Starship Krupa

Okay, now that we've solved the puzzle of how to get this thing to work, I found the video I've been referring to, where the guy raves about it (and he actually uses the term "God Mode"). And I sat through the whole presentation again, remembering how he seems like a really intelligent person, knowledgeable musician/songwriter/producer/video creator, up on theory and production technique, and it seemed impossible that someone like he could get so sprung over something if if weren't truly useful. I believe I now understand what he means and why he's so excited: he's got this channel where he's trying to teach people how to compose while needing as little music theory as possible, and he's figured out a method for doing it using Instachord. If you can get past the giddy raving that makes up the first half of the video, it may become apparent. The "secret" that he's unlocked is overdubbing different parts using the same chords chosen with the left finger, but with different Actions (those "strum patterns" declared in the right hand columns when you select a preset) in each overdub. He noticed after messing with it that there are bassline Actions and that you can also kick the Actions into higher melodies. One of the problems with getting it right away from his video is that he's really swift with operating his computer in general and the plug-in specifically, and he doesn't pause to let things sink in. So: first pass, maybe using the piano roll or step mode with the lower octave keys on your controller, you enter the chord progression you want to use. Then you go into sound on sound (or maybe comp) record mode and overdub parts by pressing single keys up in the higher octave areas of your controller. Instachord just has canned "parts" that fit the chord, scale or mode you selected in the first pass. Voila, you have something that sounds like a song. And that's not, IMO, a bad way to learn how to compose, because it starts with the person getting a feel for what I,IV,V or whatever, changes sound like. If they start paying attention to what the Actions are doing, and hip hop and R&B like this guy is working in don't stick to just maj and min, they use 7th chords as well, they'll need to know about that as well. Traditionally-trained musicians and especially teachers will hate the idea of course, but "top down" is how millions of people like for instance The Beatles (and me) learned how to write songs when we first started out. Pick up a guitar, strum the 4 chords you know, notice that two of them sound kind of cool played back to back and go from there. I still don't know if Instachord will be of great use to me personally, but I can at least see why this guy is so over the moon about it. You can FF to about halfway through if you want to get past his frothing and down to where he starts working with it.?

I know you said "free," but what you're talking about sounds kind of like Sasquatch Kick Machine. Do you remember whether it was just tone shaping or did it also trigger a sub? SoundSpot Kickbox is a great kick drumEQ and compression plug-in which is often in deep discount at Pluginboutique. In the freebie zone, there are bx subfilter, Combear and Bark of Dog, which is up to version 2, past the version that used to ship with SONAR Platinum.

I've tried to do my part by at least doing some much-needed cleanup on Wikipedia in the old Cakewalk and SONAR articles, and adding CbB to the lists of DAW's and music production software, setting facts straight, and with links to the Cakewalk by BandLab site. It was a miserable mess, and if you go check it out, please don't blame me for what's there now, mostly what I could do was grammar and rough timeline cleanup, and remove ad copy and useless lists of unimplemented features from the SONAR page. I corrected what facts I could. I would like to someday start an article on Cakewalk by BandLab itself, but that's a big task, and the SONAR article is so garbled as to be unusable as a starting point.

Yes, Tezza, this precisely. Love the Aim Assist Line, do not love the way the info box sits atop the Ruler numbers.

I think I read on the old forum that they are simplified front ends to other plug-ins that come with CbB like the PX/VX modules, so there's nothing wrong with the processing. I've not spent much time with them, but when I did, I found them surprisingly useful. There's something about using a plug-in with one big knob on it that bruises my ego. I like to think that my mad master mixmanship skills demand full control over every parameter.? But then I remember that some of my most beloved compressors, like the LA/2A and clones, are not that far off from being one knob wonders. There are no knobs for attack and release on an LA/2A.

But Cakewalk already has two of those three. What? Where? The unsung and oft-forgotten Style Dials, which are always waiting to add some Style. Right click as usual to insert a ProChannel module and all the way down at the bottom of the list of modules you'll find an otherwise empty blank box that says "Style Dial Fx." Click on that box and hey! Eight more ProChannel modules, Cakewalk's answer to Waves' "One Knob" series except they're actually more useful. Gater is the aptly-named gate, Smoother is the de-esser. But wait, there's more. Apparently they were feeling rather spherical when they put in those styley dials, because Shaper is a transient shaper. These Style Dials are a bag of surprises. There's also a compressor, tremolo, spatializer, reverb, and saturator to play with. I tend to forget about them because I have standalone plug-ins that cover their functions and offer more control, so it's good to revisit what they can do.

Cakewalk by BandLab comes with these three very nice and useful VST effects, two of them are multi-FX processors oriented toward vocals (VX-64) and percussion (PX-64), the other is a saturation processor (TL-64) with multiple controls. The VX and PX carry only Cakewalk branding, the TL also says "powered by Studio Devil). Unfortunately, by default, they are "excluded" in the terminology of the Plug-In Manager, and in order to use them the user must use Plug-In Manager to change their status so that they show up as available in the FX racks and lists. Every time a new version of CbB installs, the installer flips their status back to "excluded" and the user must again use Plug-In Manager to enable them. They were enabled as part of the SONAR Platinum suite. I read on the forum that some of the Style Dials use their resources. I don't know what the barrier is to making them available by default.

Thanks, lads. I think I found a way to get it to work with Google Photos. Hoping so!

Glad to hear it! I, too like the cleanness of the designs, both sonically and visually. I've been meaning to have a try at mixing using nothing but the Dead Duck package just as an exercise, see how good I am without access to my fancier toys.

Is there any way to use the free piano without buying the $400 sampler? I'm not up on Knotakt.

I just tried DD Compressor with the latest build of Cakewalk, Windows 10/1903 on my Core 2 Quad system with nVidia card and all functions worked fine, including the ones you mention. Man, I'm sorry to hear it. It's a good bundle of FX and fun to go through all of them. You might post a message to the developer on KVR Forum, he's active on there and very responsive the last time I saw. He doesn't like bugs, either. Wants them to work for everyone.

BandLab does own the intellectual property that was owned by the now defunct Cakewalk, Inc.,which includes the Cakewalk branded FX and synths. I believe that Meng, the CEO of BandLab said that they would be looking into making them available. Each plug-in is its own little program that can affect the larger program and must be given the same level of support, so this isn't as trivial as it might seem at first. As you can see, much attention is being placed on bug fixing and workflow enhancement. I favor this approach and believe it shows a bright future. For now, look at the "Favorite Freeware FX" thread for a list of what is now hundreds of freeware plug-ins that are known to work well in CbB. There is a corresponding thread for freeware instruments.

The bottom line that they are missing by a light year is that subscription licensing is for software that gets updated, for heaven's sake! It isn't for a company known for having come out with very little new in the past 5 years, for selling instrument plug-ins recycled from having been bundled with Pro Tools almost a decade ago at bargain basement prices. When they do come out with a new version of one of their instruments, it seems like the user base are kind of underwhelmed, and they wind up once again blowing it out for $20 in a couple of years. It would be like "subscribing" to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I have it, I'm fine with it as it is, and there's not going to be any new content. This just illustrates how "differently clued" their operation seems.

Here's where things get really esoteric. Others can speak for how the presence or absence of Hyperthreading (the Intel system has it, the AMD does not) would affect Cakewalk, but one thing is, between the two processors, that AMD has support for the AVX2 instruction set and that Intel does not. They are both old chips. Newer Intels support the instructions. I know that Vojtech of Meldaproduction uses those instructions in his plug-ins, and they are applicable to many multimedia and rendering operations, but I don't know for sure whether Cakewalk uses them. I'd be almost certain it does, as they have been around a long time now and the baker/devs are quite up on this sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions This discussion is relevant to my interests, as I have a friend who also wants to buy a DAW computer and asked for my advice.

In Preferences/Editing/MIDI, do you have Non-Destructive MIDI Editing checked? I ran into this one myself, and if I remember correctly, that solved it. The option is not-well documented. I may be wrong about it. Try it and let me know if it helps. I do know that I have the option checked and that I haven't had occasion to be exasperated about it lately, so there is hope. ?

Yes, you nailed it. The idea is that at the end of tracking, for each instrument or vocal or whatever, you'll end up with a Track for each of them, with your various takes in clips in one or more Take Lanes down underneath the Tracks. That's what Store Takes in a Single Track is about. (Sometimes I'll be recording 4 tracks at a time in Loop mode, playing drums (mic'd up kick, snare, and overheads), and wind up with half a dozen takes. If I had it set to Store Takes in Separate Tracks, I'd wind up with 24 tracks) Then I use the various comping functions to cut, copy, paste, move, split, mute, speed comp, however I want to do it, the various clips. This work is done in the Take Lanes, and once you get the hang of it, you can really fly, especially with speed comping, which doesn't even require moving clips around. When you have it all assembled, you can take your comped clips and bounce them to a single clip if you want; I just leave it as-is and commence to mixin'. I might archive some tracks with unused takes if I want to keep them.

It's funny that this issue should come up with a De La Mancha plug-in, because I, too, have whittled my 32-bit plug-in arsenal down to only the ones that provide sounds that I can get with no other. I think I'm down around 5 at this point. DLM Sixty-Five is just such a plug-in, his amazing emulation of the dbx 165a compressor. I have been trying for years to "crack the code" of this one and figure out just what it is that I like so much about it, the soft knee, fast response, whatever, trying to emulate it with the versatile compressors at my disposal like MCompressor and MModernCompressor, ReaComp and so forth, that allow access to every parameter, including custom knee shapes in the case of MCompressor. One that is in the ballpark actually, is the dbx preset in the sonitus fx compressor in CbB, but still, not quite there.

I would also love this. Years ago when I was DAW shopping, the fact that Mixcraft comes with its own wi-fi remote app was a HUGE selling point. Since BandLab already has another DAW that runs on Android and iOS, I like to fantasize that it could be somehow be adapted to control Cakewalk. The Mixcraft remote only does transport and master fader, but as long as I set everything up, just having the transport available is golden. One of the barriers to doing this is feature creep, with people saying that it would be "useless" without this or that feature. I think the time I asked about it, the first reply was that such a thing would be "useless" without the ability to arm individual tracks. Fair enough, but that adds a lot of work to creating the app. For that level of control, I think a remote desktop like VNC with a tablet might be more appropriate. Me, I just want to be able to have access to Play, Record, Stop, and be able to go back to the top. The ability to assign one fader would be nice, for adjusting the level in the cans, but it would not be "useless" without it. Right now, I use a nanoKONTROL2 on a long cable like Mark. The wireless keyboard is also a fine idea. Both are rather bulkier than a phone, though.

This item or similar, is what I use. You can get a cable with Display Port on one end and HDMI on the other, but I find the adaptor to be more versatile.

I wouldn't be concerned about this. As long as the system has a Display Port, like the first system you were looking at, you can connect any monitor. Display Ports will accept adaptors for any kind of video connector, including HDMI. The adaptors are inexpensive. Every pre-configured PC is going to come with a certain amount of "crapware" installed. It's a source of revenue for the companies who build them. Even just Windows 10 itself comes with a bunch of Microsoft games and XBox stuff that I went through and disabled on my system. It's only a matter of removing it.

That system would handle many times more than what you describe doing. To be honest, I've not felt the limitations of my aging i5 notebook and not much on my even older Core 2 Quad system when running Cakewalk. You will hear from people who will say that you "need" such and such to run a DAW in 2019 or such claims, but often to me it seems like what they are talking about is a system capable of composing movie soundtracks with huge sampled orchestral VSTi's and many CPU-hungry plug-ins on every track, in a high-pressure professional situation where time is money and you can't let the client down. Or similar. So it's true that some people need that, but certainly not all people. The fact of the matter is that there is a vast spectrum of uses for a DAW, especially Cakewalk, and it's possible to get focused on our own use. For me, it's strictly a hobby, mostly audio, I've never loaded more than 2 VSTi's in a project. I should probably increase the RAM in my computer from 8G to 16, but when I went from 4G to 8G in my notebook it had so little effect on my use of Cakewalk that I just keep letting it slip. My audio projects at this point are indie rock affairs, I favor minimalist production, my track counts seldom nudge into the 20's, if that. My reverb is all done via sends. My FX are deliberately-chosen CPU-friendly ones like Meldaproduction. My only "extravagances" are that I sometimes put iZtope Neutron or Ozone on a bus during mixing. I use utilities like Task Manager and Process Explorer to see what's running on my system and turn it off if it's not necessary. I increase the buffers in my audio interface's driver during mixing to let Cakewalk breathe easier if it needs to. I often forget. As you have seen, your 10-year-old notebook can hold its own with Cakewalk. @John said it all: to use your money wisely, higher clock speed is more important than number of cores, and if you want to use multiple monitors, get an accessory graphics card. My onboard Intel HD graphics are fine for Cakewalk, but I run two monitors so as to have the Multidock (Console/Mixer and Piano Roll, etc.) on the second monitor, and it's just better to have more dedicated video RAM. Any new system will have USB3 ports, so you're covered there. Don't fret about the monitor connection. I looked at the back panel connections and the photo shows that it has a Display Port (that's the thing just to the left of the DVI), which means that with an adaptor, you can connect any type of monitor you wish. My Dell has the Intel onboard HD graphics similar to that system and I connected a HDMI monitor via a Display Port-to-HDMI adaptor. I now use the adaptor to connect the monitor to my Radeon 5770. One thing to be VERY aware of when buying a preconfigured system such as the one you are considering is that part of the way the company who sells them makes money is by installing many, many demo programs that you most likely don't want and that may run at startup. To get maximum efficient use of your system it's necessary to get rid of this "crapware." There is software to help you do this, and Windows 10 even comes with a feature called "Fresh Start" that will install a "clean" copy of Windows 10 without any installed 3rd-party software.

Ah, you have a Dell. My own main DAW is a Dell tower and it works just fine for Cakewalk, so despair not. There's a thing about mine I can share. When I first started running Windows 10 on it instead of the Windows 7 that came with it, LatencyMonitor was showing me similar spikes to the ones you were seeing, but they were about ndis.sys. I Google searched and found many people complaining of this issue, usually after getting an OS update from Microsoft. To shorten the story, what solved it for me was that instead of the "latest and greatest" Intel network interface driver, I needed to use an older one from Dell's website. Occasionally it seems like Microsoft pushes out a NIC driver that breaks it again, and when they do, I use Device Manager/Device Properties to roll back the driver and all is well again.

Alameda, California, USA

It's something that I've never seen mentioned in reviews of Sonar or CbB, but the existence of the Theme Editor and the resulting availability of excellent user-created themes is a huge feature. The only time I run with Mercury or Tungsten is when I'm troubleshooting and want a bone stock setup. Otherwise it's one of the M-Lux, M-Titanium, or Boston Flowers.

To say that props are due @scook and @Matthew White (and @Mariano Germán Floresand @Canopus and @Michel Roth | MSol, and @Colin Nicholls and anyone else I missed) for creating their themes and getting with these changes so quickly is an understatement. Having rolled up my sleeves and gotten my hands dirty with Theme Editor, I have a taste of how much work is involved in just coming up with color alterations that look good. When I tried to get into creating my own buttons, oy, what a lot of work.