Starship Krupa

Minimogue VA is a favorite of mine. I'm not sure how faithful it is to the original hardware Minimoog, but it's free, so check it out. Scroll down on that page.

One of my favorite free reverbs is Wave Alchemy's Magic7. In their words, "Experience the immersive sound of the legendary Bricasti M7 reverb for FREE with Magic7." I have other reverb plug-ins that I love, so I have no need for a free Bricastalike (MTurboReverb's "Brichamber" model is one of my go tos), but when I've messed around with it just testing it, it sounded really good. The MeldaProduction FreeFX Bundle also includes MCharmVerb, which is an algorithm reverb that sounds pretty good, and MConvolverEZ, which is a convolution reverb that I am told sounds really good. Of course if you have Sonar Premium, it comes with the Sonitus algorithms in VST3 form with new UI's, so you could go with Cakewalk Core Reverb and it should sound exactly similar to using the DXi version.

I personally have no issue with any of those, but yeah, that's a thing, their installation process, even before MPluginManager, is just something I let do its thing and keep my hands off. I trust it to know what it's doing or at least not to ruin anything. Fortunately, in the dozen years or so that I've been a big user of their products, MeldaProduction have never shipped a product, even a beta version, that didn't function perfectly as advertised for me. I've never had to roll anything back, never had to dive into the file system, none of that. The only hassle I've run into with them as far as installation was when I wanted to move my MSoundFactory samples to a different drive. I hacked at it and hacked at it, asked on their forum, bla bla bla, and finally threw up my hands and let the installer download it all over again. It took way less time to just start fresh than I spent trying to get MSoundFactory or MPluginManager to recognize my changed sample location.

We'll see. Maybe someday, but it seems like a daunting task right now. Of course, due to the perversity of these things, I fear that iZotope and Plugin Alliance will get shoehorned into my least favorite installer of the cabal, Native Access. But for now at least, I'd say that the current Plugin Alliance installer is one of my favorites, up there with Kilohearts and MeldaProduction/United. It's moved ahead of iZotope Product Portal. Maybe that could be a new category in the KVR Awards: best installer shell.

Sweet! I must run it....

Some installer shells I like, many I do not. I agree with Brian that when the number of plug-ins I have from a manufacturer gets past a certain point, it would be a giant pain in the butt to have to manually check for updates by visiting their websites, then downloading installers for each individual plug-in. For instance, between Kilohearts Essentials and MeldaProduction's FreeFX Bundle, both of which I consider mandatory, there are over 70 plug-ins. That would be a tedious task, I don't know how long it would take me. Even conservatively allowing just one minute to download and install one plug-in, that would be over an hour. I also have more IK Multimedia T Racks modules than I would care to install individually. With a good installer shell, it takes a matter of minutes. It's just not practical to have individual standalone installers when your line includes a bundle of 35 freebies that everyone who deals with your company will probably want to install. The best ones are Kilohearts in first place, followed closely by MeldaProduction/United, then iZotope. Kilohearts gets the nod because it doesn't even install itself, it's a standalone executable. MeldaProduction's does install itself, and while that doesn't bother me, it still gives Kilohearts the edge. iZotope is a distant third because it no longer stores my login information, I have to enter it each time I run the shell. Kilohearts and MeldaProduction aren't perfect, but the sins they commit are relatively minor ones. What I want from an installer shell program is numero uno, don't install any damn services, and don't screw up iLok or the VC++ redistributables by overwriting them with older versions. Then I want the installer shell to be able to phone home and version check all of my installed plug-ins, and give me individual control over which ones I wish to install/update. Both Kilohearts and Melda do this. I want it to be able to store my log-in information so that I don't have to enter it each time (Native/iZotope, why do you make me enter my email and password EVERY time I run the installer shell?). It should allow the user to set the install folders for VST2's and samples or other resources and it should allow the user to choose which plug-in formats they wish to install. And it should OBEY those choices and not install friggin' AAX and/or VST2 after I explicitly tell it I only want 64-bit VST3. It should have the option to store installer files locally in case I need to repair an installation. The OPTION. Do you hear me iZotope? I don't want to have to periodically purge old installers from my Downloads folder. It should allow queueing of downloads so as to allow long downloads to run unattended. Arturia's allows me to choose to queue multiple updates, but then if I pause one (because it's taking too long or whatever), all updates stop and I have to force quit the installer. Sometimes they all grind to a halt for no reason whatsoever (maybe the individual product's installer is hidden behind the main window?). I'm running it right now and queued updates for 3 products. When the first one finished, the other two just sat there saying "waiting." For what, I don't know, but invariably, if I quit the installer and start it back up, the remaining updates will complete. Ah, yes, I see, as soon as I killed the installer shell using Task Manager, the installer for Analog Lab popped up. So crappy. It should not clutter my VST3 folder with "demo" versions of plug-ins I don't own. IK frickin' Multimedia, hang your head in shame. T RackS is such a great product line, and that practice of installing ALL of the modules regardless of license status makes it look bad. When I think of T RackS, it's always with a twinge of remembering the drudgery I have to go through each time I update it, having to refer to my list of licenses and move all the rest of the product line out of my VST3 folder. It should handle the task of activating the products that I own without my needing to enter serial numbers in the plug-ins themselves. It should not install duplicate libraries when I have licenses whose content overlaps. IK Multimedia again. I found out at one point that I was both missing a great deal of the suite I had paid for (SampleTank MAX), AND that I had lost WAY too much disk space to duplication of samples. Aside from the first three companies, all of the remaining installer shell programs I know of commit fundamental sins such as not checking versions (Plugin Alliance), installing services, not storing login information (as I type this, Vienna Assistant can't log me in for whatever reason). Unfortunately, the challenged ones outnumber the solid ones, so installer shells get a bad name (not undeserved).

[pedantry] And also shares the nomenclature of the company name being WA Production rather than "WA Productions." As in MeldaProduction. The way I remember is that the tools they make are used for "production." [/pedantry] I think it will always be a matter of confusion for native English speakers....Melda are my favorite plug-in company and I need a mnemonic to remember that their name contains a verb🙄

It has the whiff of spin-off. I hadn't recalled that they dropped the tiered versions, Vegas Pro Edit, etc.

I got Vegas Pro 21 the last time it was Humble Bundled by MAGIX. That was a pretty big update for me because it added VST3 support as well as expanded the use of GPU's for rendering. After that, I'm not sure new features would be anything I would use. Here's the link, the upgrade price for just Vegas Pro without the other stuff is $99: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/us/vegas-pro/pricing/

Well, that's a clue right there. Do you use the whammy? Is it set up to float? Going out of tune sharp is often due to binding at the nut, so the advice about nut care is pertinent. As far as whammies go, if it's set up to float, it's a nice idea to hit the holes in the inertia block where the springs attach and the claw at the other end of the springs with lube every so often.

G is always the worst. On all of my guitars, which cover acoustics, solid body fixed bridge, solid body with vibrato, and hollow body electric, 3-on-a-side and 6-on-a-side, the G is the one that's most likely to go out of tune. Also, when tuning, it's the most difficult to dial in. Why? I've given it some thought. What about the G string might cause this? First, in the case of the light strings I (and most guitarists, since the late 1960's) use, the G string is the fattest plain string. If I'm correct, that means that it has more tension than its neighbors the B and E strings. Second, it's close to the center of the fretboard and in the middle of the guitar's range. That means that when strumming and playing chords, it will nearly always be strummed or plucked. While there are some chords that omit the low E and A as well as some that omit the high E, whatever cowboy chord you play will involve using the G string. It gets fretted more and struck more than any other string except maybe the B. And when strumming downward, it will be hit before the B and therefore be hit with more force. Third, and probably least significant, is that on 3-on-a-side headstocks, there's more G string above the nut, therefore more to stretch, more to have tension above the nut. The D string also shares this. This is of course a known phenomenon, and while it seems like magic or the universe's perversity, I think that this too can be explained. I had to deal with the "technician effect" all the time when I had my amp servicing business. People would show up and the amp would magically have healed itself and they'd be WAY bummed and angry until I picked up a drum stick and started tapping the butt end of it against various areas of the cabinet. Bingo. A couple of days ago, I was having trouble with routing MIDI from MTuner. I'm the biggest MeldaMoonie on this forum, and I've written tutorials on how to set up MVocoder, etc. But I could NOT for the life of me get MTuner to appear as a possible input to a Sonar MIDI track. So I put the question to the forum, including the "facts" that I had enabled MIDI output for the plug-in both in Sonar and in itself, yada yada. Immediately after posting, I decided to go back through one more time and double/triple check the steps I said that I had taken. Poof! I had it working within 5 minutes of posting. Magic? Nah, writing it all out helped me to calm down and sort my thoughts and focus. You've been concentrating your efforts on solving this issue, and something or other you did has helped, even if temporarily. Another trick that's so obvious that people wouldn't mention it is: always tune UP to a note, never down. This ensures that whatever leftover tensions from binding in the nut or whatever will result in the string going slightly higher in pitch if they are released. It's not ideal, but the idea is that strings tend to go out of tune in the direction of flat, so at least these two forces will somewhat cancel each other. Only one of my guitars has locking tuners, and it's one that someone gave me. It isn't any different from my other Strat-alikes when it comes to tuning stability.

I don't have Stutter Edit 1. Stutter Edit 2 had already been around long enough for iZotope to have it in one of those $10 blowout sales that were more common before the Native Instruments merger. I had discovered Tipper and Telefon Tel Aviv and reaaaaally wanted to delve into glitchy textures. I picked up Break Tweaker around the same time. Unfortunately, with both of them I've so far only been able to use the presets, with very little alteration. I treat Break Tweaker as a preprogrammed drum machine and Stutter Edit as a preprogrammed effect. Nothing wrong with that, except I would like to be able to hear a sound in my head and then take it to fruition in a direct line sometimes rather than scrolling through possible options and going with something that sounds cool. Two different ways of approaching an effect or instrument, and while I don't mind using cake mixes, to use a metaphor, I'd like to be able to start from (pun) scratch. I'd like to understand how to get results from the ground up. I use canned beats from time to time, but it's also valuable to me that I can play live, physical drums, so I know how to cook up my own beats from the ground up. I'd like this to be similar for the many, many glitch effects I have.

You have it all set up as it should be hardware wise. I assume you're using the Midas for mixing and summing. The first thing that comes to mind is what others have mentioned, it being a matter of track interleave and/or pan law setup. I'll leave it to them, they've have already made better suggestions than I could, but I'm pretty sure you just need to flip a couple of settings and it will be just as you expect. It's the sort of speed bump we encounter when switching from one of these venerable beasts to another.

It's those bits where the sound seems to lurch to a brief halt and comes back right on the beat. I found a video about Kilohearts Tape Stop (free in their Essentials bundle) where a crucial part of keeping the rhythm is to set the stop length to a 1/4 or 1/8th note. Tipper is a giant of this genre, trying to emulate his signature production tricks is a daunting challenge. I'll take another crack at Stutter Edit. I went so far as to work all the way through the Producertech course on Stutter Edit 2 and it STILL baffles me. Some of the Stutter Edit 2 presets have elements that get close, but I haven't even figured out how to dissect presets and pull out what I want. It's a confusing interface with all of its switching between different modes, and I understand why you would prefer a simpler interface. There's an element of what all of these things do that I have been unable to wrap my head around, and that's the bit about loading the audio into a buffer. My brain just derails when I try to "get" it.

I think what went wrong was that I hadn't actually enabled MIDI out from it.

I have both of those, and have messed about with MRhythmizer in my quest. It probably can do it, I just haven't been able to figure out how. Much as I love MRhythmizer, I'm completely dependent on presets, because despite having it for years, and really wanting to incorporate stops and glitches in my own work, I remain innocent of any clue how to either create a new preset or even alter an existing one with clear intent. I've tried reading MeldaProduction's "documentation." I've tried watching video tutorials. I also have Stutter Edit 2, as well as a number of other plug-ins that can do tape stops. No luck so far with any of them. I can get them to do what they do, which is simulate the sound of a tape deck stopping and restarting, but it's nowhere near the effect I want to create. There's possibly something in the timing of it I'm not getting, and maybe some extra pitch manipulation. Been banging my head against it off and on for years. Figured I'd throw it out to the hive mind. Thanks for replying.

I'm not sure I learned anything from that, but I love her collection of knicknacks. NERV coffee mug, original iMac, multiple hardware oscilloscopes, retro CRT monitors....

Seeing as this forum is mostly about Sonar, a Windows-only program, you probably won't get many replies in the affirmative here. Maybe Vi Control or some other forum? I don't know why people think Apple is any better than MS about updates and data gathering. One of my big issues with Apple products is that they are forced into obsolescence when the underlying hardware is still capable of doing the job. Microsoft goes to a lot of effort to make sure that legacy programs and drivers aren't broken by OS updates. Apple, not so much. They have a financial incentive for users to bin their old hardware and buy new, and unfortunately, they may take advantage of their position as the sole legal supplier of the OS and the hardware it runs on. They can decide not to allow the OS on computers of a certain age and then you're just out of luck. Later versions of the OS can be forced on to earlier hardware that has been deprecated by Apple, but it's much more difficult than, say, tricking Windows 11 to install on a Windows 10 system that is supposedly incapable of running it. As for data gathering, if anyone thinks that Apple is somehow "better" than Microsoft in regard to data privacy....I don't know why anyone would think that. All that said, I think Macs are great and that their new CPU's are a genuine step forward. I wish I could afford one!

Here's an example of what I'm trying to do, it's fast and smooth and fits the rhythm. I have multiple POWERFUL FX that do tape and vinyl stops and spin-ups, but this effect eludes me. No matter which one I use, it doesn't sound right rhythmically and I there's also something happening that isn't found in my standard tape stoppers:

Dang, you must have some serious chops to be able to record acapella with no instrumental reference and keep it in key and in tune. The issue I can see with recording your vocal first and then going from there is that unless you are really spot on with your rhythmic timing, it will likely be very difficult to overdub any instruments. So if there's a way that you can use a metronome and not lose the feel that's obviously very important to you, do that and you'll be fine with everything else. Of course you don't have to (as drummers say) "bury" the click, you can wander a bit, but you should land on the upbeat or downbeat as much as possible. I think that with your chops, you would eventually be able to do this even if it doesn't feel right at first. As long as you keep the time, you will be able to use the same metronome click to make the instrumental tracks match. The way it's usually done is to start with an instrument playing to a click, and your instrument is your voice. I don't see any other reason that it wouldn't work. If you trust your chops enough to even be considering it, go for it. At the worst you'll learn what doesn't work. While it's true that the first vocal take is usually a guide that gets replaced, you're not doing it the usual way. I've observed many first takes that had a magic that the player or singer just couldn't top no matter how many times they tried. Have one myself. I recorded a scratch guitar solo just off the top of my head and tried half a dozen times to better it with a solo that was more worked out ahead of time and none of my subsequent tries got anywhere close to the magic of that first take. I was looking at it like the first pancake off the griddle, there's no way it can be the best one. But it bypassed my intellect, came more directly from that mystical source of creativity in my mind. And that's bottled lightning. I suffer from "red light syndrome," which is when I can easily play a part when practicing or rehearsing, but when I hit Record, I suddenly become stiff and clumsy. Engineers who record others know about this phenomenon, so if you're in a studio and the engineer tells you to just run through a take so that they can "set levels," 9 times out of 10 they'll have the gear in record mode. I suspect that almost every recording musician has wound up using a "set levels" take in the finished product. We just sing and play better when there's no "pressure," even when we're recording into a computer whose hard drive can hold days of audio and takes are free. I'd love to hear what you come up with.

I was a big fan of ELO at the time and an avid reader of the music press and I don't remember any such incident. Not saying none of it's true, but someone did a good job of keeping it out of the press. The Who were well known around that time for using tapes to augment their performances when playing material that had used parts that they couldn't perform live, mostly on the Quadrophenia tour, but also for stuff like Townshend's keyboard ostinatos. "Baba O'Riley" and (a few years later) "Eminence Front." I'd be surprised if ELO didn't have taped parts to reproduce the arrangements of some of their songs. Like you're going to play "Eldorado" and not have that famous spoken word "high on a hill, in Eldorado-dorado-dorado...." intro? The string section itself, I still haven't figured out how it was possible to get Gale and Kaminski and McDowell amplified and also able to hear themselves at arena rock stage volume. I know there was a company called Barcus-Berry involved in making pickups for them, but the rest is a mystery. Regarding that article, the idea of a 70's Detroit rock promoter being a crusader for authenticity (or for anything other than making money from what they were doing) stretches credibility way past the breaking point. As long as the kids paid their money and were entertained, I find it nearly impossible to believe a promoter would care about anything else. Why pull such a stunt and run the risk of concert attendees asking for their money back? Who would it serve? Rather more likely was that someone on the local crew noticed that they were testing the backing tracks during sound check and talked about it. Maybe they thought it was big news and contacted someone in the press, or someone in ELO's entourage pissed them off. They were managed by Donn Arden, the Great Satan of 70's British rock 'n' roll, making that more likely. I remember Peter Grant, Zeppelin's manager, having a go at one of Bill Graham's employees around that time at a concert at Oakland Coliseum. Talk about When *****holes Collide. This kind of thing was well-covered, the press always loves a controversy. So I'm gonna roll and cast Filter of Skepticism.

Indeed, Ace and Peter are having a great time, being young silly guys (maybe a bit hooched up), how can you take KISS so seriously? Gene seems to think it's still 1974 and they are "controversial" and wants to put out a stoic dangerous badass persona. The same one that Totie Fields called him out on when they were both on the Mike Douglas Show....

Fixed, within 5 minutes of posting this. A mystery as to how, but sometimes asking about a mysterious issue will result in the issue resolving itself. Sometimes very quickly. Whether I overlooked something or what, it works now, and that's what's important.

I'm trying to experiment with some realtime pitch-to-MIDI and decided to try it using MeldaProduction's MTuner. The way it's supposed to work is that you put MTuner in the FX rack of the audio track, enable MIDI out, then on the synth track you want to control, you set its MIDI input to be MTuner. That's the way it works for plug-ins that output MIDI. For some reason, when I try this, MTuner isn't appearing in the list of possible MIDI sources. I've made sure that MIDI output for the plug-in is enabled both in the plug-in and in Sonar's plug-in menu. This is very odd, because I've even contributed to topics about this in the past. It was most definitely working for me at one point. Unfortunately, the screen caps that the person who posted the recipe used have been deleted. Has anyone gotten this to work lately? What am I missing?

Oh noooooo.... I was recently trying to list the musicians who have influenced my own music and David Ball is in the top 5 at least. My favorite Soft Cell song, radio edit. The immortal lyric: "And the girl underneath doesn't care who you are And you're nearly there and she still doesn't care And her chewing gum is getting stuck in your hair" Never fails to bring a laugh. The synth bass line is ferocious in note selection, tone, and execution.