Lord Tim

Absolutely high up on my feature requests list too!

Seems to be working OK here - I have mine set for daily digests for the places I follow and indeed I've been getting daily e-mails.

When I did my first really big production, I had the same issue. And the biggest problem was listening to stuff in isolation and getting a sound I liked and then moving on to everything else. Put it all together and... mud. 😕 I obviously didn't get the memo about making space in a mix to fit all of the instruments together. The tone I love on bass is rarely what I have on the recording once I've finished doing all of the work, but! what I hear in context is the key. You'll find that a lot of things you think you're hearing in the final tone are actually a combination of everything else working together and your ear filling in the blanks. So the first thing I'd try is this: work backwards. Mute everything, and then put something like the excellent Voxengo Span over your master out so you can see what the frequencies are doing. Unmute your kick drum and make a note of where that sits in the spectrum, then unmute your snare, and do the same. Then mute the drums, unmute your bass and see where that's sitting. I'd almost guarantee there's frequencies fighting for the same space as the kick drum. Unmute the kick and snare and listen to it all together, while watching the frequency spectrum. You're likely going to either need to EQ the bass or the kick drum to carve out a space for the other instrument. Sometimes it means cutting the EQ on the bass track at the frequency which is the most prominent on the kick track, and boosting a lower frequency than the kick if you like a really low bass, or doing the opposite where you want a good throaty bass and you'd prefer the kick drum to handle all of the sub-sonics - the song will dictate what feels right. The next thing I'd do is umute the guitars. If it sounds like crap at that stage, the most likely culprits is too much low end on the guitars, and too much snap in the upper mids on the bass. In a mix, it's pretty common to high-pass the hell out of your guitars. In isolation, that sounds AWFUL. Really thin and powerless. But in combination with the bass guitar, your ear fills in the frequencies and the guitars sound just as thick, but with no overlapping frequencies causing mud build up. If you have too much pick attack on the bass, you might find that's fighting for the growl of the guitars - again, look at the frequency spectrum when this stuff is muted and take a note of where things are peaking out, and try cutting one of the instruments that's fighting for that space. This should all get you 90% of the way there if you systematically go through your mix and carve out only what you need to hear from each instrument. EQ in context when everything is playing together, and take it as far as you can before it starts to lose too much of what you want to keep in the particular instrument. You'd be surprised at exactly how much you can lose before you notice it gone, once everything is playing together. After that, there's a few tricks with compression and distortion that can even things out enough, or more advanced things like side-chaining to let stuff dynamically make space for other things. But I'd almost guarantee that you'll never need to go that far unless you have a specific reason to do so. Good luck!

Did you upgrade from 7 to 10 or did you do a fresh install of 10? It's been my experience that any kind of migrations are iffy at best, and it's better to start with a clean slate if possible.

The VX-64 is almost always in my vocal chain. It's pretty quirky though, and I don't think the de-esser is overly great, but the tube stage, dynamics and slapback are great. I'll often pair that with Cakewalk's excellent CA-2A compressor and a 3rd party de-esser, and finish up with a Sonitus EQ just to get the final sound. Save all of that as a FX Chain Preset and you have an instant vocal channel strip.

That is a good question, actually! You can cut/copy/paste to your heart's content but the moment you move any of the things you pasted, your clipboard gets cleared. That's annoying in that you might be pasting in, say, drum samples and you miss the mark with one. You nudge it into place and go back to pasting... except you can't, and you need to copy the source again.

Haha! And man, they can all drink. We toured with Nightwish a couple of times and when an Australian can go "yeah, you guys win" you know they're serious! 😂

I do have a couple of things up on Bandlab (link in sig below), mostly to get a feel for how to use the site. Funnily enough, one is a classic rock song where I'm playing bass, rather than the kind of things I'm known for most (guitar and vocals on heavier music) but that's where Bandlab is pretty fun - you get to expand your palette a bit. It's a bit of a shame my schedule is so ridiculous these days because collaboration is a lot of fun when I have free time. I think there's talk of thowing up stems from our next album for a song or two and getting people to do a remix or guest parts, which should be cool. Who knows, it could be so good I put myself out of a job! 🤣

I think that's like some kind of a law from your part of the world, that you have to serve your time in a black or death metal band, kind of like national service! 😛

There's a few of us around!

That was originally due to the aggressive spam filter. I know a lot of hosts had to go back and manually restore posts/threads when they saw it happening (and ironically getting blamed for censoring people sometimes 🤨)

I'd also like to add (and echo @Tobias recommendation of TH3) that you shouldn't underestimate a lot of CbB's built in effects. The Sonitus suite, for example, looks pretty old and useless, but it's far from that. I do a lot of pretty big productions and that suite of effects is my go-to for almost every project. Light on the CPU, transparent sound and they just work. Adding to that you have all of the great ProChannel modules too. The EQ has great character, you have the console emulation which, when you strap it over a lot of tracks, gives great character, and the tape simulator is great for warming things up and knocking the peaks off of stuff that's too "digital" sounding. I think with the exception of a couple of good mastering effects, you can easily do world class mix/masters with no additional effects needed other than what comes with CbB. If you're just mixing, you easily have enough stock stuff to get the job done well. That said... who can say no to more free stuff? 😆

The Edit option also seems to disappear entirely after a while too, which is bad if, for example, you reply to someone and then come back later in the day and realise you've given some bad advice and would like to correct it, but can't.

Ah, neat! The old forum was crazy for that. You'd have to make sure the URL conformed exactly to what the forum software wanted, embed it in BBCODE tags and then go back and make sure the URL didn't get just converted to a clickable link instead of an embed. I'm pretty web/forum savvy and have run a few in my time but that was something else...! 😐 This is sounding like a real breath of fresh air!

Ah, I "remember" this song 😋 (I hear the LT mix is OK too, but to be fair, LT told me that and he's a bit of a jerk...) Related to this though, is there any forum specific code for embedding YouTube or other hosted content?

... that moment when you scroll back through a thread and you realised you missed that someone already gave an actual answer to the one you took a guess at. 😑 *hands the microphone to @Soundwise and goes and sits down*

^ Can absolutely vouch for those, they're fantastic!

OK, in Account Settings there's a checkbox for Update Username when Bandlab Name Changes (or something like that). If you uncheck that, does it allow you to edit your username here independently?

I'm pretty sure that's what I did, but then again I think I was "Lord Tim" up on Bandlab anyway. Let me see if it'll let me change it...

This should give you a good headstart: https://www.kvraudio.com/plugins/windows/vst-plugins/vst3-plugins/instruments/effects/free/newest

Nice work, guys! This looks awesome!