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Due to the virus.....


kitekrazy

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I got a whole lot of DAW stuff to audition and a lot of it free.   Maybe to add to it I could just get that Pro Tools trial.   I'm losing income next week.   I may be force to create some music or play an instrument.  That may be harder on me than getting the virus.

Edited by kitekrazy
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I hope you get to make some music.

I finally went with Sampltank MAX. I'm downloading as I type this......all 230 gigs of it. *yawn* At the rate things are going this is going to take awhile.

Edited by Starise
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Due to the virus, and the area banning live music because it draws a crowd, I'm unemployed at least until August - and August/September are the slowest months of the year ☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️

Oh well, at least while drawing down my savings, I should go anywhere, and that'll keep me from getting the (&#@ virus.

So I guess I'll work on creating more style 'disks' and fake 'disks' for Band-in-a-Box.

Notes

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9 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

Due to the virus, and the area banning live music because it draws a crowd, I'm unemployed at least until August - and August/September are the slowest months of the year ☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️

Oh well, at least while drawing down my savings, I should go anywhere, and that'll keep me from getting the (&#@ virus.

So I guess I'll work on creating more style 'disks' and fake 'disks' for Band-in-a-Box.

Notes

Sorry to hear about that Bob!

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5 hours ago, David Sprouse said:

Craig, did you grow up in pdx?

Music-when-I-grow-up-musician.jpg

 

Actually, PDX is not my kind of area at all, but I DO like to see plants that are actually green!  I've only lived in Vancouver, Camas and Troutdale up here after being paroled from Kalifornia after 40 years (born in San Diego, moved to Orange County when I was 24).

My goal is to get something going where I can become wealthy with only an internet connection (i.e., without having clients!).  Working on that now...  Then I want to move a bit farther away from cities.  Somewhere in the mountains that's quieter, with a lake or a river, but not too high up so I don't need to deal with snow.

My "REALLY BIG" dream is to create a resort for those that need an escape.  I have a LOT already thought about there.  Someday!!!

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I work at home anyway, but I have little to do work-wise since most of my customers are shut down. And because I can't bring myself to bill anyone under these circumstances, I probably won't see any income at all for months to come. So no musical purchases this year. Unfortunately, I'd recently spent a couple grand on keyboard amplification that I now won't get to use, given that there aren't any gigs. 

I should have spent the money on toilet paper instead. I imagine 5,000 rolls stacked in the corners would make great bass traps.

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I guess I should be thankful I have a job. The place I work is talking about going to a skeleton crew. Next week they will lock down large parts of the areas and put the buildings into a sleep mode. 

 Almost all of my job is easily done remotely from computer, but I was deemed "essential" so I continue to commute when I could have done my job from home and only gone to the site when needed which isn't very often. I haven't pushed the issue here. It's a union shop and my classification puts me in a  group of people who DO need to be on site at least occasionally. It's just complicated. I wish they would just let me work from home. As they say, "be careful what you wish for". I like getting a paycheck too.

 

 

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I've lost all my gigs, so I'm working on Band-in-a-Box software.

The problem with that is my customers are musicians.

Oh well, economic self-isolation means I'll probably not get that COVID disease.

Don't worry about me, the mortgage is paid, I've got some savings, and social security, so I might lose some needed weight, but I'll be OK.

I feel mostly for the waiters and waitresses I know that are living week to week and depend on their wages and tips.

Notes

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BiaB (Band-in-a-Box) is an auto-accompaniment app. A little like those arranger keyboards but instead of 2 to 6 measures repeating endlessly, in BiaB I can put up to 400 patterns in and assign "masks" so that the patterns appear in musically appropriate instances.

It is a great program for practicing. It give you a decent backing band for just about any pop/jazz/country/rock song you might want to play.

For backing tracks I prefer to use BiaB as a starting point. The styles are by their nature generic. I export the MIDI styles into a DAW and then add the song specific licks and hits. It turns the very good output of BiaB into something excellent.

BiaB has two kinds of styles, MIDI and Audio. I prefer the MIDI because it is thousands of times more editable than audio tracks (even if you have Melodine). And if you have a good MIDI synth module, they can sound 95% as good as the pre-recorded tracks.

I started making my own styles in 1992, gave them to my friends who told me I should take out an ad in a trade magazine and sell them. As time went by I ended up with customers in over 100 different countries.

I do it as a part-time "moonlighting" business. I'm selling to musicians so I keep the profit margin slim. The shopping cart, Visa/MC authorization company, the Visa/MC merchants account, web host, bank, and some of the subcontractors I use combined make more money on each sale than I do. But that's OK, I'm not complaining.

The music in my styles I played and recorded in MIDI format. So in a way it's like a recording artist collecting royalties on his/her work.

I've got two Style Disks done and Leilani and I just got 3 Fake Disks back from the subcontractors so we are working on going through song by song in real time, triple checking and fixing any problems.

It's a very time consuming task, but we have plenty of time now that my full-time job (gigging) is on hold.

Notes

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