Larry Jones

I have been doing digital recording since before the current millennium, and I have never rewired anything, and don't know how to do it or why I would want to. So I'd be interested in an entry-level explanation of it. Capabilities, gotchas, advantages, reasons for doing it at all. I'm sure I could google this, but I guess my question would be "Why would I want to know?"

I can't read what it says in your images, but if you've got the Focusrite set up correctly, maybe you have not activated input echo ("J" in the image) on the guitar track you are trying to record. If not, you won't hear anything until you start to record.

Is there any way for the user to specify where the Start Screen appears? I use two monitors side-by-side, with the Cakewalk GUI spread across both. When the Start Screen pops up in the middle of the dual display, the two bezels form a block right down the middle of the SS and I have to move it before I can use it. Outside of CbB, Windows remembers where things are and puts them back there even after a restart, so it seems as if there might be a way for this same thing to happen inside of CbB. Thanx!

Some time in the next year or two there will be a plugin that is an order of magnitude more "realistic" than what we have now. It's a matter of processing power and "smart" modeling. This stuff just keeps getting more accurate and simple all the time. We'd have one now, probably, if there were a serious demand for it, but -- this is just my guess -- artists still want to sing their own stuff, and in the long run that's cheaper and better.

What's the point of the Trump video? Just trying to show how obnoxious he is? On edit: The link in your post goes to a video montage by conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, of Donald Trump being rude to people. I find nothing amusing about this racist demagogue. If your post is found acceptable under this forum's terms of service I will consider that I have permission to post political videos of my own.

I've gotten as far as thinking about it. Then I saw myself creating a duplicate vocal track, breaking all the blobs down into individual notes/syllables, and moving them around to the correct harmony notes. It started to seem like too much work, so at that point I set up a microphone and sang the part. ?

I guess I've been out of the loop too long. I kept looking for the post that said "NO, YOU CAN'T MIX ON HEADPHONES!!!" This was my training in the 70s and I had no reason to reconsider during the subsequent decades when I worked in studios. I realize that most music these days comes out of earbuds or computer "multimedia" speakers, and so I guess the thinking might be Why waste money on studio monitors when the sound will eventually be coming out of one-inch speakers (or earbuds!)? Everything does sound better on headphones, of course, which is the exact reason I don't use them for mixing. You have to check your work on as many different playback systems as you can, including cans, but in my opinion you shouldn't be doing the primary work in the hyped aural environment of headphones. It's music. It's meant to flow out into a room and envelope the listeners. Or to put it another way, when was the last time you went to a concert and listened on headphones?

I think they're (Bandlab) headed for more and smoother integration between CbB and their online "social music" project. It would be great if they could make it so we could collaborate with others more or less in real time using a set of online tools designed to work seamlessly with CbB. But that's just my guess, and given the current state of technology, who knows how long it would take? FYI, forum users have been grousing at each other and The Man since forever, regarding the direction we are all headed. Toes are sometimes stepped on. Feathers are ruffled. But it's not real -- it's just an online forum. No real harm, right? Don't be so touchy.

Might want to list the hardware you're using and which MIDI devices or soft synths -- and how many -- you are recording and playing back.

As an unreconstructed rock'n'roller I don't generally use more than a handful of tracks. NOTE: Back when I was recording on tape I never had the luxury of using a separate track for every piece of the drum kit, so I do that now, which bumps up the track count. I wouldn't set any kind of artificial limit on tracks, but I believe the song and the performance counts more than the engineering or the production, so if I can't get it done with a couple of guitars and a piano I feel like I need to go back and write a different song.

I would just add that Melodyne is not always 100% accurate in its assessment of your tempo, so be prepared to do a little manual editing of the generated tempo map, and don't get discouraged. I kind of like @michheld's idea above, especially if your piano track is not a rockin' four-on-the-floor beat.

@Tezza is right: It's an effect, like any other VST, and if you put it in your FX bin it should process the audio on that track. Note there is a "power switch" for each VST in the FX bin, and probably on the Guitar Rig GUI as well, so make sure those are both turned on. (Turn your speakers down before you hit that switch. ? )

You should be able to insert Guitar Rig into the FX bin of the track where you already have clean guitar already recorded, and by adjusting the settings on GR as the guitar plays back you should hear the effect on the recorded guitar. Is there a "mix" control on Guitar Rig 5? If so, set it to 100% wet. If this doesn't work, please describe exactly how you are setting this up. What you are trying to do is completely normal -- it's the way it's supposed to work, so something's wrong. BTW, Craig's solution above is destructive. If you decide to do it that way, make a copy of the clean track first, in case you find later that you don't want the effect you have used.

Nice, Andy! Good to hear from you again. And sign the kid up -- for someone who"doesn't like what you do" he did a fine job for you. You drone guys need some rhythm!? Seriously, this is excellent ambient, with a toe-tappin' bonus. Thanks for sharing!

I often use six or eight BG Vox, and sometimes use the same section on different parts of the timeline. If any individual track has lanes, I comp that track and render it. So I only have to copy and paste tracks, and don't have to worry about moving take lanes. I understand the impulse to keep all options open, but I try to decide as I go if a track is adequate, and if I think it needs more work I do it as soon as I can. (I hope I understood your question.)

https://www.cakewalk.com/Command-Center

Two years ago it was 500 bucks. It was not developed as a "free" product.

Thanks, @scook. I was not aware of that setting. I may never need it as I don't use a lot of soft synths, but good to know.

I'm not a particularly heavy synth user, but when I've got a piano or horn part or something I "don't need" but might want to use later I archive it and use Track Manager to hide it so I don't have to look at it. Once archived it uses zero RAM. I think freezing, bouncing or disconnecting still takes up some system resources.

Thanks for your response. As you'd know if you read farther, I tested the "quote" function myself, acknowledged my mistake and corrected it in a later post. I assumed you had done this on purpose (although I couldn't figure out why) because you've been trolling this forum for months, and that's the kind of thing trolls do. False attribution is, indeed, "that big a deal," but even if just as a matter of courtesy, you should have fixed the mistake when @Starship Krupa asked you to.

To be fair (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong about this) the "rollback feature" in the Cakewalk Command Center was not really a feature at all, but just a side effect of the fact that CCC did not automatically delete the installers after they were run (as Bandlab does), and they were all full versions. So all versions were there to reuse whenever we thought we needed to roll our installations back.

The liberals! Why did it have to be LIBERALS!?

Since this has come up in this forum so many times, and the staff at Cakewalk reads here, I have to think they have a reason for not wanting us to be able to roll back easily. Probably they'd rather have a shot at fixing problems instead of users simply reverting to an older version and never telling Cakewalk about the issues they have. My opinion only.

This is a fine, fine idea. People who don't do this will no doubt continue to ask how they can roll back, though. ?

Looking further, I see that must be what happened.