Starship Krupa

Go to YouTube and search for "how to make a vocal pop in a mix" or "how to get my vocal to sit in the mix" or similar and you will find much good advice. Adjusting relative volume (pulling down the other faders in your case) is the first step. Using processing is the next. By processing I mean EQ, compression (and/or clip gain adjustment as Craig does), reverb, chorus, whatever. When new to this, as you are, iZotope Neutron Elements can really help get you started. Some see it as a crutch, I would characterize it more as a shortcut. You can use the presets or the wizard at first, then later, when you understand things better, the individual processors in Neutron are top-notch. The Elements series regularly go for deep discount or even as a freebie or part of a bundle, so watch the Deals subforum on here or keep an eye on Plugin Boutique. Just now they're running a deal where if you purchase anything, you can add MTurboCompLE to your cart and get it for free. PB has many things for sale for under $10, so it's a great way to get a high end compressor for peanuts. Each of MTurboCompLE's modeled compressors has a "Compression" knob that adjusts all the other parameters for you, so it's good for newbies. An epiphany for me when I was first learning this stuff is that sometimes mixing can be counterintuitive. Cutting certain frequencies, compressing dynamic range can actually make an element in a mix stand out better.

I don't agree that "a sampler is a sampler." There are different types of hardware samplers, and that is mirrored in software. Both an Akai MPC and a Fairlight CMI are "samplers," but they have different functions, different vocabularies, and are primarily used in different styles of music. They're so different that for heavy users of one type, the other type isn't on their radar at all. Here in the forum, it's just a matter of advocacy. The developers prioritize new features based on the perceived demand. In the past when the "Cakewalk needs a sampler!" cry has gone up there have been people who said they did not want Cakewalk to come with a "sampler," because they had already invested in Kontakt or Sampletank libraries and didn't want to have to deal with yet another format. To them a "sampler" is something with big libraries for doing orchestration or scoring or whatever. I want to keep it clear that a Kontakt/Sampletank type of thing is not what I'm advocating for (although if someone else wants to, they can go right ahead). I think that an MPC-type phrase/pad sampler is something Cakewalk should have. If it had a way to map and stretch and pitch shift sounds across multiple keys, I wouldn't mind that either, but it's not as important to me.

Excellent. Thanks, John. I see Mike also has videos on "Audiosnap Tempo Mapping" and "Time and Tempo." Something that disappointed me was that Cakewalk really missed the target on detecting the tempo of the clip. It's just 8 downstrokes right on the beat, quarter notes. Heavily reverbed, though, so the transients aren't as sharp as in Mike's video. There are other tools, like Hornet SongKey.

I'm finally getting around to composing with musical samples and loops I've pulled myself from old records. I've used 3rd-party loops, and non-musical dialog samples in Cakewalk before, but this is my first crack at taking a couple of bars from an instrumental piece and looping them, adding other stuff, etc. I've tried reading what the Reference Guide has to say about Audio Snap and Groove Clips and still am not sure what Cakewalk tools to apply to this and how. I've even poked around them experimentally just to check them out, and couldn't make sense of the Audio Snap Palette thing with dragging the beat markers around and all that. It always looked like the ratio of prep work to work saved by using the tool was unfavorable and even then, I couldn't get it to extract anything close to an accurate tempo, I did better by hitting play and tapping my foot and counting. Since then, when I've wanted to put something together I've just continued to use Sound Forge to trim samples so that they loop rythmically and seamlessly, but if there are better ways to do it I'm up for checking them out. My first task is: I have some 2-bar samples from different parts of an old song (same song, so same tempo). The audio in them isn't rhythmically complicated, it's just 4 guitar chord strums per bar, strum strum strum strum on the beat. What I want to do is take those 2-bar sections and loop them and string them together, without changing their pitch. I want to keep them as close to the original tempo as possible, and I want them "on the grid" so I can add MIDI notes, beats, and even play live instruments. So these clips must be able to loop smoothly and the project tempo must match theirs. Using the tools in Cakewalk, what's the best way to go about this? I know how to do it by other means, but I want to try it the Cakewalk way.

Can anyone confirm whether successive purchases will get you your choice of the remaining freebies? The last deal was like that, I wound up with both Animate and Drumazon. I'll pop for another five buck Glitchmachine to get it and W.A. Fundamental Bass. I've been experiencing the discreet charms of W. A. Production's plug-ins.

I just want to keep the distinction between the two "sampler" paradigms, some people know the term applied to both types, some one or the other. Mixcraft also has as an integrated instrument a sampler that is the type where a sample is spread across multiple piano keys. The way they have them integrated is great, very simple, you can send audio to either of them from a clip on one of your tracks, from the media browser, from the loop constructor, or drag and drop from outside the program entirely. They have just enough tools to get their job done, you can reverse the sound, loop it, whatever, so they're not so complicated that they're intimidating, which is an issue I've had with TX16wx. It's so powerful and feature rich that I forget how to use it in between projects, so Speed Drum or Sitala for me.

From what I observe, the sampler market these days is split into two types: the phrase sampler/drum machine type where you drop in phrases and one shots and the type where you have sounds spread across the keyboard, using stretching and pitch shifting algorithms. The first type is usually played/programmed in a style where you trigger the individual sounds as separate elements, the second is used more like an organ, playing melodies and chords. In my memory, this developed as a result of there being two kinds of hardware that did this. Originally the Fairlight, Mirage, etc. were the second type, but could also of course do phrases and one shots mapped to individual notes. Then later, hardware phrase samplers like the MPC came along and became immensely popular in hip hop and EDM production, doing stutters and short loops. Ambient/downtempo people like me would be lost without being able to drop in those breathy phrases and dialog samples from movies, and phrase samplers are great for that. Yes, you can do it as clips in your DAW, but lots of people like to improvise it in real time. As we've been discussing "Cakewalk needs a sampler" in the forum, I've tried to emphasize this distinction, because some people (EDM/hip hop/rap producers) think of a "sampler" as the phrase sampler kind, and others (scoring/arrangers) think of a "sampler" as the other kind, with libraries of orchestral sounds and samples of classic synths. Since the styles of music where they are prominent can be so divergent, to the heavy users of each the "other" type may not even be on their radar, for the arranger types because Kontakt and Sampletank can be used as phrase samplers, so why bother with a dedicated one. For the EDM types, they might just use a loop for their string pads. The second type of sampler user are correct, IMO in the position that since Kontakt and Sampletank and Zampler and the like do it so well and are industry standards, Cakewalk doesn't need one of those. Their workflow is such that they don't really need to be integrated in the same way that phrase samplers are. For example, Mixcraft comes with both kinds of samplers, but the one I use the most is the phrase sampler. It's well integrated in that after you've made clips in a track, you can just drag and drop them onto a sampler pad, or right click and choose "send to sampler." That's huge, not having to go to the step of rendering them to audio first. Speeds up the workflow immensely. Their loop construction module also has buttons and right-click menus so that after you've got your warp slices, you can select them and send them straight to the phrase sampler. The phrase sampler has facilities for reversing, looping or one-shotting or choking on retrigger, trimming, stretching, changing pitch, applying filters, amplitude envelopes, etc. The integrated type also use fewer system resources, because they play clips in the same way they are played in a track. They don't have to be loaded into memory separately. Although they do have the ability to drag and drop external audio files. tl/dr: I think it's important when advocating for this feature to use the term "phrase sampler" to avoid confusion between the types.

Thanks for checking in and telling us about this, @Scott Wheeler. The developers will be alerted, and unless they've already started work on their own sampler, I can't imagine that they wouldn't be interested in talking with you on your API. As with ARA (which Cakewalk has always been toward the front of the herd with), the more companies that buy into these non-Steinberg standards and extensions the better. I'm very interested in what form the integration with REAPER has taken, so I guess in a few days I should download the latest builds of both Sitala and REAPER and check it out. For me, the minimum is dragging audio clips from Cakewalk tracks to the sampler's pads with no intermediate steps or conversions or leaving the app. If I could just do that, life would be so much simpler. If your API allows that, host applications transferring audio directly to Sitala, and it's something that others might start using, it would make for a happy land indeed.

Here's my review of MTurboCompLE: I snagged it the first day, no surprise, and I think that as long as one takes it on its own terms, being a plug-in with a dozen or so modules that are set up to sound like classic hardware compressors, but that don't look and feel or even sound exactly the same, it can be a useful tool. Vojtech, the proprietor of Meldaproduction, has a well-known disdain for the idea of chasing the sound of hardware from an imagined past when everything sounded better because the parts used to build it were imperfect. This is one of the things I find refreshing about the company, they're a good antidote to when I go to Plugin Alliance and see them asking hundreds of dollars for those myriad channel strip emulators. I use a bit of console emulation myself, but feel no need to track down the perfect emulation of some specific board. Nothing wrong with it, it's just not my interest. The classic compressor that I've long been trying to find a good inexpensive emulation of is the dbx 165. There was a guy calling himself de la mancha who put out a most excellent one, but it stayed at 32-bit when the programmer got into other things and folded the company. Vojtech tips his hand about how serious his efforts were to chase vintage verisimilitude with MTurboComp; the information box for the dbx-flavored one says: "We listened to the DBX-160 [sic] and then we forgot about it and came up with the DBMeld 160." Uh, well, okay, if I had paid the full licensing fee for an emulation of a compressor that the developers said they deliberately put out of their minds before designing the algorithm, I'd be a bit bemused by their marketing efforts. So don't expect to be fooled by the emulation. If you think of it in terms of tribute bands, MTurboCompLE is more like one of those outfits that have their own take on the band being tributed, like Koi Division, Dread Zeppelin, or Nudist Priest than it is one of the ones that tries to deliver as close a set to the original band as they can. It's not a good compressor for learning how compression works and what the usual parameters do due to the idiosyncratic labeling and workflow. IMO, the best one for that is their MCompressor, which combines straight-up Attack and Release (in mS), Ratio (expressed as a number followed by a semicolon and a "1"), Threshold (dB) and Gain (dB again) with a very informative graphical display that shows how the compressor is set and what it is doing to the signal. Oddly, some of the models of compressor in MTurboCompLE have their controls labeled in mS and dB and ratio, so it's not impossible. The developer says that he didn't do it because those numbers don't really mean what they say on other compressors. I say, fine, who cares, then, why not just let us use them anyway? It's not like it hurts anyone to believe that we're actually dialing in microseconds and precise ratios. The important thing is that we already know what to expect from "10mS" attack and "8:1" ratio. Percent is fine for Dry/Wet controls. There is already a convention for "meanlingless place markers," which is labeling 1-10 or higher, with no units. In order to really "get" this compressor, I think it's necessary to read the manual, but don't worry, if you're familiar with Meldaproduction documentation, you won't be surprised to learn that the description and information specific to use of MTurboComp fits comfortably on a single page while the other 150 pages (I am in no way exaggerating or stretching the truth, really I wish I were) are generic boilerplate that describes features common to most Meldaproduction plug-ins, like modulators and multiparameters. There's not even the slightest description of what a compressor does. There is no mention of the Ratio control, and Threshold is only mentioned in passing to distinguish MTurboComp from other compressors, ones that don't have the Mighty Compression Knob. I've complained in the friendliest way about the Meldaproduction product manuals in the past. Their ad copy boasts about how their products are the MOST advanced, forward-thinking tools for modern music production, yet the comprehensive instructions on how to use all this power to, y'know, make music, seem to be missing. Go to their site and try to figure out what MSpectralDelay does from reading the ad copy or manual. I know what it does on my system because they gave me a license as a loyalty award. It makes things sound weird in a warpy, filtery, repeaty way, like one of Glitchmachines' delays. This happens to be useful to me in my endeavours, but if there's something else it can do besides scroll presets hoping to happen upon the perfect "glurtch" it's lost on me. MFreeform Phase? No idea. It's not a "phaser," at least. MFreqShifter? MSpectralPan? MWaveShaper? I don't know what they're supposed to do and the documentation is no help. Trial and error. Another thing that distinguishes this product from other compressor plug-ins and some hardware units is that nowhere are we given access to knee shape or RMS time. With MTurboComp, we do get precise bar graphs for input, output, LU, and gain reduction as well as a very detailed animated histogram (also common to all of their processors) that can be configured to plot all of these things and more. Pls. see pps. 2-151 of manual. I'm sure there's a description of setting it up somewhere in there. To extrapolate from the crumbs offered by the manual, MTurboCompLE for the most part seems (I'm guessing, there is no canonical way to actually know) to combine Ratio and Threshold controls into one bigger knob called "Compression," and the idea is you put this thing on your track or bus, pick a compressor model and if the stock settings need to be tweaked, you hit the attack and release controls, but stay away from ratio and threshold and instead use the big "Compression" knob. You can watch the meter to see how much gain reduction you're getting. On some of them you can get at the ratio and threshold, but they're labeled as a percentage, but a percentage of what, they don't say. How do I dial in a 4:1 compression ratio? No idea. Do I need a calculator? 5mS attack, 150mS release? Nope, no help. The really cool feature is that MTurboCompLE's Compression knob sort of has MCompare built into it, so while you're dialing more compression, the plug-in is calculating the makeup gain based on loudness. This eliminates having to fiddle with makeup gain manually, and keeps you out of the perceptual sandtrap of louder usually sounding better. It is so humbling once one tries out something like MCompare or GainMatch and realizes that one's skills at improving a track via the psychoacoustic magic of compression too often may have amounted to being over generous with the makeup gain knob. One need not disclose how one knows about this, but one does know about it. This does seem to be a processor oriented toward "using your ears," and I mean that in a positive way. With the gain compensation built in, I think it will allow me to focus more on what effect the Mighty Compression Knob is having rather than fussing with milliseconds and ratios. If I want I can shuffle through 14 different compressor types in a minute, turning the knob back and forth, and choose whatever sounds best. That's how I hope to use this thing. 14 quickie compression solutions that resemble classic hardware units. Fun fun. Another unexpected treat is the inclusion of a 4-band multiband compressor that is said to be based on the 1176. Unfortunately it has no metering beyond the aforementioned bar graphs and histogram, which would make dialing in individual bands kinda fussy. I think part of the issue that some people seem to have with MTurboCompLE is that we've come to expect something different from the company, which is very painstaking signal processing coding wizardry and endless control and configurability. They didn't seem to be overly concerned with precisely emulating the units they say they're trying to emulate; we're mostly supposed to set them up with one knob, and the more granular controls aren't even labeled in the standard way. Those things don't seem very "Meldaproduction" to me. I was expecting to see a dbx with "the industry's most stunningly advanced accurate emulation of the old hardware VCA" and then, if anything, even more control over each compressor parameter. That's not what this is. I guess the non-LE version allows you to assemble your own compressors out of parts of the other modules, but that isn't really the point of good hardware emulation. Nice, but not what vintage emulation is primarily about. This is a Meldaproduction compressor made to sound like vintage hardware, not a vintage hardware emulation with Meldaproduction features included. Hard to beat the price, and, oh, I tried the dbx on my guitar track and it sounds killer, and actually quite dbx-y. -Erik "Starship Krupa" Miller

Who among us has not spent minutes tweaking a compressor plug-in's settings, getting it juuuuust right, and then noticed the thing was bypassed the whole time? Anyway, when I mix, I use my brain, my eyes, and my ears. My brain knows what has worked in the past and we start there. If it sounds like it could use some adjustment, then we make some adjustments. It's like cooking to taste, you start out with roughly the same ingredients and proportions of them that you've had success with in the past and then start adjusting the flavor. To my mind, this is like a cookbook saying "add 2% paprika" instead of "add one tablespoon of paprika." It's not a standard way of measuring that parameter. Especially with a dozen modeled vintage compressors, if I'm turning the knobs and something unexpected is happening, or it sounds like poo, how do I know whether I just don't like that compressor, or it's not the appropriate one for the job, or I'm not setting it up correctly because I can't figure out how to set a 5mS attack, 100mS release, and 4:1 ratio? I call myself a Meldamoonie, I really like my Meldaproduction FX and utilities, but this is kinda chafing me. Doing it "the Meldaproduction way" is fine to an extent, once you get past the FreeFXBundle they're mostly not for beginners. But why put in a needless obstacle to understanding how it works? No doubt it's a fine plug-in, but the learning curve for the advanced Meldaproduction products is steep enough already. I'll take this to the Meldaproduction forum instead of moaning here....

To my dismay, @Brian Walton, the weird "attack and release expressed in %" is actually the case in many of the models. I can't fathom why he would do this. As someone who sometimes likes to set my release time to a division of the tempo of a song, this is especially bothersome. I think I can work with ratio as a percentage, but what a MCompLEteHeadache. I'm a "set my initial parameters to numbers that usually work for this kind of material then tune it from there" kinda guy, not a "mix completely subjectively with my 60-year-old ears and have friends politely tell me that the cymbals are razor blades" kinda guy, so I just want mS, please. These are supposed to model classic compressors but give the user greater control, why reinvent the wheel on the control labeling? Try before you buy on this one to see if you can deal with it.

RFK

As a former professional software QA engineer, with such a precise (and well-observed, I might add) symptom, there are questions to be asked outside of the usual "running out of memory" "bad drive," etc. The most important one is: what event happens on your system each time you open (or possibly save or close) a project? There is some event, such as initializing the ASIO driver, the MIDI port, something like that. After the 22nd time, it breaks something. Software bugs are sometimes like this. My guess, since it stops happening when you disconnect the TASCAM (good troubleshooting, BTW), is that there is something going on either in its driver or in the hardware itself. It can only take being reinitialized (or whatever) 22 times before going into an error condition. Did the change in the number of projects opened coincide with a change in buffer size? If you switch to WASAPI driver mode, does it still exhibit the problem? It is a little unusual to open and save 22 projects in a row, so it's possible that TASCAM didn't test for this exact condition in the driver software or the interface's firmware. In any case, you have identified the component that is most likely the source of the issue: your audio interface. Contact TASCAM and see if anyone else has experienced similar issues.

Yeah, JST Sidewidener (Computer Music) is my go-to, sometimes Infected Mushroom Wider. But hey, free, always worth a try.

Cool, thanks! Something that trips me out is how often people who make YouTube demos obviously have mix engineer skills, but can't or won't apply that to the VO track for their narration. The guy's lip and tongue clicks drive me nuts. ?

Kurre, @Terry Kelley, I'm curious as to how you liked the expansions and whether you consider it worth the money. Cheers.

Really? There are many free ways to edit lyrics, it doesn't need to be a part of the same software we use to make music. Cakewalk's "Lyrics" feature won't do what you and I would like it to, but a good free plug-in will, "A pity," perhaps, but depressing?

I've posted earlier in this thread about the wonders of Swatches, the freebie from A|A|S that is basically a player that demos their other instruments. It comes with almost 500 sounds. If you have Swatches/AAS Player, the AAS Player and sound packs that use Chromophone 3, Ultra-Analog 3, and String Studio 3 have all been updated to the new engines and sounds and they sound fantastic. I did a 1:1 comparison using some favorite Cinémathèque ambient pads and the already-magnificent sounds were huge. So go update your version of Swatches, and certainly, if you, like me, own a bunch of sound packs and only use them in Player, update your sound packs as well.

Okay, this is pertinent for other Swatches/AAS Player users who may be reading this: The AAS Player and sound packs that use Chromophone 3, Ultra-Analog 3, and String Studio 3 have all been updated to the new engines and sounds and they sound fantastic. I did a 1:1 comparison using some favorite Cinémathèque ambient pads and the already-magnificent sounds were huge.

I love the sound of their stuff, but keep it to the "Session" versions and AAS Player with a pile of sound packs. Player works fine for me (except I've found no use for the Strum packs I got in bundles), the only feature I would add to it would be a way to mark favorites. For those having CPU issues, a trick that has worked for me in Player is reducing the number of voices. This may seem like it would reduce the lushness of those ENORMOUS AAS pads, but I've never even noticed a difference when going from 12 (the default) to say, 8. I think this is because some of those long, evolving highly effected pads have such long tails that voices can really pile up if I'm doing something with a lot of changes or arps. The thing is, if I'm doing something with lots of changes, long tails can get in the way anyway. 8 or even 6 voices works just fine. If I'm doing piano key entry, 6 note chords are kinda my limit anyway.

That's a feature that many of their plug-ins have, you can design simplified control panels. It looks as if for the various vintage compressors they've come up with they also made panels. Click on the "Edit" button at the top and the panels will go away and you'll see the usual zillions of options. The LE one doesn't give you access to the "Edit" screen. I wonder if that's a typo on the artwork they are using for the website and advertisements, because I have owned Meldaproduction compressors for years (I'm one of the few with any love to show for MModernCompressor, which, now that I'll have MTurboCompLE might be seeing less use), and ratio is expressed as a ratio, release and attack in mS, everything is as it usually is on compressors. And anyone who gets MTurboCompLE, be sure to poke around and see if you can find the "psychoacoustic prefiltering" option for the detector and A-B it against the other detector settings. Really nice on a snare. MModern has it easily accessible, one of MModern's few claims to fame.

Well, last month, I made two purchases at PB, and the first time I opted for Animate, and the next time they again offered me my choice of the remaining 2 on the freebie list, so it's time to get one of those under $10 plug-ins we all keep in our PB wishlist so that we always have something to qualify (those deals have sold a lot of SoundSpot licenses over the years).

https://page.waproduction.com/monthly-free-product With any order, and last time I did it that included products that are themselves already free, like their numerous other genre packs. I can say that if you're a droner, glitcher, or sound designer, you won't regret investing $7.90 in a license for Venom. It's another of their crazy useful creative tools.

At least now that their BF sales are over I can finally get my best price on Sandman Pro. I have a $25 voucher that must be used on an order of $35 or more (and have no $5-10 plug-ins that can be used to pad an order), and their silly "any plug-in $29" sale meant that the one plug-in I was interested in would have cost me $4 more if I'd bought it on sale.

Oh heck YEAH to some MTurboCompLE, that so much more than makes up for my missing the Waves dbx 160 spiff.