Starship Krupa

Spill.

Charts for those aren't difficult to find on the interwebs. I don't know of any plug-in that can convert piano chords to guitar chord diagrams (not to say that there isn't one, just none that I know of). Me, I usually search YouTube for "how to play [name of song] on guitar."😆 It's getting to be that no matter the original instrument(s) for a song, someone will have worked out a guitar arrangement and posted it to YouTube.

What do you mean by "horsepower?" It won't drive your headphones loud enough? Or something else? If the issue is volume, there are any number of small, inexpensive USB dongle headphone driver/amplifiers available at such sites as Amazon or eBay. If the issue is latency or timing, what others have said about entry-level small audio interfaces. Mackie is another brand that sells a small interface for $50.

What do you mean by "actual symbol?"

Now is the time to pick up some Unfiltered Audio processors, for those so inclined. Who was asking about BYOME/TRIAD? TRIAD+any other Unfiltered Audio plug-in is a deal for $39.99. My favorites (other than BYOME/TRIAD) are Sandman Pro (which comes with Instant Delay as well) and G8. G8 is for real the best all-purpose gate plug-in going. The display is what is really special about it, lets you dial in a threshold very easily. It also has many options such as peak vs. average detection, can put out a MIDI note each time the gate closes, etc. But there aren't many clinkers in the bunch. There are some that I hardly ever use, but that doesn't mean that someone else won't find a crazy use for them.

Nice! I was probably one of the people who recommended the TruOil finish. Amazing stuff that can be wiped on with an old t-shirt. It's also great for the impatient because you can throw on the next coat within hours. The interior of my car smelled like it for weeks because I was using it to cure my TruOil'd guitar in the summer sun.? And you can either do what I do and just throw it on and come up with a lovely semi-gloss finish or polish between coats and build as high and deep a gloss as you want. Then after all the coats are on, it continues to cure to a rugged, ding-resistant finish. What kind of wood is the body? This. Leo Fender was the Henry Ford of the electric guitar manufacturing process, got it down to interchangeable components. Yet there can still be variations 70 years on. The ones put together by Sally or John in America have the fewest, followed by the ones put together by Rosa or Jose in Mexico, followed by the ones put together by Thuy or Zhiyu wherever in Asia. But if Zhiyu has the skill and intuition to pull bodies and necks off the pile that "go together" and that axe goes to his friend Mei on the final finishing line, who knows enough to spend an extra 5 seconds taking the fret ends down, you can wind up with an amazing guitar. Case in point: I have the cheapest of the cheap in Fender's line, a Squier Affinity Tele made in China. When I bought it, it was literally in pieces. Some dirtbag had tried to smash it on stage (I can tell from the placement of the dings), the pickups and tuners were missing, neck and body apart. A pile of the cheapest possible parts in maybe the worst possible condition. But it had found its way to the guitar rescue ranch. And I subscribe to the Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang theory: "....you will never regret buying that car. She’s going to give you the time of your lives. You’ve saved her from the scrap-heap, and I’ll eat my hat — if I had a hat to eat — if she doesn’t repay you for what you’ve done today.” Sure as the sun rises n the East, once I put a $20 AlNiCo pickup in the bridge, a set of used Schallers I had in a drawer, got the neck back on, controls wired up with the volume knob toward the neck as all Teles should be, holy mother. It must have at one point had a pro setup, because I didn't have to touch the frets and the nut was just right. The guitar just has it, that quality you can't quite put into words, but I can say that there's a "waiting list" about 5 deep of friends I've handed it to for a twangle, and they got this look in their eyes and said "if you ever go to sell it...." And some of these guys are corksniffers with guitars in the over $1000 range, who research for hours trying to find the best kind of bridge for their Jazzmaster, new pickups in the Flying V, etc. People who actually make money playing music among them. One even owns a beautiful Affinity Tele, similar model but clear butterscotch finish. "Doooood, you already HAVE one!" Nope. She had big chunks of that thick poly blonde finish, deep and sharp-edged so that it scraped the inside of my right arm, so I have dripped Krazy Glue into the divots layer by layer and polished it out. Not so much "relic'd" as "abuse survivor'd." My thanks go out to the skilled workers in that Chinese factory, who I just hope are making a decent living from what they do, hope at least some of them are guitar players who are interested in their jobs. She's not the only one, I have a Johnson Strat with the mojo, and even a Behringer that I refretted. The best-playing and sounding guitars in my collection all originally came with crappy practice amps.? I think I will go play her right now.... Post glamour shots of the final finish!

It was so bad in the wee hours this morning that I started wondering if somehow it was getting knob-twisted by a spammer or DoS'd by whomever. I looked up the "too many connections" error and it seems to be a MySQL thing. Happens when it hits 100 connections. I don't know if that translates into 100 simultaneous users or some condition where the forum software would be making too many connections due to misconfiguration. Not likely that there were 100 people all trying to post or fetch a post at the same time in the wee hours of the morning.

This is only possible with the use of 3rd-party plug-ins (I can't remember which ones, but there are free ones that will let you accomplish the task). Maybe some aggressive use of the search function would turn it up. The person who told me about it was @scook, if that helps. It's a feature that I have long requested.

Yeah, I don't care much for that myself, especially when it depends on servers maintained by a brand such as AIR. The only thing that seems to have changed with these classics is that they're VST3 and have Apple Silicon versions. Still iLok. I'm not an iLok hater and I never had the issues with AIR's installer that some people did. The only thing they really need to make them top notch (and more future resilient) is UI scaling.

They sound crazy good, especially considering that you can regularly pick them up for ten bucks apiece. They must have been outrageous compared to the competition when they first came out. Hybrid 3's ability to layer arpeggiators means that you can have patches where you hold chords and get a melody and bass line along with them. I built an entire song around that feature. For AIR to go to the trouble of making VST3 versions must mean that even at the bargain bin prices, they're still cash cows, which is great.

He's definitely missed. I suspect that the June 2023 announcement followed by months of silence finally did him in. Without him and John Vere, I pity the n00b who can't work out the forum search function.

ACDSee, that's a name from the past. I was using ACDSee (their original program) 30 years ago when I was working at Macromedia (now part of Adobe). Gemstone seems to be two products rolled into one, there's a RAW editor (which the review focuses on), and then a conventional photo editor in the Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop vein. I got Paint Shop Pro in a Humble Bundle with Painter last year, and while I was interested in it, my attempts at trying to use it to replace Paint.NET have been futile. I just can't get cozy with its way of doing things. It's always asking me if I want to convert this or that either to a bitmap or a vector layer because it supports both of them, which is supposed to be a big deal but means diddly 5hit to me. I just want to edit images, I don't care whether intermediate steps are vector or bitmap or whatever, I just want to crop, rotate, adjust color, add text, etc. Maybe I'll warm up to this one better. I'm running up against Paint.NET's limited feature set.

Now up is an orchestral Kontakt Player instrument that has been my favorite new toy for the past few days. Sonuscore The Orchestra Elements is a great-sounding, useful (and downright fun) instrument. It comes with 30 presets, including 10 for strings, wood, brass, and combined in sustain and a variety of the basic tremolo, marcato, and staccato articulations. The samples sound pretty good, but the really cool part comes in once you encounter their arpeggiator and envelope programming. This happens with the next 10 presets, which offer the instruments in a variety of 8ths and triplets. The presets that made me fall in love and want to buy the paid version are the last 10 where they combine the basic articulations with some awesome 5 layered programming, using 3 arpeggiators and 2 envelopes in various combinations. The free version doesn't allow you to change which articulations are stacked, but you can re-program the arps and envelopes. The odd thing about it is that there's no keyswitching until you go a couple notches up the product line. That can be worked around, Kontakt is multi-timbral by itself and even if it weren't, you can always use multiple instances.

Wow. That is weird. Thanks for posting the solution.

Once I learned about the PreSonus extensions, I asked the Cakewalk devs about it and they had a similar response, but pointed out that they had already implemented some of them. Of course, ARA began life as a PreSonus-led extension, and Cakewalk has always been solidly behind that as well. An issue they cited was the one you flushed out, which is that the plug-in has to make use of it for it to be of any use to the host, It's just the same as with VST3: if the plug-in isn't supplying the information, there's nothing the host can do. To be sure, the ability for a plug-in to pass things like articulations and instrument names (a la drum maps) to a host would be reeeeeally useful.

When I save a preset in Cakewalk Sonar's own preset management system (the menu at the upper left of the plug-in UI) it goes like this: Double-click in the preset name field Type in the new name Click on the "save" icon (floppy disk icon) Currently, if I hit <enter> before I click on the save icon, the preset still isn't saved until I click on the save icon. The program gives no indication that further action is needed. I think that if the user types in the new name, then hits <enter>, the preset should save immediately. It's my instinct to hit <enter> after completing typing in a text field, with the expectation that <enter> will save the information. It would also be nice to have more definite feedback from the UI indicating that the preset has been successfully saved.

All of these are features that have been implemented in VST2 plug-ins, and they are all features that vendors aren't required to implement in their VST3's. They aren't "features of VST3," they're features that were already built into some VST2 plug-ins, then Steinberg wrote up a spec that recommended how to implement them going forward. All Steinberg did was decide how they would prefer other people to implement certain features, then they wrote that into the spec. A big chunk of it came from the PreSonus extensions, most of which were originally conceived and implemented during the VST2 era. One of the big "new" features that Steinberg claimed for VST3 was sidechaining. I don't know when sidechaining first appeared in VST2's, but I do know that it was around a long time before the VST3 spec was published. I have yet to see any plug-in with features that only became possible post-VST3. My system counts off over 600 plug-ins when the DAW does its scan. My toolkit of plug-ins includes suites from iZotope, MeldaProduction, and IK Multimedia, as well as a large number of plug-ins from brainworx, Waves, and other heavy hitters. With all of them, I can still install the VST2's if I choose, and with all of them, there is no difference in function between the VST2 and VST3 versions. I once heard that with some Waves compressors, in order for sidechaining to work in Cubase you have to use the VST3 version, but that's it. Ask yourself: if VST3 allowed plug-in and/or host developers to do things that they couldn't do before, wouldn't they tell us how great their new VST3-only features were, to encourage us to upgrade to the latest versions? To my knowledge, the only company that's ever talked about how great the VST3 spec is is Steinberg themselves. Everyone else seems to see it as a pain in the *****, and it even inspired some companies to form a group and come up with a competing standard. I guess it's insurance in case Steinberg decides to pull the same stunt in the future. In the long run it may save work for developers who want to implement features that depend on a lot of host communication, but I doubt that will ever make up for the extra work developers had to do to comply with a new plug-in spec. Their testing load for VST's effectively doubled once they started supporting VST3. As someone who used to make his living testing software, I can tell you that that extra labor is very much not free. More work into development and testing=higher prices for the end product. I've yet to see any benefit to consumers or non-Steinberg developers in the move to VST3. There may someday be, if plug-in and host developers start actually using the extensions, but I won't hold my breath.

I don't know if there's any way to test a plug-in to see if it's shutting down when there's no audio. Usually the people selling the plug-in make a fuss about it in the marketing blurbs. Yeah, quick scanning, it's why if a plug-in installer doesn't allow me to install only the formats I want, I'll go in search of the unwanted formats and delete them.

You'll probably hate to know that most VST3's still don't implement the feature where they shut off when not passing audio. I've only seen one developer implement it, and that developer also implemented it in their VST2's, AU's, and AAX's. That ability is just a possible feature, developers are not required to implement it. Same with the other "new" features like UI resizing. Steinberg only create the standard. They don't enforce it. It's up to the individual plug-in (and host) developers to implement the available features or not. It's also possible (even common) to make VST2's that implement the "new" VST3 features. MeldaProduction's VST2's do the shutting down when not passing audio trick, and any number of developers' VST2's feature UI resizing, sidechaining, etc. VST3 doesn't really add much, if anything, to what's possible within the VST2 spec. It did create a canonical location for the DLL's, which was great, cured the eternal support issue of "I installed the plug-in and it doesn't show up in my DAW," but it also seemed to coincide with developers no longer supporting the API that populates hosts' preset managers with presets from the plug-in. VST3 uses an external preset system that fewer developers implement. It's turned into a situation where each plug-in has its own proprietary preset manager, which is a pain, 'cause you have to figure out where it is for every developer. Sonar doesn't populate its native preset menu with the VST3 .vstpreset files, I know that at least S1 and REAPER do. As long as your host(s) still support them, and they still function, there is no practical reason to stop using VST2-only plug-ins. I think Cubase and Nuendo are the only DAW's that stopped supporting them. And there are still some plug-ins where the VST2 version works with certain hosts while the VST3 version doesn't.

Hmm. Best sells a certain PreSonus product I won't name in the hybrid version. I'll wait for Black Friday and see if I can snag both of them. Messing about with this freebie has shown me how they set up the layered arpeggiators, which can translate to other synths. Their samples and presets are awesome, but I'm not sure there's anything there that can't be approximated with some effort in other products that include arpeggiators, like Miroslav-on-SampleTank.

I'm really digging what this thing does with just simple chords, but digging deeper I'm confused about certain aspects. There's no documentation I can find except for the comparison chart on their website. The main question I have is whether its preset slots and articulations can be accessed via keyswitching or automation or whatever. For instance, I'd like to start a piece with a 3 chord loop, go for a few times on one pattern/preset, then switch to another pattern/preset using the same 3 chords. Can this be done without having to set up another track with the instrument set to the patch I want to use? Most orchestral instruments that I've seen, even the simple ones like Orchestral Companions, allow keyswitching. I can't find any evidence of it with Elements or Essentials. If there isn't some way to switch articulations/patches on the fly, that kind of limits the use of its sounds outside of the "animated orchestra" trick. I'd like to find out before I drop the fiddy on it. Seems like it would be a pain to have to use multiple instances of Kontakt Player, each one set to a different patch. I'm not familiar enough with Kontakt to know whether I can set up multiple instruments within it and access them on different MIDI channels. Can you set it up with multiple NKI's and use it multitimbrally as you can with SampleTank? That would be one possible way to get around the absence of keyswitching in The Orchestra Essentials (if it's actually absent). The comparison chart also says that you can't save user presets in the Essentials version, which seems like an odd thing to leave out in a paid version. The workaround would be to use the DAW's own preset manager, but why force people to do that? It definitely has great honeymoon appeal, but before I invest, I want to know how much I'm confined to using the 99 presets it comes with (33 voicings, 33 rhythms, and 33 complex "animated orchestra" presets) and how easy it is to use multiple of them in the same song. If it's too limited I'll just stay with the free version.

It is so great that you do these, and continue to roll them out. Is there a standard for MIDI FX the way that there is for VST, or is the API different for each DAW? Seems like there should be a standard if there isn't already one, it could open up a whole new market for plug-ins.

Wow. This is amazing good fun. It has me contemplating buying the next step up, The Orchestra Essentials. I trust that there's no "GROUP" or whatever discount available at JRR or Best or Larry would have mentioned it. Is the current discount price the usual price or does it actually usually sit at $99? I definitely want the Essentials upgrade. What I like: the articulations sound great, and I was able to grasp how they're pulling off "play a chord and get an instant arrangement," which is layered arpeggiators. I love synth patches with layered arpeggiators, it's one of my favorite things about Hybrid 3 and the A|A|S synths. The different instruments and articulations also load instantly, which is a big advantage over SampleTank/Miroslav. @PavlovsCat, the way that it's limited is that you can't change what instrument is loaded into each slot. Try clicking on the little arrow to the right of an instrument's name and you'll see what I mean. So I'll guess that Essentials does let you do that. Even if I stayed with only their programmed arpeggios, it would be nice to change out say, the trombone bass sound for a cello or oboe.

"In typical imperial British fashion, Fallout: London will take over your Fallout 4 installation."?

No more than iZotope Ozone put mastering engineers out of business. Just go John Henry on it. In creative pursuits, the machine can always be beaten. If what you've been doing can be bested by an algorithm, maybe it's time to change up what you're doing?