of eyes and ears to provide feedback. This is still a work in progress and a lot has changed so there is room for even more suggestions. I would like to get this song perfect. I tried to make this song with "changes" and not just the 4 chord same old... It is sort of Pink Floyd meets the Moody Blues. I wonder if certain sections are too sparce. I feel it has been taken in the right direction though. Please let me know your thoughts no matter how detailed or minute.

Hey thanks Rik for the advice, I agree, the guitar could be removed in parts and take away from the monotony of it. Thanks for the tip, it is very helpful!

New tune for your listening pleasure awesome Cakewalk peeps! Critiques welcome. 😘

From the Sonar documentation (I assume it is the same for CBB) "When enabled, SONAR will attempt to load balance FX Racks that contain two or more unbypassed plug-in effects, including track FX Racks, bus FX Racks, clip FX Racks, FX Chains, ProChannel FX Racks, and ProChannel FX Chains" From what this seems to say to me is if you have a second effect in your bus/rack/chain/bin Sonar will send that effect to another core. My problems is I have only one effect each in a lot of tracks so they are all being sent to core 1. The balancing is done on a, per effect in rack, basis but it seems it is not done on a per track basis. I don't think load balancing is even working when unbypassed effects are in a single bin. I contacted Izotope and they said that their plugins should work with load balancing but that does not seem to be the case.

This is my meter when I am not even playing the song.

I have 18 cores intel extreme i9, load balancing is on and Cakewalk seems to be favoring core 1 such that the other cores are barely moving and core 1 is maxing out. I have about 8 instances of waves vocal rider in various track effect bins, and ozone 10 in the master effect bin. I am using convolution reverb parallel in a master bus and a lot of instances of ozone imager, why is core 1 so busy in Windows 11. Is there a way to manually manage load balancing? Core 1 is maxing out even when the project is not even playing anything.

It is nice when my music crosses over to people who prefer other genres. I really appreciate you taking to time Keith to leave an awesome comment. All the best! 👍 RexRed A live YouTube video, part one, of me making this song. Please leave comments and critiques on YouTube. My ego can handle it 😊🎶❤️

My new song peeps! Hope you enjoy this new love ballad. ❤️ RexRed

Hey Ruralrocker2010, I have noticed that problem with the timing and I have been baffled as to how to fix it. Everything seems to be lining up with the measures. I have just resolved to let this fall under the category of "syncopation". There are low Ooos sung sporadically through the song and the bass guitar is very faint and a "phantom bass", just to balance out the high frequencies and add some power to the low end. There are also some chord issues that have perplexed me as well that I could not resolve in this song. I may revisit this song again someday and try and figure it out. Mark Skinner, as for my harmonies, I do pan them for clarity sake and for the stereo spread effect. It may not sound very natural, I don't know. It does give them a separate place in the mix to stand out. I usually pan the low voice left the mid voice right and the high voice left depending on the pitches in the melody line as long as the harmonies are not the same octave on the same side. If they are octaves I put them on opposite sides. This approach helps them to not cancel each other out as much when played in mono. I hope to one day address the flaws or maybe another mixer/master person may have a go at trying to get my songs into shape. 😃 Paul Bush, thank you for the very nice compliment I hope the work outweighs the unresolved problems this song has presented. As for the Rhodes solo in the center of the song, I just wanted a change from the usual guitar solo I put in my songs. It has a soft and intimate tone, easy on the ears and I thought it was okay. Again, I may one day make another version of this song and try and raise it up to a different level. Thanks for the honest critiques and compliments! They are very helpful and also flattering to my work! Much love and have a great week peeps! RexRed

Here is a new song for your listening pleasure awesome Cakewalk peeps! This will probably be my contribution this year to Valentine's Day. So, Happy Valentines Day! 💝🌹😘

Thanks for the really nice comments awesome Cakewalk peeps! It was about a month ago when I created this song "One Touch Away" words, music and vocals. It is really nice getting feedback from Cakewalk users. We are all brought together by this music creation tool that is so amazing and unparalleled in the industry. My first experience with Cakewalk was in MSDOS many eons ago and today, Cakewalk has grown into a mammoth of a program. My wildest dreams could not have envisioned what Cakewalk is today. But my fancies knew what Cakewalk was all along. I on, 2/3/23 have reached the golden age of 60 years old. This nearly life long ride with Cakewalk is fulfilling and all that I have imagined and more. May I still be able to accomplish greater with this superlative program in the years ahead. Best to you friends! 🌹💗💖 RexRed

Thank you Wookie for the listen and nice comment! Well, I went back to the song and did some more work on it. If you bought the song, please go back and download the latest version of the song on Reverbnation. There is only so much I can do other than rip the song up and redo it completely. Personally, I did not like the song as it was either. So I really can't fault TeeGarden for his comment. It sounded harsh to me and lacked warmth. So, I added another bass to balance out the highs more. I took out Ozone 10 on the master bus and Neutron Pro on some tracks and mastered it manually. Then I fixed the lead vocal that had a slight lag. When the vocals are not EXACTLY spot on and lag a bit, that can give the song a, well, "boring" feel. I also added a choir, a cello and an organ in separate places to give the song a more climactic feel to the parts when they do change, to help with the repetitive nature of the song as best as I could. Enjoy, awesome Cakewalk peeps!

Thanks for the honesty TeeGarden, I guess you have not lived as a musician 'till someone has called your song, repetitive and boring... I am glad I am not made of glass. 😉 I actually put a drone in the lead guitar part in this song as well, to accentuate the monotony I guess. I make a variety of songs, and a lot can be said for songs with more changes. Some people can't be bothered by a love song, even on Feb 14th... lol Best to you Tee!

New tune Cakewalk peeps! Critiques and suggestions welcome! Best to you! 💖 RexRed

Thank you Kevin for the awesome answer to this question!