Michael McBroom

I'm working on a piece that has 15 tracks, all MIDI, using four different instances of TTS-1 for the MIDI voices. I like TTS-1 as a multi-timbral synth because it's cheap and it sounds decent. I don't know how much of a factor using TTS-1 for the voices is with this phenomenon. And I can't honestly say if I would have this same problem with audio tracks because I've never recorded a piece with more than 6 audio tracks. So anyway, what's happening is, as I've added instruments -- or tracks -- to the piece, the tracks get buried in the mix. If I solo a track, it jumps out at me in volume and clarity, but as soon as I un-solo it, it disappears into the mix again, noticeably quieter in volume. With this particular piece, this has become annoying with respect to the drum track. I really want it to stand out and have a lot of punchiness -- which is the way it sounds when soloed -- but it's getting buried in the mix. I can increase its volume, but even though it gets somewhat louder, its sound is still buried, and it begins to peg the meter, so I'm limited as to how much I can do. This doesn't just happen with drums. It happens with guitar -- especially acoustic guitar -- and piano tracks. Oh, and strings. They get so buried I can't even tell they're there, but they definitely affect the meter if I turn them up. Oh, and I'm careful to balance the mix as well, trying hard not to stack instruments up in any area of the pan range. This has actually helped my mixes a lot, but it hasn't cured this burial issue. So what do smarter-than-me studio gurus do to keep their tracks separated from each other? Record in audio on million dollar boards? Well, given that's way out of my range of affordability (I'm having to exist on a fixed income at the moment), is there anything us poor composers/engineers can do to improve their mix?

I have Cakewalk set to save my projects every 5 minutes. I have discovered the hard way, however, that having Cakewalk save my data while I am inputting values into the Event List causes the system to hang. This happens if I am in the process of entering data when Cakewalk begins to save the project. Sometimes, if I see it begin to save the project, I stop entering the data, it will pause then continue to save, but other times if I've like hit "Enter" while it's saving, Cakewalk freezes and even if I walk away from my computer for several minutes, it won't dislodge itself from this condition. The only way out, I've found, is to shut down CW and then call up the most recent save. But to shut it down, I have to call up the Task Manager to kill it. Fortunately, when I do this, I get a CW pop-up asking me if I want to save the file, so I haven't lost any data. If I'm doing a lot of work on the Event List, what I do now is I disable the "save" feature in Preferences and then I re-enable it when I'm finished with my Event List editing. Still, a bug's a bug, which is why I'm mentioning it.

I thought I should resurrect this stale thread because I have new information with regards to the issue I was facing, namely that my Marshall CODE amp was showing up in CW as a MIDI device and not an audio one. I did as Scook recommended and changed the driver mode, in this case from ASIO to WASAPI. This song I'm working on has five audio tracks -- well, six now -- and no MIDI tracks. My audio interface supposedly supports only ASIO, so I was concerned I might lose audio on the other tracks, but fortunately I didn't. WASAPI did the trick, the CODE showed up in the audio interface's input panel only, and I had to deselect the interface's inputs in order to select the CODE. After that, everything was pretty straightforward. I had to do some balancing of the input signal in order to get the volume up where I needed it to be, and I found that, using USB, suddenly the input signal -- in this case a Gibson Les Paul with humbucing pickups -- became very clean. But curiously enough, it was as if i were playing a guitar with single coil pickups. Lots of hum and the position of the guitar became very sensitive to the level of hum that was being produced. When I hold it just so, the hum disappears pretty much completely. But I don't think that CW has anything to do with this. It's a feature shared by that Les Paul and the CODE amp, albeit an atypical one. The difference in noise levels between bringing in the audio signal through one of the audio interface's channels and bringing it in via the USB port is dramatic. I was having to port the signal into the interface from the amp's headphone jack -- it doesn't have a Line Out, unfortunately -- and it was noisy. I hadn't ruled out the possibility that some of the cabling might be at fault, but instead of trying to trace it down, I decided to give the USB port one more shot. Glad I did, because the difference in noise levels was dramatic. So anyway, problem solved, glad to have a successful USB approach for getting my guitar's audio signal into the computer quietly.

Thanks for your response. Looks like I've got a bit of studying to do.

Okay, just so's you know -- I'm not a Cakewalk power user. I know enough of the basics in order to get done what I need, as long as what I need doesn't get too tricky, I suppose. I did a fair amount of searching through the Help Index before I realized that PRV stands for Piano Roll View. Duh! Which ended up being kind of frustrating because I've been trying to get things done in the Piano Roll with no useable results. And since most of your post was just so much Greek to me, I decided to search for a tutorial on the PRV. I found a couple, right off, and just finished watching one. It answered several questions I had. Still dunno where to find Global Snap, though, unless that's the name for the drop-down column of snap values. Still not clear on PRV snap override, but hopefully I'll be able to puzzle it out quickly enough. I'll check back in with more questions if I still have some after I've watched more videos. Thanks.

Okay, so first thing, I did a search on the topic and I found this thread: http://forum.cakewalk.com/Slurs-m2700315.aspx It wasn't helpful. This is what I've got going on and what I'm trying to do. I've written a part to which I've assigned a TTS-1 patch -- jazz guitar -- and there are quite a few areas in this score where I would like to be able to duplicate hammers and pull-off, and even the occasional string bend. I'm not a keyboardist (although I own a couple), so I'm not even going to try playing the part on my keyboard using the wheel. In the past, I've used the event list to actually get in there and type in the numeric value of pitch changes. That wasn't difficult to do if I played the part using my Roland GR-33 Guitar Synth because it would produce lots of wheel events that I could then edit. But the problem with writing out the score is I don't get all these wheel events. It's all just straight notes, one after the other, with no wheel events in between them. In this case it means that I actually have to create wheel events so that I can type in these values, and that is a major headache. Each event takes at least a couple minutes to produce and I'll end up probably having to type in many hundreds of wheel events for this entire piece. Many hundreds of minutes. You do the math. I'm aware of the various controls that can be configured in the Piano Roll, and they include things like Portamento and Modulation, but I haven't been able to get them to do anything meaningful. There's also the Wheel Controller, which is very hard to use because just a touch of the mouse can cause hundreds of digits of deflection, so trying to get things just right will also be a major chore. So, just wondering, is there anything available I can use to "automate" this process? I mean, I can export the part as a MIDI file and then try calling it up in something else, to which I can add the slurs. I'm thinking. Or is there a relatively painless way to get this done in Cakewalk?

Noted. Using TTS-1 is probably due in a large way to laziness on my part because it's so convenient and it provides decent sounds, for the most part. Yes, I also use SI instruments -- especially strings -- when I'm looking for something with a bit of extra quality. I have dozens of VSTs on my machine in addition to the Cakewalk ones, so I have plenty to choose frome. Last night the white noise returned. Reloading the file didn't work. Rebooting CW didn't work. I had to reboot my system to get things back to normal. Annoying.

Yeah, that's the GR-33 guitar synth recording finger vibrato and pitch bends. The instrument I'm using, incidentally, is a Hammond B3-sounding patch, so I think it's kinda cool being able to bend pitches on a B3. As for no gray notes, why don't I find that surprising? My copy of CW shows those notes as being grayed out and, not only that, but they don't appear in the track window. One possible explanation has occurred to me, but it doesn't entirely fit. When I first started laying down tracks, my setup was set to record in "Comp" mode, which apparently is where one track is laid down on top of another. By the time I'd realized what was going on, I'd laid down three or four tracks on top of each other. Then I went in and changed it to delete the old data during recording. It was after this, when I was examining the event list, and trying to puzzle out which lines of melody to keep that I noticed that some of the notes were grayed out and that when I deleted those, it removed the spurious ones from the Staff View. As I dimly recall, they weren't making any sound so they weren't cluttering things acoustically at least. But even after I'd removed all those grayed out notes, they were appearing when I would write in new ones. So maybe something got stuck somewhere, I dunno.

Greg, as I mentioned in my opening post, I was very careful to eliminate any duration overlaps because I'm aware they can present problems. I have arrived at a solution -- one I don't particularly care for, but it works. Greg, I gave your solution a try -- putting the notes on another track that wasn't being affected, double checking with the event list that they weren't being grayed out. But then what I did was copy and paste the notes into the original track. Fortunately they translated over as valid notes -- black in the event list -- and so now I have sounds where previously I had none. I would just as soon find out how to correct the problem in the track that's being affected, but this solution at least works. Robert, give me a moment. I've prepared a clip on another computer, so I'll have to post this message, then come back and edit it from the other machine. Okay, I'm back. This is a short clip -- 9 measures. The anomaly occurs at the beginning of measure 5 and lasts for three fourths of the measure. After creating the clip, I loaded it back into CW to make sure the grayed out notes were still there. They were. An observation I made, but didn't report, is that these grayed out notes don't show in the track window -- it's as if nothing is there. Which is kinda curious too. f1clip1.mid

That's quite a variety. I'll make a note of your preferences for future reference. But getting back to the problem -- the white noise issue -- since it is an intermittent condition, I realize the cause is harder to trace. But once it hits, it stays put until the piece is reloaded, or in a worst case, until I've had to reboot. Any other ideas?

Hmmm, interesting behavior, but totally different from my own experiences. Prior to this one issue, TTS-1 has been extremely stable on my system and I use it a lot because of its very low drain on CPU resources. I also find that many of its instruments actually sound pretty authentic. I am in the final stages of finishing up three CDs of original compositions, in which I've made heavy use of TTS-1 and I've had zero problems with it, except for this white noise issue. Just this morning, things seem to be getting worse. Working on the same piece as above, when I loaded it and clicked Play, the white noise was there. First time I've run into this when loading a tune for the fist time. So I exited the piece, then reloaded it, which worked before, but no joy. So I went ahead and shut down the laptop and rebooted to see if that would make a difference. Well, it cleared up -- for now. I hope that I don't have to reboot the machine every time this problem appears now. I suppose it's at least worth mentioning that I don't know for sure that this is a TTS-1 problem. It just so happens that it is the only multitimbral synth -- or any synth apart from my GR-33 -- that I've been using when the problem appeared. Incidentally, what multitimbral synths do you use now that you find to be better than TTS-1?

First thing I did was do a search here on this topic and I got zero hits. I'm currently editing a MIDI track that I laid down with my Roland GR-33 guitar synth -- it tends to add spurious notes to the playback, so getting rid of them is a regular enough occurrence. When doing this before, and when viewing the info in the Event List, I've occasionally noticed that some of the notes were grayed out, while others were black. I found that the grayed out notes made no sound. They were usually the spurious notes, so this made editing much easier. But just now, I've run into an annoying occurrence. I'm trying to lay down three beats worth of notes -- two eighths and eight 16ths -- using the Staff View, and I'm seeing that the Event List is showing these notes grayed out. I tried adding notes into other sections of the piece and results were mixed. Some were black, and sounded when I played the piece, and others were gray and were silent. So anyway, I have these three beats worth of notes that I need to get sounding -- and any other future occurrences, should this happen again, and I haven't yet figured out a way to convert these notes such that they will make a sound. And yes, I did make sure that all the time values were correct to eliminate any overlap, which can sometimes choke off a note's sound. So do you happen to know what I've done to cause CW to begin misbehaving, and what I need to do in the future to prevent this?

Well, the title pretty much sez it all. But here are a few more details. I'm running the latest version of Cakewalk on a laptop that still has Win7. It runs Cakewalk pretty much without issues -- except for this odd situation. TTS-1 is handling 10 tracks of MIDI instruments, and I also have a Roland GR-33 guitar synth hooked up to the system via my USB audio interface's MIDI ports. This doesn't happen all the time, but it happens enough to be annoying. What I'm doing right now is editing a track that I've laid down with my GR-33. Getting rid of spurious notes it generated mostly, which is a common enough issue with the GR-33, especially if one is playing fast scale passages. So, after cleaning up maybe a measure or two of the GR-33's track, when I hit Play to see how it sounds, all the TTS-1 instruments now sound as if they've been converted into a roaring sort of white noise. The GR-33's track still sounds okay, but none of the TTS-1 tracks do. I first tried just stopping and restarting the piece, which didn't help. Then I found that, if I clear the piece from CW by hitting the 'x' in the top right corner, then reload it, everything's back to normal. But what I'm finding is, after editing a couple measures of the GR-33's track, the roar comes back. So I have to save, exit, and reload again. This is annoying behavior and I'd like to find out what it is about my activities that is causing Cakewalk -- or TTS-1 -- to behave in this manner. I don't have any VSTs loaded -- just two instances of TTS-1, but only one of them is doing anything during this section of the piece. No audio items are loaded at all, except for the TTS-1 audio outs, of course. Any ideas?

Guys, thanks for clearing up the mental confusion I was having. Abacab, I had thought of trying to load two instances of TTS-1 to test it out, but I'm glad to read you've confirmed it works. I have a couple of pieces I've composed where I should go back and adjust my TTS-1 settings to avoid any MIDI confusion. Abacab, the way I'm getting the GR-33 into Cakewalk right now is through a USB audio interface with 5-pin MIDI ports. I also have a couple of Midiman MidiSport 2x2s and a Roland UM-1 or something or another that's 5-pin to USB. Currently, the only device I have hooked up that require a MIDI-to-USB interface is the GR-33, but I also have an older Yamaha keyboard that has several onboard patches I'm quite fond of, and a Roland JV-1010 that I bought back in the age of hardware synths, which also has some decent settings. More importantly,. I've recorded tunes using Pro Audio 9 that, in order for them to work properly in Cakewalk, I have to have all these old synths hooked up so their instruments are interpreted properly. Speaking of Pro Audio 9, abacab, I like your avatar. Most expensive single piece of software I've ever bought.

I'm aware of the 5-pin MIDI cable being the 16 channel restriction. It sounds as if you're saying what I'd hoped to hear -- that Cakewalk has no limit in MIDI channels it can handle, but rather that the limit is imposed by the devices and/or software synths being used.

I suppose I could set up a test file to find the answer to this, but I'm wondering if things might be more complicated, which is why I'm putting this question to the forumind. I've always known that MIDI is limited to 16 channels, but I'm wondering now, is this a limitation that the Cakewalk environment imposes, or does it depend on the synths and/or VSTs. For example, let's say I've got a number of MIDI instruments that I have assigned to TTS-1 -- say a dozen. But I need to load, I dunno, another five more. So that will put me at 17. But what if, for these next five instruments I choose to load VSTs and a MIDI keyboard or two? Are all these separate instruments included in the 16 channel total, or does each of these separate devices have at least one channel not included in the Cakewalk total (like TTS-1) that it can use? I found this article on the subject. It seems that, if one has the hardware to support it, one can have a large number of MIDI channels. But I guess my question remains -- will Cakewalk support this larger number of channels? http://homerecordinghub.com/midi-interface.html

Folks, I thought I should come back to this thread and let y'all know that I found the solution. You know, I'd tried so many things with my GR-33 that I had probably gotten things crossed up pretty good internally. So a few days ago, I decided to reset the device to bring it back to factory default spec. Of course when I did this I lost a few presets that I'd saved, but I can recover them without too much difficulty. As I was going back over some items I'd covered before, I came across the Local Control discussion on P94 of the GR-33's manual. In the discussion a couple of things were mentioned that I had been running into, specifically collisions between the DAW and the GR, and not recognizing switches on my guitar's MIDI pickup. I had tried setting Local Control to Off before, and it hadn't made a difference, but since I'd reset the device, I decided to try it again. And guess what. It worked. I'm now reliably getting my GR-33 to lay down MIDI tracks, and I can hear what's being recorded from the GR-33's onboard patches. This is yet another example of me realizing that I have indeed forgotten more about MIDI than I know now, cuz I didn't used to make this sort of mistake way back in my Pro Audio days.

OK, I have more to report. First of all, I updated the GR-33's BIOS or OS or whatever you want to call it. Then, I tried unchecking the MIDI out in Preferences and left the cable plugged in, as John recommended. Didn't make a difference. What I have been describing as alphanumeric hash still appears. I took a closer look at this "hash" just now. I greatly expanded the length of this piece's measures in the Tracks window and made an interesting discovery. The track carries a label, identifying the GR-33's patch -- in this case, A11 Jazz scat. And that is in dark gray text. But in bright white text there is a successions of, well they look like boxes, spaced evenly apart, each one occupying the equivalent of a 32nd note's space. And inside each one is the label "p0." Inside some of these boxes are broken bits of line -- indicating some sort of musical signal ordinarily. And for the first time, I heard some audio coming from this fragment. All it sounded like was a single honk from a harmonica. But then I made another interesting discovery. The audio for the GR-33 track is now working, and I can select different patches if I want. However, I also discovered that I can no longer record MIDI. I didn't do anything, other than just muck about with the playback some. So now I get to retrace my steps and see if I can figure out what I've done this time. Grrrr . . . . . Feels like one step forward, two steps back, but I'll get there eventually.

Gswitz, My GR-33 works much like your GR-20, I suspect. I've never had an issue with hammers and pull-offs with mine, and string bending and finger vibrato -- it's always tracked this perfectly. I find that most of the errors I get come when I try to play really fast scale passages. The GR-33 demands ultra-precise technique when playing at high speed, and I guess my technique can be a bit too sloppy at times, although it doesn't sound like it to me when I'm playing the guitar straight -- that is, not using the synth. However, the great thing about having a MIDI guitar is I can go into Cakewalk's Staff Mode and correct any errors, even supplement the guitar part in areas where I feel it needs it. It ends up being a very powerful tool. Yeah, it's true that the synth can pick up a lot of garbage, but, while it may be a bit time consuming, it is ultimately possible to clean up the part and get it configured the way I want it.

John, thanks for your response. I mis-wrote. As you can see in your above quote of what I wrote, on the second line, I wrote the true condition of the audio interface, opposite of what I wrote in the first line. So, to reiterate, I do have the MIDI out from the GR-33 running to the audio interface's MIDI in. But as I mentioned above, if I run the cable from the audio interface to the GR-33, I get alphanumeric hash appearing in the track and no recorded signal. I don't know why this is occurring. It seems to me that, if I try your technique of leaving the MIDI Out unchecked in Preferences, this is the same as unplugging the MIDI Out cable from the audio interface, yes? I'll give your technique a try, though, with the cable both plugged in and unplugged. The GR-33 came with no software, thus it is not seen as a VST by Cakewalk. But your mention of this got me to thinking, so I visited Roland's website and found that they have updated OS files for the GR-33. So I downloaded and installed them. Maybe they'll fix the problems I'm having. I'll find out momentarily -- and I'll report back.

Folks, I'd like to revisit this thread -- mostly because I've finally gotten my Roland GR-33 Guitar Synthesizer to work with Cakewalk. It records fine, but that's it. Now, for whatever reason, I can't get any playback sound from the GR-33. Just to check that it was recording correctly, I copied a passage of the track I'd recorded onto a neighboring MIDI track, and then played back that track. It sounded fine -- even captured some nuances, like my finger vibrato and string bending. Given that this track was for a Hammond B3, I was quite surprised. But that's where the happiness ends. I've gone back through the GR-33's difficult to understand documentation, seeing if I can puzzle out why it isn't playing back any audio. Might it be because I have only the MIDI OUT from my audio interface running to the GR-33's MIDI IN, and I have the other cable unplugged? I tried plugging it back in, but it didn't help. I found I had to keep the OUT from the audio interface to the IN to the GR-33 unplugged, or else I got a bunch of hash in the track where the recorded signal is supposed to appear, and no recorded information was left. Just a bunch of alphanumeric hash. I don't remember having to do this -- unplug the cable that is -- years ago when I was using Cakewalk's Pro Audio and the GR-33. I also found that, after finishing the recording, when I played my guitar, the B3 track would sound along with the GR-33 track. And I found further that if I clicked on any other track, its MIDI instrument would play along as well. These are all TTS-1 instruments. So I have no idea why that's happening. But I can't help but wonder if all this mess is tied up with my not getting any playback from the GR-33. In Cakewalk, I have the GR-33's track in/out associated with the audio interface. Actually, I eventually left the input to Midi Omni, since it still worked, and was non-specific enough to avoid any conflicts, or so I'd hoped. For the Group/Bank/Intrument, I have the instrument definition file loaded for the audio interface, such that it reads "Roland GR-33," and it's sitting with its own, non-shared channel number. The bank is User, which is the correct one, and the instrument is selected from the User bank. Everything perfectly normal there. In Preferences, I don't have anything out of the ordinary selected there. So, I'm just wondering what I might have missed. I suspect the problem doesn't lie with CW, but with the GR-33. I probably have a parameter set incorrectly. Problem is, the manual is a difficult read and it's left out even minimally comprehensive explanations for a lot of the synth's settings. Much of what I've been able to glean out from it has been through trial and error. Unfun.

Hey Nigel, is this Windows update for Win10? I'm still running Win7 and my last update was KB2310138. I've wondered for some time if one or more of these updates might be responsible for some problems I've been having. For example, I have a Roland GR-33 guitar synthesizer and it worked perfectly with Sonar until about two years ago, when it suddenly stopped working. To this day, it still doesn't work -- the problem has to do with Sonar (now Cakewalk) not playing the MIDI signals sent out by the GR-33. If I run it straight into an amp, I get all the MIDI instruments playing through the amp, I just can't get those instruments to sound within Cakewalk. I've suspected for some time that the problem I'm having with this synth might be related to a Windows update, although I have no idea which it would be. And of course I've been wondering for some time now if the problems I'm experiencing right now might be because of a past Windows update.

Playing around with this one file some more, I didn't mention but it does have one audio track. This particular file that I was working on had seven MIDI tracks, plus the two TTS-1 tracks, plus an audio track, where I bounced the nine tracks into it. So, to see if it would make any difference, I deleted the audio track, then played the file. No difference. Very heavy distortion and dropouts about every second or so. So, I restored the audio track, then deleted the 9 MIDI and TTS-1 tracks, such that only the bounce audio track was left. Hit Play, and it played the tune back perfectly, nary a snap, crackle, or pop to be heard anywhere. Frustrating.

The LatencyMon stats I quoted above were with that same MIDI file resident in CW. I tried it later when CW was not present, and the numbers were WAY lower. Like the bar charts below were mostly only an inch long or less. The message was my machine was suitable for the sort of stuff that I've been using it for. Those spikes are abnormal. I only see them that high when my machine is misbehaving, the way it is now. Otherwise, they're barely a ripple while a tune is playing. I'm running 44.1k/24 as my sample/bit rate, just to keep things simple. I'll be burning my tunes to CD once I finish editing them, so I might as well just leave it at the CD spec (I know 16 bits is spec for CDs, but my software auto adjusts for the difference). I'll bump ThreadSchedulingModel up to 2, although I doubt it will make a difference.

As I mentioned above, ThreadSchedulingModel is set to 1. You recommended 2. Should I increase to 2? Plug-in Load Balancing is unchecked. I just reset the Config file. Honestly I think the new one is the same as the one that just got replaced. So, I just gave this same example file another try, and there's no change. Still heavy distortion with dropouts every second or so. I should reiterate. Sometimes this machine will play these files perfectly and sometimes I have to deal with this. And there's nothing that I've done to change things in the interim. It's as if the machine decides one day suddenly to behave after spending days misbehaving. But it's just with Cakewalk. I can load MIDI files into Band in a Box or MuseScore 3 and they play fine. Well, I should be clear here. It's the Cakewalk .cwp files in which there are MIDI tracks that I'm having issues with. I just tried something I haven't tried before. I loaded a blank file into CW, then added a MIDI track and loaded TTS-1 for the synth chores. No distortion. So I added another. No distortion. So I added another. Still none. Then I added a MIDI file that had six tracks of MIDI data, which meant I had a total of nine MIDI tracks. Sounded like crap with all the dissonance, and for the first time, there was quite a bit of distortion. So I got rid of the first three MIDI tracks such that I had just the file with the six tracks. There was still distortion, although not as bad. So I looked for another example, but what I came across was a file with five audio tracks and one MIDI track. So I loaded it and hit Play. Quite a bit of distortion -- but only one MIDI track. So I muted the MIDI track. No difference. Then I deleted the MIDI track. Still, there was some distortion, but it had dropped quite a bit. Still there though. Then I realized that TTS-1 was still resident, although not assigned to anything. So I deleted it, such that there was only audio tracks present. Distortion was gone. So this tells me that TTS-1 is actually contributing to my problem. Other synths do too, because I've noticed it with a few. But I've always liked TTS-1 because of its low tasking of the CPU. Well, it might be low tasking, but it is also part of the problem. When my machine is misbehaving, that is. Grrr. TTS-1 is the only multi-timbral synth I've used. I guess I should look for others.