Amberwolf

BTW, you can usually rent mics and amps and stuff reasonably cheaply, some music-gear stores do this. If you don't know one that does, ask the con itself if they have a place they rent gear from. If all else fails, check with the hotel itself, as they may have sound gear for rent, though it will probably cost more because it's usually last-minute-needs that it fills.

Unfortunately I think she passed away a few years ago. Everytime I was around her it seemed like an adventure. 😆 The local filksings she came to would usually be more entertaining; the cons moreso. Sometimes legendary.... What recording / mic / amp equipment do you have? What do you need to record? (a whole stage, just you, a room, several individuals one at a time in different spots, etc?) Will there be a sound system? (if there is, you could just tap off their mixer, if you can talk to the soundperson in advance to be sure you have the right wires/gear; I've never had one refuse, most have been eager to work with someone else). Knowing what youv'e got, and what you want / need to do with it, we might be able to suggest the best use for it.

If it's useful (probably not): When I used to record stuff into my EPS16+ or ASR88 at events at Leprecons, Coppercons, and GallifreyOne's a couple decades ago, I'd use an old Oktava mic (don't remember which model) generally pointed in the direction of whoever I was capturing, for those that allowed / wanted to be recorded. All I could really do given the spaces it's usually in (sometimes outdoors on a lawn, sometimes in a hallway, sometimes in a small hotel room, etc) was to verify I was getting recordable levels that didn't clip, with no compression hardware, etc. I also didn't really know too much about live recording (as on my own it's all keyboards and virtual synths or a guitar plugged directly into the audio interface (or the ASR88's input, back then). Nowadays if I were to do the same thing, I would use a hardware compressor between the mic and the recording input, to prevent clipping while also getting as much input level as I could for whatever nuance and quieter performance could be captured, without having to sit there and ride the input gain all the time manually. (which i tried doing in some cases, usually to the detriment of the recording). I don't know what mic would be best--if you don't want to move it for each performer, something omni; maybe cardioid if you are moving it for each performer or just doing yourself. Post-production will depend on what you want the result to be. Probably different processes depending on that, such as if you intend to add enhancement tracks (reinforcements of parts, effected portions of some of the main along with dry (or in place of), etc. , or if you want to make them into "complete" songs, with various other instruments doing whatever it is you want them to do, etc. (if you ever heard Leslie Fish's "Robofilker's Ensoniq" filk, that's about me.... 😊 )

That's why it's in this thread....

A more useful question that would help us help you would be to tell us what specific problems you are having, under what specific conditions, with what specific instruments, etc., so that those with experience with those things could suggest changes you can make to corrrect the problems. I can guarantee that the answer to that question is "Yes". It is not a useful answer, but it is the actual answer.

LP MRU is proibably stored in the windows registry; you could hand edit that to remove them if so.

Reminds me of one of my song titles (for a project I haven't yet posted on the web): "Offhanded Chirality"

I may be missing it but I couldn't find a product with that name... The closest stuff I found was on this site in their sale but there are separate products for each half of the name.... https://www.sonarworks.com/autumn-sale Which one(s) did you get?

I can tell you that heavy duty rubber bands strung along the length of a bamboo backscratcher doesn't work very well. (several other DIY methods also either don't work at all or are pretty awful sounding).

Note that the Genealogy stuff is apparently separate from the CinematicAlpha stuff, so isn't in the sale. But for this type of sound, it appears to be a very good deal, especially since two of the three players the stuff is for (Vital, Soundbox) are available as free versions that work for these libraries. (At least some, probably all, of the Kontakt libraries do require the full paid K and not just the free KPlayer). You get 58 libraries, some of which are versions for each different player, but it's still a lot of stuff. (I didn't count how many are "dupes" between the 3 different players; not all libraries are available for all players). I don't know how independent the Vital or Soundbox players are; if they can be used completely offline, or if they have to be logged into / have live internet connections, or forced updates to be able to access your own on-system content (like Sineplayer, making it useless because it breaks frequently), etc. But as long as they can operate completely offline, the libs for them would be pretty useful.

I do this sort of thing (compositing several sounds into one) with my music not just for vocals, but for many of the parts. I am usually not recording my own audio these days, but instead playing with sample packs, and since they don't have the exact thing I want I build what I want from what's there, often enough by using parts of one sample from one pack, and parts of samples from other packs, to build each little part, and various automation and effects to blend them all together. I'm no expert at it, but it isn't terribly tough--just time-consuming. The most recent example is Drywater, Mars; another more drastic example is the "elven rock" section of Behind You Lie Many Unseen where it's not just the vocals comped togehter it's also all the other parts in there. I even do it to the percussion in some cases, where the sound I want doesn't exist in anything I have, so I take two or more sounds to create the hit I want, and blend them together, etc.. I'm still working on creating "lead" vocal tracks with words out of existing phrases that weren't intended for what I'm doing with them; this is harder than regular comping.... But it's an interesting process.

My biggest problem is that I have lots and lots of detailed ideas for all sorts of projects, much but not all of it art in one form or another (music, still and moving visual art, sketches, painting, physical models and sculptures, stories, etc), the rest of it stuff I want or need to build / create for mostly everyday needs, or just stuff I want to design and build and document so that anyone could then duplicate it and use it. I have time beyond the dayjob and resting up to keep doing that to *note down* maybe one percent of what I come up with, and maybe begin one percent of *that*, and maybe finish one percent of *that*. Money is another issue--most of these things require stuff I don't have, and while I'm *very* good at making do and macguyvering, only so much is possible this way.

Thanks! I wish I had FV. I would have bought their bundles at one time, but they never have htem for Soundpaint, only the kontakt/etc stuff. I asked them about that, and they said that since their soundpaint store and dev team is separate, any sales would be separate...but sp never *has* any sales (none they tell me about in their mailing list or that I've ever seen on the site), which makes zero sense. :roll: The primary vocals throughout were modified from bits of Black Octopus Sound - VocalKitchen - A Taste Of Heaven. The secondary stuff for the intro was modified from bits of Ghosthack - Origin - Arctic - Aurora Borealis and Archive - Security Risk and Shymer 2 - Vocal FX. The "pulsing" breathiness underlying one of the middle sections were modifed from bits of Security Breach. If I could get any of the video-creation thingies out there to actually do anything even remotely like what I tell it****, I'd make some nifty videos for a few of these tracks that have "ideas" behind them, like this one, and The Last Flight, etc. (I don't have nearly the time to create all the stufff that would go into making even a very short video--in my previous ventures into CGI with Lightwave3D v6 it would take several months of work to build the stuff that would then have to be animated, which takes a few more months to do, though at least that usually includes all the lighting setup, rendering, etc. as well as the kinematics and such. The version of LW I have is so old that pretty much everything in it is a manual function; there's none of the computer-assisted stuff that does so much work-saving for the animators these days. ****It's just as hard to "convince" the still-image tools too, but at least with those it is relatively easy to get it to do each individual thing, separately, and then I can quickly composite them together (also editing out all the wierdness that gets generated).

One of the disadvantages of not drinking...I can't accidentally end up with things I want. Drywater, Mars has been extended at both ends a bit, and there are extensive small edits throughout. What do you think of it now? https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/drywater-mars

Thanks! That does sound pretty human, it is MUCH better than the vocaloid-type things (i guess they have their place for types of music that need that, but not for what I'm doing.) At least this one appears to have a completely offline usage, is a purchase not a subscription, etc., but it is out of my (nonexistent) budget. The cheapest one that comes with any voices is a hundred bucks, and that's limited to a male voice (liam) if I want english. (the only female voices you can choose with it are chinese and japanese, and neither one of them sounds anything like what I am after even when used for english). The "felicia" voice, for instance, would be another eighty bucks. So...it's not going to be a "soon" thing. FWIW, if I could find someone willing to do the directed experiments of vocalizations and whatnot as I create the music, for something I could afford (not very damn much 😆 as my actual income is from working in retail, which pretty well sucks for pay), I'd rather have people doing this. But I have yet to meet someone that would help me out for any price. (I'd also like to have other real musicians playing the parts, but same problem there...both me and my music are too weird for anyone to want to work with (most won't even listen to it)).

It sounds like y'all might actually be closing the program, as if you were going to walk away and stop making music for some period of time...if you don't do that and stay slaved at the computer like me, and don't close the program, you don't have to wait for it to open again.

Getting many DX or DXi installed can be as "easy" as opening a command prompt in the folder the dll file is in, then entering "regsvr32 dxeffectfilenamehere.dll". It doens't work on everything, and it doesn't actually perform all the install functions, it only adds it to the registry in the appropriate places to be seen as a DX plugin. If there are files, presets, etc., that aren't installed or not in the expected places, it probably still won't work. But this has saved me much heartache for certain no-longer-made plugins I have used over the years, and makes swapping out test versions of some of them possible.

I'll have to listen to some demos; if it is "robotic" like all the other types of voice synths I've run across over the years, I'll pass. Back in the beginning of Vocaloid, for instance, I was impressed by it doing vocals at all, but it never got human enough for me to use. So I've been collecting the "dollar" (or two or three) packs of samples from various places on their "really big sales" the last couple of years or so since discovering them, and just the little bit I have used so far has changed some of the things I was making from "ok" to "amazing", as far as my own ears are concerned. I doubt anyone else of the very very few that ever listen thinks so, but that's ok. When they volunteer to find me a set of vocalists to do what I want and record for me just for the feel-goods of doing it, they can have a say. 😆 There are examples of what I'm doing these days with those in the last several songs above, if you're interested.

In my experience, VSTs that get stuck simply don't respond to note off messages correctly, and/or Sonar isn't sending the right version of note-off message to it (different than the one it expects). If there is an option in your version of Sonar to send *all* the possible versions of note-off messages to all MIDI ports, virtual, hardware, and VST/DX/VI, I'd try that first. Might be in Panic Button options. I don't have that option in my ancient version, so to fix it in the synth I use all the time that does this I have to toggle the arp state (doesn't matter if it's used or not, but doing this stops any stuck notes in Z3TA+2).

"Finished" it, now called Drywater, Mars: https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/drywater-mars What do you see when listening? I kind of visualize the opening of a Firefly-like TV show or movie where a cargo ship is coming in to land at Drywater while the townspeople look up at it; starting from the POV near the ship itself, watching the pilot struggle to keep the overloaded ship shiny side up and get it down safely while the crew tries to keep containers and cargo from going over the sides. :lol:

Is that the fender asstocaster?

FWIW, if you did want to scale the actual velocity, MIDI tracks each have the Vel+ control that is center-zero-offset, that you can use to do this, if your instruments work the right way to do this. If your trackview is setup not to display this control, you can manually show it (don't know how in the newer Sonar, but I can't imagine they took that away). Lowering the volume on the track via MIDI *or* audio shouldn't scale or otherwise alter the velocity in any way., Just to expand, for future readers of this thread that don't know the details of MIDI and instrument functions: As long as the instrument you use doesn't create any difference at all in the sound produced by one velocity vs another, then that technique works fine. But anything that uses velocity to control the actual sound (whcih is common) won't give the result of just changing the volume if you scale or alter the velocity--it may change the volume, but it also changes which sound is played. A simple example is piano, where touching a note lightly makes a significantly different sound than striking it harder does, in a well-made piano synth. Most of the multitibral rompler synths I've used over the years don't have multiple samples to use the velocity this way, so they respond fine to using velocity as a volume control, but stuff like even just TruePianos that came with some SONAR versions uses velocity like the real instrument would, with different samples being used for different velocity levels (at least for different ranges of velocity), so this technique does not work on those in the expected/desired manner--they do get quieter or louder, but they sound different as well. There are also some instruments that don't respond to velocity at all, though that's rare and I can't remember the couple I had that were like this as I haven't used them in a very long time. (one was hardware, and it didn't have a velocity-sensitive keyboard either, the other was a VI; there might've been two or three of those). For these rare instances, then like those VIs that don't respond to MIDI CC7 (or other CCs) for volume control, you have to use their audio track's volume instead.

Another new WIP: https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=15104048

If the old comptuer still works, then you can "simply" copy the projects folders and all subfolders to an external storage device, then connect that to the new computer and recopy them to your new projects folder. Make sure you copy the audio files as well as the projects. If you had authorizations and serials on the old system you may be able to find them (possibly with the help of the ocmpanies that made the software if they're still around) and transfer those to the new one. If you made presets for plugins, you can transfer those over by opening each plugin, even if it's in an otherwise empty project, loading your preset, then saving it as fxp / fxb / etc, onto that external drive, then opening eahc plugin in the new computer and opening each of those and resaving as a new preset in the new computer. (there are other methods, but this one is "guaranteed" to work as long as the plugin is the same version; at least, it has in the few instances I have had to require doing this).

There are a number of things that can keep user files from being transferred from one drive to another, and I have not worked with many techs (back when i was lead tech at a computer repair shop) that had much of a clue that it was even a thing, much less able to deal with them in order to get user data from one drive to another, etc. There are various softwares that can help with this, some automaticaly and some with various user-choices, but again, not many techs either know they exist, or the shops don't have licenses to use them commercially so only the techs that know about them and are willing to (in most cases) illegally use them in a commercial enviroment will be able to use them. So not all data ends up transferred, and some techs will even do stupid things like *move* the data or erase the source drive, without notifying the user. (I stopped working in computer-related jobs because I got tired of being yelled at for other people's stupid choices and actions, both those of the users and of the techs).