Shane_B.

The first song I learned to play without having my Complete Beatles book in front of me for the chords was Misery by the Beatles.

The first solo I learned to play was Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain by Willie Nelson. That was the song that changed my life. The very first time I heard the needle set down on the record player at home and I heard him do his trademark hammer from the A to B note, it triggered something in me as a child and I've had a guitar in my hands almost every single day since.

I used to sneak in to my brother's bedroom and practice on his guitar, but it didn't feel right. He plays right handed, and I'm right handed, but I cannot play guitar right handed. So I learned to play backwards on his right handed Ovation until he caught me and got mad. He bought me a an actual left handed guitar for my birthday that year and I had to relearn playing all over again with the low E on top.

But Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain did something to me. It triggered something in my brain as a child and I've had music running in my head 24/7 ever since. The flip side of the 45 was Remember Me. Both of those songs are very old. His versions were remakes and he left a verse out in Blue Eyes to fit the time limit back then and add a lead.

I can play that lead note for note with his slides and all. You can't hear me playing along I can emulate it so closely. We just blend together. If you listen really close you can hear he double track the first few notes, but only those. If I had to guess, I'd have to say he did multiple takes and left those first few notes as timing markers? I don't know, but I always thought it was odd that just the first few notes were double tracked.

I have about 15 different versions of Blue Eyes. Conway Twitty,, Hank Sr., Marvin Rainwater, Hank Snow, Roy Acuff, just to name a few.

That album was very well recorded. All of his recordings sound really good even if you don't like his music. 

I still have the very first recording I ever made. 12 year old me playing and singing Bungalo Bill and Strawberry Fields Forever. Fake British accent and all.

Sorry if there are a lot of typos. On my cell and the screen is cracked and changes stuff I type and I don't have my glasses. Lol.

7 hours ago, craigb said:

Ok, this was a HOLY F***ING S**T moment for me!

Steve - Sonus Lucis (usually a modular musician who has a Discord channel that I'm a moderator on) decided to have some fun with Suno.  Here's what he posted:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1316155762694684744/1432047908672508014/Holohedron_Highway_of_Light_Suno_v5_Prog_Cover_v1.mp3?ex=69004acb&is=68fef94b&hm=9599b7d4a95935d035c76dc97db7161c5b275218d6875f7f8e55892a703d70b4&

 

I've already listened three times!  Totally blown away!  🤯

 

(Let me know if that link doesn't work!)

I just listened to it. I have a dumb question. Is that an AI generated voice, or is that a real person singing lyrics that AI wrote?

If that's AI singing, then honestly, music is over. There's no need to bother anymore except as a hobby you enjoy.

It's incredible, frightening, and depressing, all at the same time.

That said, I have an instrumental song I wrote and recorded I'd love to run through that to see what it comes up with. But I don't have a clue where to start.

5 hours ago, Pragi said:

Good old Glenn does great reviews, etc., but sorry, I get fed up with his hectic way of talking after 30 seconds at the most.

Yeah, I feel the same way. And he wasn't exactly truthful with this video. It kind of came off like he was making up problems just to turn around and say they were all gone by buying a pre-built daw from the place he was advertising for.

That said, I think buying a pre-built is a great idea and there's nothing wrong with doing that, but he wasn't exactly honest about all the issues he claimed he had over the years and how hard it is to resolve them.

My PC was running sluggish so I checked for background updates. They usually slow it down.

In the Update section under Settings there is now a link to enroll in security updates to extend the "safety" of Windows 10.

I clicked on Enroll and it said because I've backed up my Windows settings I am eligible for free enrollment. 

I didn't know I backed up my settings, but I do have the Pro version of Win 10 that I paid a lot of money for a license for. Maybe that's the difference. I don't know. Maybe they charge to enroll for the Home version and not the Pro version? 

That's a relief. It says it's good for a year while I decide what PC I want to upgrade to. Lol. 

Edit: My PC was very sluggish. When I checked for updates, it was up to date. After I enrolled, it's back to normal speed. Probably a coinkidink. Yeah, that's it. It was just a fluke.  

1 hour ago, Rain said:

Talk about comparing old apples to fresh oranges.

Yeah, I'm not really sure where he was going with this video to be honest after I watched it a couple of times. Some of the things he was saying weren't great, were things I've been able to do for many years. For example 16ms latency. I can't ever remember a time when that was an issue with live heavily compressed and reverbed mic track and guitar track with amp sims and lots of other effects. It was only when I started to get a handful of tracks and didn't freeze them that it became an issue.

I agree that it's crappy that they will no longer support W10 at all, unless you pay a fee. But I definitely know that some of the problems he was going on about are not true. And it's not as complicated to tweak a PC setup for DAW usage as he makes it out to be.

My only experience with Mac was trying to set it up for network printing, scanning, email when I worked on office equipment. I went to a training class one time and the instructor was our in-house Mac guru. He spent all day trying to set up the classroom to show us how easy it was and he never could get a single piece of hardware connected. He handed us a troubleshooting manual and said good luck. If you run into any problems out in the field, call me. They sent us out to connect machines at schools,  which is very complicated because we had to track what every teacher was printing, setup access codes, secured folders and more, with zero hands on.

So I have very limited experience with Mac, but that did scare me away from them.

I'm probably going to cave in and just pay the yearly fee for a while to keep W10 safe. I don't have the time or energy to complete the build I was planning. I got an incredible deal on the CPU and jumped on it, but prices since then have skyrocketed and it's a very bad time to build or buy a PC right now. I know some blame it on other things ... ... but I belive the rising cost is mainly due to the increase in need for people to upgrade because of w11.

And don't get me started on Nvidia. Grrrr. 

He uses the F word a lot, but it's kind of funny to watch. He goes on a rant about the forced upgrade to Windows 11 and DAW's.

The problems he goes into detail about I have not experienced, but he does this for a living and spends far more time in front of his PC than I do.

He also talks about Cakewalk a little back in the day. I can say from experience ... what he was saying about the problems he had, they weren't caused by Windows ... lol.

The second half of video is an ad for the company he bought a PC from. He says he loves his Mac until he gets to his sponsor segment.

Fwiw, you can keep Windows 10 going with security updates for a yearly fee for a few years. He doesn't mention that.

https://youtu.be/CsymyR9GgpM?si=LVooicBEeITBzH9o

I predicted here a while ago that there would come a time when we could make our voices sound like famous entertainers within our daw with an ai type vst.

We don't have that yet, but I've heard a lot of new so gs by Elvis recently done by AI. So it's here. Just a matter of time. 

There's a time and a place for that kind of thing, but real musicians will always be here. We'll start seeing "human" remakes of AI generated songs before long. I'm sure we already have heard that already actually. All this pop music that sounds all the same is probably ai generated and someone fleshes them out. 

On 9/20/2025 at 5:39 PM, craigb said:

Me likey!

Oh come on man. We've all come to expect more out of you than this. With a thread title like "A Plug For A Friend", I thought for sure a pic of Ed and a strategically placed Alembic would have showed up here by now ... if only for a brief moment before it was deleted. 

31 minutes ago, Gswitz said:

I'm sorry about having to wear your suit. I had to wear mine last week. 

Thanks. It's the 2nd time this year I've had to wear it. Sorry to hear you had to wear yours too.

I think what I'm going to do is hit the stores on release date. Halloween is coming up, so I may get lucky and they'll have one in stock. Best Buy has one little rack they keep them on in the back of the store. They used to have isle's and isle's of Blu-Ray's and UHD disc's, but they are online only now except for new releases. I'll try my luck there.

It was a bad weekend.

The good news is, my wedding/graduation/funeral/formal occasion suit still fits. So there's that at least. 

Sitting at home afterwards last night I wanted to watch a movie to distract myself. I can't think of a better genre to watch after a funeral than a zombie flick.

Flipping through free movies on YouTube I came across Night Of The Living Dead 1990. The Savini remake.

I was thinking,  man it would be really great if they gave this the royal 4K restoration treatment. 

To that Batcell Boy Blunder went. I did a quick search on the net and low and behold, "4k restoration including the uncut restored version with deleted scenes. Release date ... SEPTEMBER 23RD $39.99 Pre-order now at amazon, walmart, target,  and other online retailers"

Straight to Amazon I go. It's not even listed on Amazon. Went to Bestbuy, Walmart, Target dot coms and all the preorders were sold out and it's unavailable. I couldn't even place my order and wait. 

Pop on over to ebay and there they all are. You can buy them all day long. Lowest one I found was starting price ... $89 + $15 shipping.

I'm all for capitalism. That said ... there really should be a limit on how many preorder people can place because this is scalping and that's not right. 

It's just as underhanded as daw subscriptions. There,  I made it "music"related. 

This isn't the first time I've seen this. I've had to wait for years for some movies to drop back down to retail price. All because of the preorder situation.

I suppose I'll have to cave and order one on ebay. Maybe I'll say it never arrived and get a refund from ebay and screw the seller like they're screwing me.

Speaking of plugins. I just saw Ozone is at Version 12 as of a few days ago. I'd get a good price for upgrading from 9.

But, as usual the bold print giveth and the fine print taketh away.

I'd also have to upgrade S1 because Ozone 12 won't work with my version of S1. So now my good deal just doubled in cost.

I can't remember how many I have for certain. I think around 300?

That's not counting VSTi's. I have a handful of those but not many. Mostly free stuff I found out on the net.

That said, out of my roughly 300, I rarely use more than a handful. Maybe 10 different ones. Maybe. Ozone 9 Adcanced changed the way I do everything, so some of the stuff I used to used never gets touched anymore. 

The real question is

....

"I have 493 plugins. Guess how many I actually use.".

....

Answer: 5

Yes, sorry, I was referring to Oxone 9 Advanced.

I once worked for a large company that had so many abbreviations they had to put out a memo of definitions. True story.

On 8/18/2025 at 3:07 PM, Bapu said:

I still have my Tascam Porta One. Recently serviced. Runs great.

The one I used in the 80's died. I got a replacement a few years ago on marketplace and transferred some of my old masters. I was able to use O9A to seperate some tracks, clean things up, and add to them. It was a lot of fun.

One song my brother and I recorded back in the 80's and left out a key change in the song. I used O9A to correct it and you can't tell software was used. I certainly got my money's worth out of O9A imho.

On 8/7/2025 at 7:38 AM, msmcleod said:

I recently found some old tapes in the attic from > 30 years ago that had old 4-track (Yamaha MT1X) / 8-track (Yamaha MT8X) recordings on them.

The Maxell ones (XL-II and XL-IIS) sounded like they were recorded yesterday.

The TDK ones (SA and SA-X) were unusable - warbled and muffled.  In fact, I remember having this issue with TDK just a few months after recording on them, which is the main reason I stopped using them. 

That's the exact same experience I had with the TDK's. I started on a Tascam 4 track and graduated to their 8 track. Even the new Maxell's I would buy in the 90's started doing it. But by then they didn't make the gold label ones I used in the 80's. Quality control started to die along with the cassette tape format right around that time.

3 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I remember it was Maxell vs. TDK vs. Ampex Grand Master.

I always preferred Maxell tape. TDK used to sound dull to me like the recording was made without Dolby on, but played back with it on. I always preferred chrome over metal as well. 

I can remember going into my local music store, Record World iirc, and there was a giant rack full of every brand and type of blank cassette you could ever want. And then there was Radio Shack. I bought one of theirs, once. Lol.

I still have a few NOS Maxell UDS-II tapes never opened I bought way back in the day. The original gold label version, not the later CD version. The tape path on those were superior to anything else I tried. I still have tapes that play and sound great I made back in the 80's and 90's. 

I recently watched a YouTube video of a woman restoring an old cassette deck. I think it was an Akai. It had a manual bias control on the front panel. She did some sound tests and after adjusting the bias I couldn't hear the difference between the digital rip and the cassette playback.

A very very long time ago there was a thread floating around about the good saturation some cheap interfaces produce. To this day the best sounding interface, to my ears, was my M-Audio Fast Track Ultra. I still have it, but there's no drivers available for it past XP iirc. And the rubber on the knobs has turned to a sticky goo from age.

Clean isn't always better. In fact, my favorite 'clean' old country recordings from the 50's and 60's have a lot of saturation on the vocals and I personally really like that sound. Tape heads and phono cartridges both introduce compression during recording and playback. 

In my world, I try to emulate the mechanical recording methods in the digital realm. Not an easy task, especially when you are not held back by the limitations of tape and analog gear and have the world at your fingertips IRT compression, saturation, etc. etc.. But it sure is fun trying.

6 hours ago, PhonoBrainer said:

All the ones I've ever used kinda sound like crap.

Same here. I spend so much time trying to make everything sound like I recorded it on tape that I might as well have just recorded it on tape and saved 496 hours per mix.

1 hour ago, bitflipper said:

1,023.

That's how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Prove me wrong.

Depends on the size of the pin I guess. 

I mean, Angels were giants. That whole Nephilum thing.

13 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

That tests the rendering engine, not the playback engine. While that's ultimately the "sound" of the DAW, it isn't necessarily the sound we hear during playback.

Exactly. I did a very in depth test one time on sampling frequencies. Iirc, on the soundcard I was using at the time, 48khz sounded best with the least amount if artifacts when rendering fx. This is especially evident when soloing reverb and listening to the trail end/fadeout of it.

The forum crashed shortly after I posted it on the old forum and all the posts for that day were lost. I never reposted it but I wish I did.

I had sound samples and listed the different daws I used. I got different results between Sonar, Reaper, and S1 Thats still internal.

IRT playback/monitoring real-time ... I can hear a difference in how they produce the sound you are hearing. Internally we can null test this and show there is no difference, but with real-time live monitoring there sure seems to be to my ears.

That said, I don't think I've ever heard a bad sounding daw, but I can hear a difference during monitoring/playback.

Sonar has always been my favorite. I only switched due to stability problems that apparently only applied to me (cough cough). All of my gear is boxed up. If I ever get back into music I may land back on the Sonar bandwagon.

I tried a dual monitor setup one time. Couldn't get used to it. I want to mount mine on the wall to free up desktop space. The distance would require me to get larger than 43".

Even gaming isn't an issue. I only dabble in one game. Fallout 4. I have an old rtx 3060 and I can run a rock solid 60Hz/4K with all Ultra settings (minus God rays and fog) on this old cheap TV I have. I can't complain whatsoever. Maybe if someone was doing online gaming and latency was critical, but I'm more than happy with working and the limited gaming I do on my cheap 43" Vizio.

The new Vizio Oleds tvs do 120hz in pc/gaming mode in 4k at a fraction of the price of a dedicated monitor. 

I use a 43" TV as my monitor. A lot of tv's now will run 4K 120hz native in pc/gaming mode. Mine will run 4k 60hz but I'm more than happy with it. 

5 hours ago, craigb said:

I hear Hulk Hogan has gone with Ozzy to provide security...

He was a musician so maybe they joined a band. He played bass. Chuck Mangione just died too. Ozzy on vocals, Hulk on bass, and Chuck on Trumpet. What a trio.

It depends. Sometimes it makes sense to pay more throughout the year so you owe less to the government in the end in taxes.

I'd have to guess that does not apply to the vast majority of audio software users so a that point it's personal choice.

I have never, and never will subscribe to anything for home use audio related.

I had to subscribe to a few things for my LLC and in the end ... it works out in my favor.

I'll switch back to tape and other hardware before I ever subscribe to a DAW and VST's, but I'm a sporadic user. I'm not in my studio every day like I used to be 

If you are a heavy home user, I can certainly see why someone would subscribe to Adobe or audio related stuff. I don't think people are wrong if they do is what I'm saying.

I think having a choice to buy or subscribe is great. I just worry about the slippery slope of sub only like Adobe.