Starship Krupa

Maybe my standards are low, but IME, the stuff that people post on the Songs sub doesn't suck. Maybe by the time someone gets a song in good enough shape for their ego to handle showing it off to an audience of entirely musicians/home (and some pro) recordists, it's usually in halfway decent shape. Usually, if anything's "wrong," there are mix issues where the creator just needs to level up their skills a bit, reference more to their favorite mixes for comparison, etc. Frequency range collisions are something I hear a LOT of in hobbyist mixes (I wonder if Trackspacer is on sale, that thing is still the fastest, easiest way to help with that issue. Also problems with processing on the vocals (usually too dry, not enough highpass, inadequate control of dynamics, not the right kind of reverb for the material, and either too low or too high in the mix, depending on how the person feels about the voice). Heck, if someone has finished a track, that's something I've only been able to do on average about once a year. Not that I'm terribly down on myself about that, the hobby isn't necessarily a machine for getting songs out there (wherever "there" even is). I just like playing around with sound. I do like it when I create a finished piece, but it's all the fiddling with it that's fun.

(edited to eliminate misunderstanding on my part, nothing to see here, move along)

Oh, so do I (look in my sig). I didn't mean to come off as being offended. I just thought that featuring a Studio One logo in your avatar photo on a forum for Cakewalk was....interesting and worthy of inquiry. Welcome and let us know if you want any specific help setting up your "listen" bus. You can route things so many different ways in Cakewalk I'm sure you'll be able to put together what you're looking for. That's one of its strengths for me, the flexibility of that mixer.

Some would say neither!? But I didn't say "inherently," I specifically asked would we bother (watching and commenting). "We" being my perception of the people in this forum being particularly interested in the "how" of making music. The norm for synth music for a long time has been what David said: laptop/DAW/virtual instruments. Seeing someone play it in real time on a rig with at least 9 different physical instruments is a novelty, it's a throwback to Vangelis or Tomita. The music itself in this video....hmm, if I wanted to listen to something like this I'd probably listen to....Vangelis or Tomita. She has other videos with more interesting music, she's a pretty hot Rhodes player for one, makes good use of the timbres and dynamics specific to the Rhodes electric piano.

My mistake. I guess the manufacturers these days are doing such a good job of emulating the early '80's look that they fooled me! I am impressed. I've had my nose in a computer for so long I'm only peripherally aware of trends in that part of the industry. Okay, well, vintage style hardware vs. 2018 Macbook Pro with a dent in the corner. ?

Nice. I met Bob Moog, briefly, at the first US Festival. That was the one where Steve Wozniak wanted it to be a music and technology festival, and they lined up some music technology companies. Bob Moog was one representative, it was during a period when he had lost control of the Moog name. I think he was representing Fairlight. About 2 dozen people showed up to watch his talk. To me he was a towering figure in the industry. I just walked up and shook his hand. He was very nice, so I don't doubt that he was fun to hang with in Hollywood.

I'm glad to hear it. I am an Amazon consumer who got screwed over by them a couple of years ago. It happened this way: Amazon have a policy where any 2 people sharing the same address may also share an Amazon Prime membership. Nice for unmarried couples, roommates, whatever. I have a tenant in a cottage at the rear of my property, and he has an Amazon Prime membership, so I signed on to this. He , in turn, has access to the Netflix subscription I pay for. A couple years ago, I noticed that among the scattering of purchases from Amazon, one for the same amount of $14.95 kept popping up. This had gone on for about 6 months. I contacted Amazon and apparently, buried in one of those legalese-filled emails we get about Notice of Changes in Terms to Your Account, was the information that, in order to continue using my tenant's Amazon Prime membership, I needed to opt-in. Failure to do so, while continuing to order from Amazon, amounted to my consenting to having my own membership, at $14.95 per month. If I even read the email, I only skimmed it, because, you know, legalese. I informed them that I did want to opt in to continue on the one address/2 users plan (duh), and not only that, I wanted my money back from the months when I hadn't explicitly opted in to the other plan. No go said they. My bank (Chase), on the other hand, were very accommodating about getting 3 of the months charged back. Yes, part of it was my fault for not reading the email message completely, and for not noticing the recurring charges until it had been going on for half a year. Still, I thought it was kind of sleazy for them to switch people over in this way when who on Earth, if they were eligible for sharing a membership, would choose to pay for their own? It's too bad they pull this crap, because Amazon Prime is a great deal. Either the free fast delivery or the streaming videos would be worth $15 by themselves, IMO. Probably similar to how @Grem feels about Waves: they have a good product, why do they have to be so sketchy in how they go about selling it? I've never been a huge fan of Waves' products. They work fine, but none of the ones I have experience with surpass counterparts from other industry leaders like Brainworx, Meldaproduction, or iZotope, and the single seat license always put me off. Something about them that I think is great is that you can move their licenses around on a generic USB stick or SD card rather than a proprietary dongle.

It's the same subscription pitch as ever. 30-90 days free, and then a large enough percentage of people who try either stick with it because they dig the content and think it's worth it or they just forget to stop it. My ADHD-ridden brain is bad with these things. Many such subscription services have gotten a month's payment out of me because I was late to cancel.

Sigh. I fully understand that attitude about the analog modular synth nerd thing. I was first exposed to the culture and got to know some of the people involved back when I was getting my stompbox company underway. Mid 00's. I thought that all the toys were cool, of course, and a logical reaction to the path in big company synth design that had started 20 years earlier with the DX7. But the music that came out of them was....well, Ms. Bella Donna (and if you watch it and think she's just a Vangelis knockoff, she switches into a higher gear about 6 minutes in) is miles ahead. They'd hook them up and it was basically, well, a sine, square, saw, or triangle wave with a filter. I understood the impulse to have lots of cool knobs and wires and all that, granular control of what modules you wanted to mix and match. We were a few years into the boutique stompbox phenomenon (my company was kind of second wave on it), and going the other direction from things like rack mount all-in-one guitar processors. But unlike the difference I could hear with the stompboxes, there was nothing (to my ears, anyway) that this stuff could pull off that you couldn't get in a larger all-in-one synth. Even a budget synth of yesteryear like a Roland SH-101. Still, it is true that especially with synths, different gear will lead you in different creative directions. There was more than a whiff of model train layouts. Getting all excited because you found just the right locomotive to go with your passenger car, freight car, caboose, etc. Which I have no problem with (I do it myself with plug-ins), but if it's going to ostensibly be music gear, how about making some....music with it? At least Lisa Bella Donna here actually put together a finished piece (which, unfortunately doesn't start to sound interesting until you've sat through 6 minutes of the sound of '74). It raises the question: is the music inherently interesting, or is it only interesting because it's all boutique modules and vintage keyboards? If she were sitting behind a scratched up Dell Latitude with stickers all over the lid, making similar music, would we bother?

Nice. Naming their record Ceremony is definitely showing their hand. I've recently been re-experiencing Siouxsie and the Banshees and realizing what a freakin' musical genius she was/is. Underrated in that respect. Her arrangements with all the tuned percussion were just crazy even from the start with "Hong Kong Garden" with the xylophone. Didn't hurt that she put monster players like Budgie and John McGeoch in the band. I've probably listened to "Cities In Dust" a dozen times in the past week. Before that my vintage tight rotation was selections from the first couple of Tears For Fears albums. Post punk/goth/darkwave is one of the things I'm proudest of my generation (1955-65 births) for having created/innovated. Something about having been a child during the hippie years and then what followed it can send you in that direction I guess. ? Here's a guy who's local to me; when I heard him on the college station in my car, I thought "when did Curt from Tears For Fears team up with Trent Reznor?" (maximum Generation Jones icons there) His production is quite the ear candy, too: Here's something I heard on SomaFM's Beat Blender that you and your new squeeze might like (and congratulations on finding a lady who can introduce you to new music, that gets so much more difficult the older we get). It's from 2006, but to me, if I never heard it before, it's "new":

I feel the OP's pain about things getting selected that I didn't want selected, and the ramifications of that when exporting. I, too, still check all the seatbelts and then cross my fingers when I do an export, and still, from time to time, I get silence. One thing has made my time with Cakewalk less of a headache in that regard, which is to bind my "~" key to Edit/Select None. I know that the default binding is Num 5, but that doesn't work too well on my laptop. As for the sometimes oddball key modifiers, that too. Although I understand that Cakewalk dates back to a time before those key modifiers became industry standard, and the company prioritized the comfort of their existing user base. As for the rest, got no answers except that since I (and others) don't seem to have the rage quit level issues with automation nodes, there must be some way to avoid them.

My project templates have this set up. I call it the Output bus. It's downstream from my Export bus. The OP (what's up with that avatar photo??) maybe needs some help setting that up. Even if that's not what they meant, Cakewalk probably has enough routing flexibility to make it happen. I have different buses for headphone mix, speaker mix, master, exporting....

Maybe we're still settling into the technology, even though it's been settled into its current form (by which I mean DAW-with-plug-ins) for over 20 years? Venus Theory on YouTube is one of my favorite people who philosophizes about the psychological aspects of this matter of everyone having access to a high level of music production technology. When possibilities are endless, when we "know" that there are no logistical penalties for working on a song "forever," when we can fully realize complex musical ideas without having to put together a band, get financial backing, spend money to hire a fully-staffed recording studio, the pressure that once existed to finish things is relieved. It's too easy to fall into a trap of endlessly polishing something as our skills continually level up, our collection of plug-ins levels up. But as you describe, there is a penalty. I can open projects from 10 years ago, but back then I was using iZotope's Elements series, Kontakt Player 5, a whole bunch of plug-ins that if I wanted to fully revisit them, I'd need to reinstall a bunch of stuff I'd rather not have cluttering up my drives. When I got back into working with a DAW, the host I was using was just transitioning to 64-bit and VST3 support. I was having issues with the 64-bit version, and their VST3 support wasn't fully dialed in, so my projects from back then have some dependencies I'd rather not depend on. My expectations need management; I need to work knowing that I will want to revisit projects in the future, and that my DAW system will have changed. I suspect that it may not change as much in the next 5 years as it did in the previous 5, due to my collection of mixing (and instrument) plug-ins having leveled up. I stick to well-supported stuff like Brainworx, Meldaproduction, and iZotope, but there are never any guarantees. My MIDI tracks sometimes make use of things that only Cakewalk supports, like the built-in arpeggiator and MIDI FX, which are DXi. Not many hosts still support DXi (Cakewalk and REAPER do). Cakewalk will likely support DXi plug-ins for a good long time to come (they still ship them), but what is "a good long time?" As you point out in the case of the same instrument plug-in from the same manufacturer, Dimension, things can change under the hood. Maybe it's time to either get into the Venus Theory practice of finishing things whether I think they're perfect or not, and also work with the idea of future-proofing in mind. Knowing that I'll likely want to revisit things in the future. Bounce everything to individual tracks, both with and without FX, etc. I already save every plug-in installer, but there are probably a few that I no longer have due to system rebuilds, disk cleanups, etc.

Oh boy, if I could go back in time....? I created my own (unplanned) scenario for this. My thing is that when I got back into the DAW thing about 10 years ago, I didn't have the budget (or didn't allocate it) for plug-ins that I had later, and of course I didn't know about the wonderful resource that is The Coffee House (kudos to Larry, King of Plug-in Deals). So I relied heavily on free and very inexpensive plug-ins, such as those from Soundspot and W.A. Production, the Computer Music collection, etc. Soundspot and W.A. have a lot of beginner-friendly "get a phat sound NOW" style plug-ins (in the case of W.A., some very interesting sound design plug-ins), and at the time, W.A. had crazy low prices. I also made use of the Meldaproduction FreeFX bundle, which helped set me on my way to a better understanding of how mixing processors work, and what more "professional" processors can do. Fast forward to today, and I have leveled up my skills as well as my collection of processors, so I'd like to revisit some older projects. Fine, but the issue is that when I open one of them, the DAW complains about the old plug-ins that I since deleted, and I would actually like to have the mixes in original form to see how much better I can do (if at all!). That means that in order to do this without the DAW throwing a fit, I have to keep all of my older, less-capable plug-ins installed. Don't like clutter on my HD, don't like the DAW having to scan so many plug-ins on startup, so this is annoying. That said, I haven't yet had any of my older plug-ins stop working, which is a blessing.

Don't hate me, but I live in Alameda, CA, USA, which is the home of Peet's. I regularly get free bags of the stuff via people who work there.? My big gripe is that plain Monterey Jack sliced cheese has become a rarity. It's my favorite for sandwiches, and all you can get, it seems, is pepper jack, which is great, but I don't always want it.

Have you considered the possibility that your song actually doesn't suck? ? Philosophical spew time: I have an old saying, which I came up with after working at multiple companies that were going under: The Company Is Not Your Friend. This goes for consumers as well as employees. Companies, ultimately, exist to make money. How they go about that, and the ethics they adhere to, vary widely. But especially during a period where one is in danger of going under (as Cakewalk, Inc. under Gibson was), or gets sold to a company with management who um, "think different" about how they treat existing customers (as Apple did at the time of the eMagic purchase and still does), that ultimate reason for existence gets shoved to the front. The owners may just love their employees and customers like family, but when things come down to the company's survival, or the owners going broke propping up a failing business....they will choose their own, and their company's, survival before all else. Not cynicism, just reality, and something to remember when being an employee or customer, which we all are of some company or other. Nothing is guaranteed. My favorite plug-in company is Meldaproduction, I really dig their products, their policies, their business practices, everything but their documentation ?. The owner is a cool guy and a genius developer. I have a lifetime license for their entire line of products, which I was able to afford due to making good use of their referral bonus program. If Vojtech sells the company (Image Line already owns a chunk of it) entirely, or it shuts its doors, there go my "lifetime updates." But that's really all in the game. There are no real guarantees. It's always at least a small gamble. You buy a $50,000 car with an extended warranty and the manufacturer goes belly up in 6 months, oops. Maybe another company will see a value in picking up the product in a way that will retain the current customer base, and maybe not. SONAR users got some of the best luck I've ever seen. Program reissued with a free license, cream of the development staff rehired, development model switched to developer-driven. Wow. Still, there were resentments about how the world could now get for free what they had paid for. When I buy a software license, I know I am buying the software as it is on the day that I bought it. If the developer improves it and shoots me free or cheap updates, excellent! My biggest purchases, iZotope Music Production Suite 5.5 and Meldaproduction MComplete Bundle, work great today. Due to the license terms, I'm entitled to "dot" releases from iZotope, and of course everything that Meldaproduction ever release. If both companies decide to shut their doors tomorrow, I still have my money's worth (and then some, considering how little I paid out of pocket). Both companies are well-known for selling excellent products, both suites work flawlessly. I am also an iPhone user. I love my iPhone. I also have a drawer full of iPhones that Apple, IMO, forced obsolescence on in ways that were unnecessary. But that's part of the game: I don't buy an iPhone expecting it to have a long life.

@azslow3 is a hero, to be sure. I don't use REAPER, but for people who do use both REAPER and Cakewalk, his utilities are invaluable.

Cakewalk has a very powerful built-in arpeggiator that (I suspect) is one of those Cakewalk features that people either don't know about or forget about. It's slightly hidden, in order to access it you use Track Inspector, the pair of strips over to the left of Track View. If using a MIDI track, it's right there, if using a simple Instrument track, in order to see it you click on the MIDI tab down at the bottom of Inspector. In its presets, there is a large variety of guitar strum patterns that sound pretty realistic, which is often a problem with keyboard players trying to imitate guitar strums and picking. W.A. Production also sells a plug-in called Instachord, which generates full chord arp patterns using just two fingers, one to select the chord and the other to select the pattern.

They are included because they are part of the "back end" to the ProChannel Style Dials. @JohnnyV: SONAR Professional, the version of SONAR that Cakewalk by BandLab most closely resembles, included the Style Dials, but not Vocal Strip, Percussion Strip, or Tube Leveler. Nor of course did the versions below it on the feature list, Artist and Home Studio, all of which had the Style Dials. I suspect that anyone who bought SONAR Home Studio, Artist, or Professional back in the day would have been able to use Plug-in Manager and enabled them just as we do. Unless they came with a hobbled version of Plug-in Manager, which I doubt. I stumbled upon them years ago when messing about in Plug-in Manager ("hmm, Show Excluded, what does that do?") and wrote up a tutorial for how to enable them. Others have done so as well, notably Craig Anderton in Sound On Sound, Mike Enzo in one of his Creative Sauce videos. People pointed out that since using them isn't "officially" supported, they could have been taken away at any point, but they're just regular VST's (they work fine in other hosts, I've tried it), and we always back up our VST's, don't we? ? Also, if they had ever been eliminated, seems like Style Dials would have stopped working. PX and VX are really nice plug-ins that for some reason I tend to forget about, so thanks for reminding me. People ask about the best de-essers, vocal doublers, compressors, expanders, EQ's, saturation and all that, but those are all right there in those plug-ins. Cakewalk, Inc. only allowed full access to them in the Platinum package, so they must have considered them to be premium. Maybe I have some resistance because in the back of my mind I think they're supposed to be only for the program material in their names, but obviously, they'll work on any program material. ?

Surely possible. Unfortunately, with some monitors, when they go to sleep, they shut down enough that the OS can no longer detect that the audio device is present (which the OS doesn't care about, but Cakewalk seems to). So if you walk away from the computer for what gamers call a "bio break" (eating or other bodily functions that unfortunately get in the way of the computing experience ?) long enough for your monitor to sleep, you get the annoying message. Also, and I'm not sure about this, but maybe if you tell Windows to allow applications to have exclusive access to the audio device, they might be doing just that and kicking Cakewalk out. Since Cakewalk is probably speaking ASIO, whereas Windows doesn't know ASIO from a hole in the ground, this might happen. Anyway, @Ted Franklin, I'm not sure this will work, but it's something to try: Cakewalk has a setting under Preferences/MIDI/Devices for "Warn About No MIDI Devices." That should not be checked. Really, though, I think this is a feature request. Cakewalk shouldn't complain about not being able to see audio devices you're not using anyway.

TH3 comes with many presets, so as with any other plug-in, that's a good place to start. Classic rockers didn't have access to amplifiers with built-in distortion, so to get their tones, they usually used either Fender or Marshall with a boost or overdrive stompbox. This signal chain is available with TH3. Presets that use the Bassface, Darkface, Overange, Tweed Deluxe, and Rock models of amp are appropriate. If you want to roll your own, one of those, then the Tube Nine overdrive would be a good place to start, with your choice of cabinets. The RSS Compressor is worth a look, too. A phaser pedal is an effect that many of them used. With stompboxes and modulation effects, they would always have to go in front of the amp, so try that first. Of course there are no rules except "if it sounds good, it is good." Each of the classic players in those bands worked for many hours to craft guitar tones that they liked. Now that you know where to start comes the fun part, experimenting and finding out what inspires you. And don't necessarily stick to trying to emulate your heroes (although that is a solid place to start). Tone is part of the electric guitar's voice, and things sound better (IMO) when we sing with our own voice. With your DAW rig, it's easy to import a track from our favorite artists, then listen to it while we work on the tone. As John is implying, the way that those players got their sounds was/is from playing through a physical electronic amplifier, usually using tubes, into a wooden box with one or more paper cone speakers, mic'd with a variety of microphones (condenser, dynamic). While emulations of this are getting better, it's still hard to beat an actual physical amp for sounding like....an actual physical amp. It gives a better monitoring experience for the player as well. That said, I'm an amp designer myself and I still use emulations sometimes. If it sounds good, it is good and all that.

It's a compromise, of course. With all of them, and I have RX 10, ERA, and MSpectralDynamics, I always have to fiddle with the balance between how much reduction I get vs. gurgle. Plain old gating and/or editing is something I often forget about when doing restoration work. The film and TV industry used to rely on that before we had all this computing power at our fingertips. But if the program material is loud enough, it can mask the underlying noise pretty well. Of course, my attention is drawn to the fancier solutions (smile). It sounds like an interesting project. I'm curious about what you're planning to do with the sounds you record.

No idea about its accessibility, but Cockos' ReaFIR is free and works very well. It's one of the ones that samples the background noise and then cancels it. It has a very simple UI, so maybe good for a screen reader.

Good thing we have Cakewalk by BandLab, which does work, and it works better.

Anything that helps for people with eyesight issues, I'm for it.