Lord Tim

Post up a sample of the recording of the guitar, that will tell us a lot about what the problem could be. Just looking at that last photo, if that's where you're doing the recording, I would be looking very closely at trying this in a different/bigger room before you do anything else.

@Starship Krupa - thanks for pointing out all of those helpful tips in the OP! I've done everything mentioned and yet I still seem to be using an operating from the 21st century. Should I try to force my ISA soundcard into the "NVMe slot" thing to make it work? I am using a laptop. Please advise!

Aim assist, maybe? Press X.

I've used Grindmachine in the past with some pretty great results - it may need a bit of EQing to have it sit in the mix but it's very usable, and great for modern styles of metal especially. The Djentbox pedal does a great job at tightening things up for percussive playing. I haven't tried anything since then, and I know Grindmachine II is out, along with a bunch of other new products, so I can only assume that things have gotten better since then. I've also had a lot of good results with freeware sims and IRs too, so don't discount those. Stuff from Ignite Amps, Poulin, and even CbB's stock plugins when chained together can sound IMMENSE. (Tip: You can make a Preset Chain with assignable knobs so you can design your own interface to control each individual plugin in the chain easily). The real key to making things sound great is your IRs. Again, some great freeware collections of metal-oriented IRs out there that you can load into something like NadIR from Poulin that can really make things heavy fast.

The other thing I'd check is if you're in punch recording mode: https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR X3&language=3&help=Recording.26.html If that's enabled, recording won't actually happen until you get to the part that's selected for the punch. Disable that and you should be in business.

You want to go to View > Display > Display Clip Names to see the clip header: https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR&language=3&help=Views.03.html

FINALLY. 🙄 Wow, where was this tool 30 years ago when I started doing this stuff? Also, that Rich and Famous thing would be nice too, now I think about it...

There's a few things you could do with Mix Recall. If you saved a scene for each song, you could just do Export Audio and have it do an export for each scene automatically. Yes, this would export the entire show each time, each with the different settings, and you would need to open up each version and trim it later in a WAV editor, but if you're running out the door to see a movie or something, it's click and forget and CbB could just go do its thing while you're out. Or you could set up a scene for each song, enable it and save as a different song revision, and trim off the start and end in CbB. Or if you just want to do it manually, do what Noel suggested and set up a scene for each song, select that song on the timeline and export the selection, then pull up a new scene for the next song and so on. If I was doing things across newly made projects, I'd tend to use Track Templates instead, if I wasn't working from an initial common template and saving different sections as their own thing.

Turn the tracks down. I mean, yeah, turning the master down would do the job too, of course, and nothing is going to clip inside CbB's engine at all, but how you set up your gain affects how each plugin will react to things as well. If you hit a certain plugin too hard or soft, THAT may clip or might not have enough guts to hit the right threshold for it to make a difference, etc. If you're hitting your master too hot, start with your tracks. A pro-tip: CTRL+A will select all tracks, then while holding down the CTRL key, drag one of the volume sliders on any track - every track's volume will move with it. A nice quick and easy way to drop everything.

That's a big question with a lot of answers. I would, however, recommend against normalising the audio unless you have a good reason for it, since that's a destructive process. You can use the track edit filter and set it to Clip Gain and turn stuff up on a clip by clip basis (including setting points to change the envelope in the clip too if you like) if you'd like to even things out like that, but with the Pro Channel you have a fantastic compressor built into every track and some very good presets to get you started. Lots of good tutorials in general out there on YouTube that's not specific to CbB but the info applies to any DAW. I especially recommend Warren Huart's Produce Like a Pro channel - he has a few great introductory episodes on compression and gain staging on there and he's a great teacher. I'm sure other people have other really good suggestions here too

You need 2 busses to do this right. First, make 2 busses: Master and Reverb. Master should have the output go straight to your soundcard hardware outputs. Reverb will have the reverb plugin on it, set to 100% wet in the plugin, and the output of that should go to Master. Then for each of your tracks, make sure the output is set to go to Master, and you make a send on each of them that goes to Reverb, which you can adjust to taste or automate if you like.

It's all non-destructive, sure, but here's 2 scenarios (one you have covered well already): 1. If you don't have your audio or original project saved elsewhere and you have your audio drive go down. That performance is now lost forever, and if it's a show that's had one of those spontaneous magical moments, you may never capture that vibe again. But by all accounts, a USB drive backup and the cloud has you completely covered there. 2. People are suggesting saving a "master project" first. Basically getting all of your tracks into CbB, pulling up rough levels, etc. before you even start to edit. Save that, back it up, don't touch it. Then have your various revisions of your working project files after that. The reason for that is first, if anything happens to your project file - say it gets corrupted or whatever - even if all your audio is intact, you'll still have to rebuild the session from scratch again, and that's a real drag. Next, let's say you do something super dumb and have your ripple edit on and set to selection by mistake. You go to delete a bit of crud out of one of the guitar tracks and don't notice that this has now moved everything back to fill the gap. You continue editing other parts of the show and then suddenly you discover that everything is out of sync from a certain point. You'd move it back, except you're now 50 edits in and you have to undo a crap-ton of work. If you have the original session file handy, you can copy everything from the messed up point and paste that into your current work project. And lastly, if you do all of your edits, mixing etc. and listen back and you think "hmm... this is actually kinda rubbish." Instead of undoing 347 edits and clearing effects and envelopes and all of that, just open up your original session, Save As a new working project and start again (this time with stronger coffee). File revisions are definitely your friend. There's nothing worse than getting to a point you hate but it's not easy to get back from. It's non-destructive, sure, but reconstructing stuff is an awful waste of time and effort!

^^ THIS is pretty much my workflow too. Great advice!

A couple of years back I did my band's live album / concert video and it was a case of getting everything more or less in the ballpark mix-wise first, setting up markers so you're not fumbling around with an hour of audio, trying to find out where you are, and then doing edits and clean-ups on the tracks after that. Then mix the thing as a whole. Unless you're swapping out instruments a lot, or that kind of thing, you'll get the most consistent and fast results treating everything as a huge hour-long song. Don't worry too much about gaps between the music just yet, just focus on the songs themselves. If you're planning to do a whole show thing, this is where Ripple Editing is super handy - you're easily able to cut sections out and tighten up the flow, and all of the audio and automation will fall into place. You'll need to be careful with crossfades between each song section, of course, but again - super quick, and really consistent from song to song since they share track effects. If you're just planning song by song exports, this is where your markers come in handy, like Noel said. Select all tracks then drag a selection range on the ruler, then use the Export Module to just export the selection. Do that for each song, then do any in/out fades, etc. on the exported file in any old WAV editor (or even in CbB itself as a new project if you like) just to tidy things up. Yes, it's absolutely MUCH easier doing the cuts first and working song by song, and if each song is DRAMATICALLY different, that's probably a better choice overall, but if you can deal with a pretty unwieldy file that you need to do a bit of forward thinking with setting up markers, etc. then this is definitely the faster workflow for a consistent set. Pro-tip: BACK UP THE RECORDING ASAP. You won't ever get that back if you have a disk error or you make a massive blunder mid-edit or something. Trust me on this, I had a disk go down mid-edit of our live album and lost a fair bit of work, but thankfully I could just go back to the archives and replace the missing files. Wasn't great, but the alternative without a backup was much worse!

HAHA! Cheers, guys! Yeah, I think back in the day when it was crucially important to have your best songs up front, maybe the order might have been a bit different, but these days with Spoitfy, etc. it's really kind of irrelevant. We just tend to put them together in an order than makes it all flow well for the few people who do still like to put on an album and let it play.

Actually, speaking of "other songs," if you guys are interested, here's a link to the Spotify playlist of the album: (Minus the bonus tracks, however - they're still exclusive to our online store version)

Cheers, Bob! I appreciate that!

Yeah, this is our "cliche" song with all of our favourite metal bits in it - gotta have the relentless double kicks in there somewhere! Haha! Our stuff tends to wander between well placed singles / accents and crazy fast 16ths on the kicks, much like we might have one song where it's all melodic based playing or another where we're going for the world notes-per-second speed record! Haha! I think I'd end up pretty bored if we had to choose one or the other.

A great deal of big touring bands now are using Kempers and the like. They sound amazing, especially since they can model your actual rig itself and copy the tone into a less fragile and expensive enclosure, and better yet, you have hundreds of amps at your fingertips, exactly the same each night. Kempers were just too expensive for me, and since we tend to fly everywhere for what we do rather than packing into a bus (in Australia, it's actually easier to fly to other cities than doing the road circuit like you would do in the USA or Europe), small and light so we don't get killed with excess baggage fees is the ticket. It's scary that my entire rig, wireless and amp included, costs less than a Kemper foot controller pedal board. I still like having amps on stage, personally, even if we're doing a direct feed to FOH. It's nice to feel that rumble behind you, plus for anyone right up on the barrier, all of the DI sound is flying right over their heads through the PA speakers, so it's good to give them stage sound to fill it all in.

Ha, I think most people would be surprised what I really use! Those cabs were supplied backline, but my live rig is actually an iPod running Amplitube, fed by a wireless pack and going into a 200w MOSFET amp. Front of house is actually fed by a DI directly out of the back of the rig - no mics required. We really just use the cabs on stage as fill more than anything. It's good to have a rig that fits into the corner of your backpack! 😁 Cheers! I dunno how you could go out and do this kind of thing and not have a good time (although I do see a lot of bands take themselves so seriously and just stand there looking boring). I think about 80% of our live show is crappy gags surrounded by the occasional guitar solo...! Haha!

My mum says I'm an administrator 😕

That poor barrier! It was seriously solid too and we're watching the front row just smash it... The security guys are standing on the side going "uhhh... what should we do here? 😐" HAHA! Cheers for the nice words, Tom!

Cheers! This is our "cliche" song, where we pulled out all of our favourite metal bits and threw them all together. HAHA! It's kinda dumb, but heaps of fun!

Thank you, sir! 🙂 I think we snuck a few good ones in towards the end. I remember when that used to be commercial suicide - put your strongest tracks up front before people get bored and listen to something else - but today in the age of Spotify, it doesn't really mean much now. (Now they listen to ONE song and the algorithm plays them something else 😒)

Cheers, man! We were in the US in 2016 doing the ProgPower USA fest, which was awesome. We'd love to come back but the visa situation is a massive nightmare at the moment. Super expensive and just completely broken in so many ways. We just can't afford to get burned by bureaucracy right now, or that kind of puts an end to anything we do anywhere else in the world, so we're planning to ride out whatever is going on at the USCIS. Hopefully sooner rather than later! For a bit of context, have a read of this post from Marc from Play America Visas - it's crazy!