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henkejs

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Posts posted by henkejs

  1. Looks good. Can we suggest additional quotes? Here's one from Mark Knopfler's song "Industrial Disease":

    "Philosophy is useless. Theology is worse."

    Disclaimer: I have a philosophy degree.

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    • Great Idea 1
  2. OK, you guys talked me into it. 😀 This is my first venture into the Kontakt ecosystem.

    A question for people with a bunch of big sample libraries: can you run them successfully from a portable USB-attached hard drive? I've got a Western Digital drive I plug in for local backups, but I've never tried running samples from it. Before I go and load it up, I thought somebody here might know if it's worth trying. Thanks.

  3. Good story. I had no idea making a blue LED was more challenging than the others, but I remember buying my first string of multi-color LED Christmas lights years ago. Most of the blue bulbs had dimmed or failed completely after the first season, while the other colors continued to work fine. I wondered at the time what was different about blue.

    • Like 1
  4. Warning, long post ahead! There are a lot of people here who are passionate about music and know what goes into creating it. I thought this forum might be a good place to share my story.

    A lot of "older" people like me have hearing loss. Some of you may be reading this right now. 😄 I also have a rare condition called diplacusis. There are different types of diplacusis, but for me it means my two ears hear the same note as different pitches. The difference is small in the higher frequencies but gets steadily worse as the pitch gets lower. Sometimes this problem makes music sound out of tune. Even simple intervals like octaves can sound bad although a tuner confirms the pitches are right.

    I don't know exactly when this problem started or what caused it, but eventually it forced me to give up playing music with other people. Soon after that it got bad enough that I stopped writing and recording music because I couldn't trust what I was playing or singing. If you've heard my music (especially my singing) you know that's no great loss to the world, but it is something I've enjoyed doing for many years.

    We can skip over my long and convoluted path to finding a doctor who even knew anything about this condition let alone whether it might be treatable. Eventually I found an audiologist and musician in Ohio who is involved in research related to diplacusis and other hearing challenges affecting musicians. Ultimately, she devised a program of simple exercises to attempt to retrain my brain in order to restore, as much as possible, more normal pitch perception. The exercises involved listening very carefully while playing various notes, scales, and intervals over and over again on the bass guitar until they started to make sense to my ears. After 20 or 30 minutes a day over the course of a few months, it made a significant difference for me. It's still hard to hear pitches in a more complex musical context or in noisy situations, but under controlled conditions music is starting to sound reasonably normal to me again.

    To celebrate this progress and put it to the test in a real-world situation, I decided to record a cover of George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps. I picked that song because I've always liked it and because I knew the bass part would be a good challenge for me. The guitar parts would have been impossible for me, but I asked my friend and long-distance collaborator Craig Hansen to help. Craig played the lead and rhythm guitar parts on our version, while I handled the bass and everything else including the mixing, which was a challenge in itself considering my compromised hearing. This was never intended to be a note-for-note copy, but we did try to honor the spirit and style of the original. Here's the track, created on Cakewalk of course:

      https://www.soundclick.com/johnhenke/?content=songs

    Note: Craig is a really talented blind multi-instrumentalist from Minnesota who writes and records original music all by himself. I help with getting his tracks ready and uploading them to the various streaming services (there's probably a joke in there somewhere about a partly deaf person and a blind person making music together). If you'd care to hear more of Craig's work, you can find him on SoundClick. His music is also available for purchase on Apple Music and other sites.
     

    • Like 3
  5. @jesse g  No error messages.

    @TheSteven  Thanks, that's good to know.

    I submitted a request to XLN tech support yesterday and was surprised to get a quick reply on a Saturday. Over the next couple of hours, we exchanged three emails with my responses to their suggestions of different things to try. None of them worked.

  6. For some reason the installer update didn't work for me. It appeared to update fine, but when it restarted itself none of my products showed up. When I clicked to refresh the product list it went into a "Checking Installation" loop and never finished. I had to kill the process manually to make it stop. If I start the Online Installer up again, it does the same thing as the first time.

    It's never caused a problem before. I have both AD2 and Addictive Keys. Does anyone know if I'll lose any customizations or user presets if I uninstall the Online Installer and try again?

     

  7. 2 hours ago, Michael Fogarty said:

    dog blue thyme (the top track) is the track he sent me
    dog blue for drums (lower track) is my edit with a quick one take bass and wurlie (after writing out the chords and measures for the drummer and talent.

    Thanks, everybody. I really appreciate this

     

     

    .

    Nice job, Michael. It's great what you've been able to do for this guy.

  8. I'm rusty on my MIDI spec information, but I seem to recall that some devices continually transmit a brief message (active sensing, maybe?) even when idle. Someone else can probably clarify this,  but that might be what you're seeing.

  9. 21 hours ago, bitflipper said:

    Most of our gigs are in places you'd need satellite assistance to locate. Next up: Concrete, WA on the 28th. Skiers might know Concrete as the wide spot in the road on the way up to Stevens Pass. But those small towns are starved for live music and are loudly appreciative, if not always big tippers.

    OK, maybe something a little closer to Seattle would tempt me to come out to see your band. Especially since I'd have to stay up way past my bedtime. 😄

  10. Thanks for following up, Glenn. I think I had an installation problem. I normally run my DAW in a non-admin user account. Most of the time, that works fine. On a hunch I decided to uninstall Scaler and reinstall from the admin account. I also disabled Windows real-time virus protection during the install. After running the Plug-in Manager, the Scaler virtual instruments showed up and could be inserted in a project as expected. Now I just have to find time to play with it a bit and decide whether to buy it while it's still on sale.

  11. Thanks for the replies. As I mentioned, I can see the Scaler vsti and vst3i (instruments) plugins in the Plug-in Manager, but they don't show up anywhere in the virtual instruments browser even after rescanning.

    I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling Scaler 2, but the result is the same. When I get time, I'll ask in the Scaler forum and see if anybody there knows what's going on.

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