Christian Jones

Like pwal said that offering may or may not be legit - and Cakewalk's CA-2A is cool and all but it's not worth $170+. Look for the Waves CLA-2A to go down to $29 soon.

Update from what went down earlier: Just called Waves tech support and they found that, as a result of updating Waves Central to v.11 some of my legacy Waves v.9.2 vst3 products became no longer supported w/ the v.9.6 vst3 Waveshell (the vst2 plugs of those same products were scanned ok). Some of my Waves stuff are v.10 and some are v.9 and after the Waves Central update nothing happened to the v.10 stuff; only my SSL Bundle, API Collection and a couple others that were v9 were affected. He said the solution is to reinstall the legacy 9.2 versions to restore those products whose vst3 plugs went missing. That's right, merely updating the Waves Central software--not the products themselves--to the latest version 11 caused this. So if this happens to you then take note of the versions of what went missing (and what didn't), and a reinstallation of those legacy products is likely in order. -------------------- So I just updated Waves Central to v.11 (not my products, but just the Waves Central software) and now some of the vst3 versions of my Waves plugins are missing. Actually, most of them are not missing, but vst3 versions of SSL bundle, API Collection, CLA Vocals, and the King's Microphones have gone missing, though the vst2 versions scanned fine. Oddly enough a couple of non-Waves vst3 plugs by Nembrini went missing too. Has this happened to anyone else? It's weird because only some of the Waves vst3 plugs went missing after the Waves Central v.11 update. After The Waves Central update, I downloaded a Puigtech Eq demo and I went and scanned (in sandbox) to pick it up and instead of scanning just that one new plug (I don't have the re-scan everything box checked) Cakewalk scanned a whole bunch of Waves plugs, like 162 or something and then said it found something like 156 new plugs or whatever it was, so here goes Waves breaking s#** just by virtue of updating the Waves Central lol. The chat guy couldn't help and I'll contact tech support, but wondered if maybe someone knew how to fix this quicker. Thanks

Cool. What's your settings on it for bass? I've got it pulled up and checking it out.

That's great if you're the Grateful Dead 😎, but for me being able to ctrl+shift+page up/down and jump back and forth almost instantly from outro to first chorus to bridge etc--and with markers that I can actually see and that don't fight w/ each other--is in the spirit of maximizing efficient workflow so as to keep it out of the way of inspiration as much as possible. Manually scrolling the screen back and forth across creation looking for sections and/or dealing w/ markers that can't give me quick info at a glance due to lack of color-coding or even at the very least a readable text, sucks.

Great news for amp sim users, especially those who play through two or more amps simultaneously (this guy)

Does this happen in every single session, just one particular session, or here and there in any random session? I've have this and other weird stuff like this happen on its own and sometimes closing out of the session and opening it back up will fix it. Other times the problem will still be there when opening back up and in those cases I port things over to a new session and that will usually fix it. You can try that. You can do it by saving all the tracks and buses as a template and loading that into a new session and then while having two sessions open simultaneously, copy the tracks from one session to the other. It's not perfect, as not every setting is properly saved in the template, such as aux input settings, phase button settings and bus colors that I've observed won't save. It may be a pita but if you get tired of stopping/restarting the audio engine then maybe a clean session will solve it for now.

I've been going from my Golden Age Pre 73 which colors my sound a bit when I crank it into the Brainworx Ampeg VR and Ownhammer Ampeg IRs. It's pretty rad, but I like the idea too of a bass chain that consists of some compression, saturation and eq and I'm gonna make some of those too. Bass is so much less fussy than guitar when getting a recording sound. As a guitar player who plays bass I've spent a lot of time what some might consider overthinking/tweaking my bass tone the way guitar players do, and I was a bit surprised to go on YouTube and hear the bass sounds a lot of the pros are mixing with.. Like w/ Joe Barresi e.g. a lot of his bass tones aren't much more than the DI tone. I run a dual bass amp sim rig almost every time to essentially parallel process live as I have one amp for fuzz and one for the clean foundation. The only time I don't do that is when I'm running the Way Huge Pork & Pickle fuzz pedal into the Pre 73 and into the Brainworx Ampeg, as the P&P has a clean blend knob on it. I forgot about the Cakewalk CA-2A. I think I have it and I know it was highly regarded here. Isn't it directx?

Yeah I've tried over the years as well as recently w/ these Mesa sims to like the Mesa sound and it just doesn't work for me. Even way back when I had (still have) the SansAmp GT2 I never liked the Mesa sound from it and always preferred the Marshall setting. It sucks cuz I really want to like it lol and I wanted to buy that Reaxis when it went on sale recently but I couldn't justify it. Same here. Have you ever come across those guys that don't fiddle w/ their amp at all? Those guys that say they just wanna plug in and play.. A friend of mine is like that.. he buys a nice Marshall combo and I'm like dude you're not even gonna try to turn the knobs? I'm a tone chaser but I won't fiddle forever. With Spark I felt like I was spending more time than I wanted, though my feeling was that it seemed better for lead tones.

Right on. Is that you singing? In the spirit of practicing completion you ought to hold yourself to that.. *checks calendar* Looks like you got 8 days. See I was easy on myself.. I hearby gave myself till the end of the year.

Judge all you like brother we all do it amirite. Not to make this thread about me, but just to respond real quick. There's my soundcloud that I've been resurrecting after some years of down time. The demos currently on there are older and before I started taking mixing seriously. I took a long hiatus from music and just got back into it about a year ago when I started posting on the old forum and found Cakewalk was dead. That's when I started taking mixing seriously, but I've always been a guitar geek and tone chaser who cares about things like scale length and signal splitting to two amps sans tone loss etc. But I had always shunned amp sims w/o even trying them; I just assumed there could be no way they'd be worth while for serious recording. Then I moved to this new place and realized I can't mic my amp here so I started thinking and researching and opening my mind and ended up down the sims and IR rabbit hole. I have different goals now than I did then as I consider YouTube and composing for TV/film rather than a band right now. There's a couple of recent riffs I uploaded there to test some guitar sim tones you could hear and I'm still dialing those. Today I built three dual bass amp rigs around the Brainworx Ampeg VR which I made into templates. I'm doom metal/synthwave guitar/bass/synth player but I'll write in various styles. Right now I'm getting a pretty dope doom tone w/ a dual amp rig consisting of a cranked Nembrini Marshall for one amp and a hardware Big Muff run through a PSA-1 which is then run through an OwnHammer IR for the second amp and I blend those together and that's the Grimy Doom Riff on there I was testing. I think of it as an Alice In Chains type of metal tone blended w/ a Siamese Dream era muff tone to get a metal muff tone that I play w/ a Warmoth baritone strat tuned to A# standard. I'm wearing too many dang hats right now and there's just so much to do and I'm playing serious catch up lately. I'm projecting my newest song to be uploaded by the end of the year if I can stop messing w/ sounds to get to actual work lol. Post your soundcloud too man. I'm always checking people's stuff out.

Yeah I hate too many options. No time to get really good with any particular plugin because you feel obligated to get your money's worth and use everything you keep buying. In my plugin buying life I've made only a couple of what I consider bad purchases, one of which I was able to flip quickly and the other I got stuck with permanently and just wrote off as a loss. And as a guitar player, back in the day I didn't have 20 amps and I didn't know anyone who had more than two... you had your one amp you chose wisely and spent good money on and your pedals/rack effects and you got all your sounds from that one setup. This limitation made you get real good at squeezing the best out of this setup and I still follow that ethos today. I've got like four amp sims I care about: Nembrini Marshall, Vermilion, Brainworx Ampeg VR, and I thought there was something else but I can't remember now.. probably because I don't care about it.

You mean to say that eventually someone's system w/ waves plugs will stop working smoothly at some point? Do you mean like, say someone's wave plug(s) was at v. 7, and maybe they upgraded something else like their OS or something and maybe now have compatibility issues w/ the older plug versions? I guess I'm just trying to determine if wup is ultimately inevitable for everyone at some point.

Lol why I gotta be the face of this angry mob? That pic makes it look like we've totally snapped over this. Yeah I get the $25 voucher where the minimum purchase is now $32 to use it. This Dirk dude should at least have made the minimum $29 - or heck even $39, as $32 just comes off as totally disingenuous since nothing on that site is ever $32.

A few months ago when I was demoing all the Marshall sims that mattered (imo) and that didn't exist is a suite (don't like suites) I was sure I was gonna get the Spark after everything I read about it being the best Marshall sim available (and it may have been until the Nembrini showed up recently), but when I finally tried it I chose the Nembrini MRH810 over Spark and Caliburn. Actually, I liked Caliburn better than Spark mainly because I was able to get great sounds w/ Nembrini and Caliburn quickly where I was fiddling w/ Spark a little longer and didn't end up getting my hair blown back. This is all subjective and depends on your setup and the sound you're after. I'm probably gonna demo Spark again and spend a bit more time with it to see if it'd be redundant for me now that I have Nembrini, as I don't like to collect plugs, so for me Spark would have to offer something different but as good as Nembrini. When demoing Spark pay attention to any high end fizziness as the gain is cranked - a lot of sims show their weekness there, but I've read that Spark excels in that area. I tried Spark *after* the Nembrini, and was kind of ruined for it I think lol. I'll demo it again.

This has been discussed around, but w/ the exception of bundles where new plugs may be added when updating (of which you may or may not be interested in) is the general consensus that wup is not necessary so long as everything is currently working well on your system?

So I did some testing today and recreated my Bass Buzz Fuzz dual amp rig template. Here's what it consists of (I've attached the .cwx template too for anyone interested): One audio track which is the Bass DI track and I use that track as a splitter and send it pre-fader to two aux tracks: Aux Track 1 is the clean amp and Aux Track 2 is the fuzz amp. The Bass DI track's fader is all the way down, but input monitoring is enabled so it's signal can be sent to the aux tracks (hence how I use the Bass DI track as a virtual splitter). The Bass DI and the two aux tracks are sent to a third aux called "Bass FX" and its function is for when I want to add effects like chorus etc - currently the Bass FX's fader is all the way down and input monitoring is off; its just there in case. The Bass DI audio track and the three aux tracks are kept in a track folder. And the Bass DI, the clean amp aux and the fuzz amp aux are each sent to their own stereo bus, and those buses are sent to a Bass Master bus. That's the basic template sans the plugins... Here's the plugins that get used on the tracks: Bass DI (audio): nothing Bass Clean (aux): Brainworx Ampeg VR Bass Fuzz (aux): Brainworx Ampeg VR and Brainworx bx_blackdist2 after the amp (Rat 2 distortion pedal) Bass FX (aux): nothing currently So on the blank template (no plugins), after it's been saved as a template and loaded into a clean session I'm able to play, record and play back just fine.. BUT, incidentally, I found that the Aux input settings do not get saved properly in the template; I had the clean amp and fuzz amp aux tracks each set to mono input when saving the template, but the template loads w/ the aux inputs set to stereo, and I re-saved the template a few times to verify that, so that sucks. So in a clean session I re-built the template piece by piece and saved versions of it each time I added another element of the whole template, and each version of the template I made I would start over w/ fresh tracks etc, not previous template tracks... First I just did the tracks and buses then saved. Next version I added the orange color to the tracks. Next version I added the track folder. Next three versions I added one of the three plugins at a time. Last version I added the bass guitar icons... After each template version I tested record and playback several times and everything was working fine. I don't know why it worked out fine today but I don't think this is over. This Bass Buzz Fuzz template I made today worked, but the previous one that I built the same way was glitching bad and acting all crazy - not just this template, but another one like it also went haywire. I've had various track templates cause Cakewalk to freeze before, like MIDI track templates which I verified previously, which would cause my Now Time line to glitch and hang for a few seconds upon stopping playback before it finally obeyed the initial command and rewound. I'm wondering if these templates somehow get corrupted. I'll test more tomorrow, I'm not convinced everything is ok. There's the template down there if interested. Bass Buzz Fuzz Rig template.cwx

Thanks for digging that stuff up Bob, some great references for anyone for this thread. Did you learn anything good? I'll check them out tomorrow, I was busy af today.

Well now let's not get too clever with this or they'll think we're good and not give us a proper marker strip 🤐

Well I do send the bass tracks to buses, but that aux track is for FX, like if I want to add a chorus pedal or an octaver etc that I can run both amps (i.e. both audio tracks) through, so the aux track is basically the shared pedal board for both bass amps. Are you guys saying that instead of using an aux track for this I should use a stereo bus as my shared pedal board, put any bass effects on there and send the two audio amp sim tracks to this bus instead of an aux track? What I have are two audio tracks where I run a dual amp rig for basically real-time parallel processing or whatever you want to call it - one track w/ a clean amp, one w/ a dirty fuzz amp, and each of those get sent to their own stereo bus (clean and dirty buses respectively) so I can keep the audio tracks at unity while being able to blend the two amps with the bus faders. Then those two buses are sent to a "Bass Master" bus, and *all* of this, tracks and buses, is part of the template I've made. Btw, a side note: if you change the bus colors those colors don't get saved in the template - the track colors do, bus colors don't, but of course that's the least of the problems.

Thanks I'm going to test this today - this problem happened at the end of my night/session so I didn't get a chance to do the elimination process last night. After I do more due diligence I'll see about contacting support if necessary and will update here. For future reference how would I share a copy of the template? You mean just outline in detail how I created it, or would I upload the actual template file in a post here and that would work?

So I'm an amp sim user and I've been creating track templates that are basically bass amp rigs that consist of two audio tracks, each loaded w/ an amp sim and IR loader (Brainworx Ampeg VR and Kazrog Recabinet 5 and a Brainworx distortion pedal on one of them), an aux track for fx that's currently dormant w/ nothing loaded on it and which both audio tracks are sent to, and three stereo buses to manage it all - and all of that is saved into a track template so I can recall the amp rig easily and load it into any song and go. I have a couple of bass rigs like this that I made yesterday, and yesterday they were loading up into a clean session and playing just fine, though I hadn't tried to actually record any audio on these tracks once they were loaded from the template.. until tonight... So tonight I started trying to record audio on these template tracks and the waveform starts drawing like normal, but when I stop recording the time line freezes where I stopped it and soon after I get the "Not Responding" as the screen fades to white. About 7 seconds later when Cakewalk starts responding it behaves all wacky, where pressing "W" which usually rewinds the Now Time line instead immedaiely starts replaying from it's current position each time I press "W" and won't stop. The Now Time line itself glitches on the screen and weird stuff like that. A couple of times tonight just merely loading the template into Cakewalk made Cakewalk not respond. I recreated one of these amp rigs on the fly w/o saving it to a template and found that I was able to record on the tracks just fine. But when I saved it as a template and loaded it into a clean session and went to record I got the same behavior as described above, so I believe it's the Cakewalk templates that are the issue and probably not any of those Brainworx amps or the Kazrog IR loader that's loaded onto those tracks, but idk. Those are supposed to be quality plugs and this issue only happens when saving and loading these rings from a template. Any ideas what's going on? I was really looking forward to being able to create these amp rigs into easily recall-able templates 😥

Far out. You know what.. I'm not going to work next week. No I'm not quiting.. I'm just gonna stop going

True on the disappearing of the marker track 1 when you scroll down far enough, but the supplement for that is to use Cakewalk's markers in conjunction with the MIDI clip markers.. At the beginning of each MIDI clip marker you'll insert one of Cakewalk's markers - just don't name it anything or use some kind of shorthand. This way they'll show up in the Marker View and in the Track View you can jump/navigate the MIDI clip markers by way of the Cakewalk markers w/ the ctrl+shift+page up/down command, and when you scroll down out of view of the marker track then Cakewalk's markers will be the guide. Yeah until they give us a legit marker strip this is what we get.

Try these, and one of them is free. Reels has a demo. I got it for $39 during last Black Friday from Plugin Boutique. I love running piano and strings through it to get that old Melotron sound w/ the wow and flutter. Also pick up Izotope Vinyl which is free w/ an Izotope account. https://www.audiothing.net/effects/reels/ https://www.izotope.com/en/products/downloads/vinyl.html

Just a quick tip on a much more functional marker arrangement alternative to what's currently offered in Cakewalk. The marker situation that's been offered in Cakewalk since forever isn't as useful as it should be imo; too small a font to read, text from one marker within proximity will actually superimpose on the text of another.. I found this video maybe a year ago and I'm sure many of you are already hip to this, but for those who aren't.. The guy in the video explains it well, but in a nutshell you use track 1 as your marker track, you input a MIDI note on bar 1 where it's only function is to give you a MIDI clip to stretch, split, color-code etc - it's not set to trigger anything, and in the track view on that MIDI track in that gray bar area immediately before the clips pane (don't know what it's called) where you see some numbers listed vertically.. you click and drag up in that area as far as it will go until the numbers become an enlarged piano roll and this will hide the MIDI note so you just have a clean clip to manipulate into markers, similar to the built-in marker feature in Pro Tools. Just thought I'd post this here real quick because.. well there's no Techniques section. Start @ 1:02:20