Shane_B.

I got an email the other day offering me $10 bucks to take a 20 minute online survey for Presonus, if I were one of the first 2,000 people to take it. Or something like that. I don't remember the exact details because I deleted it. But now I'm curious if anyone else got the email and did you do the survey and get paid?

I've seen it and just checked it out again. It's good, but not great or mega-star good in my opinion. I sincerely mean this, Danny Danzi, Batsbrew, and a quite a few others here are as good if not better. That's the kind of lead Clapton, Campbell, and John5 can do in their sleep. I mentioned those names because of the similarities of music and span of decades they cover. I can respect a great guitar player when I see one and Prince is a good but I just don't get all the hype around him. He's by no stretch a pioneer like Hendrix but I think people tried to make him this generations Jimi. Funny his name comes up. I saw a thing on Facebook the other day with side by side photos comparing other famous people to Danny Devito for height comparison. I was going to post it here because it had Prince in it but got sidetracked. Prince was only a couple inches taller than Danny Devito. I just tried to find it again and can't. In order from shortest to tallest in the pic was Devito, Prince, William Radcliff (Harry Potter) and some guy I've never seen before. It's amazing how much Dhani looks like his dad.

There's a lot of great music today. I still seek out new artists. I'll be 51 in a few weeks and my neighbor who is 55 turned me on to a new hard rock group out of Springfield MO yesterday. He showed me their latest Youtube video and said he talks with them on their Facebook page and just went to another one of their gigs last weekend. Some of the pop today is even good. I really liked some of Lorde's stuff a few years ago. She's gotten a little weird now. Even some of the EDM. Rap ... sorry. Not my thing whatsoever. But neither was classical and it's been around a few more centuries than rap. And as for Prince ... sorry, but the guy was extremely over rated. The majority of his lyrics were perverse and I have no idea how he gets the acclaim he does. There are a lot of great new country artists that are trying to stay true to tradition. And there is a whole new take on folk and rock music. People like Sierra Ferrell, Charlie Crockett, Amigo The Devil, Jake LaBotz (I love the duet he did with Puddles, that's how I discovered him.), The Avett Bro's. People like Pokey LaFarge who do harder music plus acoustic, plus a little jazz and some pop. The same guy who did this did this and this (pg-13). There's a ton of great new talent out there and they aren't locking themselves in to one category anymore and you never hear them on the radio short of the catching the local PBS stations maybe. Check out Heilung sometime if you want something really different. I can't stop listening to them. Wish I could see them live. There are a lot of new great artists out there that don't buy in to the digital age and making music with PRV and loops that actually perform live and sound the same live as in the studio but the self promotion deliver system has changed and they rely on the internet now to get their name out there. And it's actually better. You hit more people on the internet than you did passing out cassettes. Who are you playing for and what is your goal? I think this is the real question we should as the OP. Are you a weekend warrior wanting to play at wineries on the weekend or the rare bar that still has bands or a local coffee house? Are you ready to deal with the a-hole copyright snitches that go to bars now and nail bar owners and bands? We used to regularly play the animal circuit but I can't tell you the last time I saw a dance or gathering advertised at an Elks, Moose, or Eagles club or a Legion hall. Them and 3 bars in our area were our regulars. All of our wedding jobs and holiday parties came from those places. Do you want to play live for a living? Do you just want to write and put your stuff out there to get some feedback like in the Songs forum here? The weekend warrior thing with no real asperation to go anywhere is about the only scenario I can think of that you wouldn't need some kind of an online presence.

I hear he's pretty ***** about his sax. Quite the perfectionist. Really? I got asterisked? It means very picky ... ?

You're not alone. There are a lot of people that feel that way. The way I see it now is you pretty much have to play live and have an online presence if you want to make any money at all. Then it snowballs and your following grows both live and online but I don't think you can start by doing just one anymore if you want to make a name for yourself. If you want to record just to make people happy then I would recommend places like Youtube and Facebook. Maybe Soundcloud. There are some really bad artists that have really big followings at those sites and there and some really great unheard of artists too. There is always going to be someone who can play, write, and sing better than you and there's always going to be someone worse. Expose yourself to a big enough audience and someone will like what you are doing and I think that's when you'll get your spark back. It may not be commercial and you may not touch the hearts of millions, but someone will like it and those are the people you are writing and recording for, if an audience is what inspires you. I also think we've all had a lot of doom and gloom thrust upon us the last couple of years and we had zero control over it and that has a lot to do with how you are feeling. I know we feel very similar about all this and for sure the events of the past year have changed me in a lot of ways. I struggle to pick up a guitar, work around the house, and even leave the house now, and that's a very bad thing. The overwhelming feeling of it's the end and it's all over and I'm going to die if I set foot outside my door has truly effected me and changed me. I don't think things will get back to normal for a long time and I know that's a big part of what I'm going through now with my loss of love for music and pretty much everything else. Pretty much every smile, every joke, every funny thing I say here and IRL is forced now to try and get back to some kind of normalcy. But if I had my druthers ... well. I just hope things get back to normal ... quick.

OH MY GOD! It's snowing in Hawaii! YEAH! I SAVED THE THREAD! WOOHOO!! I picked this up this weekend.

That pick made me homesick. Been to Newton (Look past the blue shirt to the side of the truck you pervs) many times. I used to service machines at KCCI in DSM and the DOT statewide. *sIgH* I don't know if any of you guys ever picked up on this, I'm usually a pretty quiet guy especially about how I feel and never wear my heart on my sleeve, but I really really really miss Iowa.

"I sense something. A presence I've not felt since..." (Sorry. I couldn't resist.)

I seem to remember something about that from the forum a very long time ago. Ah the good old days. He had some of his favorite threads in his signature IIRC. Yep, I just searched. I wonder if Steve is still going to A.A.? That thread is kind of awesome and sad all at the same time.

Found it! Sort of. I got a notification that Windows 10 downloaded some updates just a little bit ago and prompted me to install and reboot. I rebooted right away and poof everything is back to normal. This is why I just let Windows do it's thing now and don't worry about keeping my PC/DAW off the net. Just letting it do it's thing has actually helped me far more times than it has hurt me. I can only assume that when it did it's updates it fixed whatever happened when I installed all those .Net Framework versions but it's all back to the way it was now. Reminds me of Christmas vacation and Eddie's daughter. Going from memory here IRT his daughter Ruby Sue .... "The girl falls down a well, eyes go crossed. Get's kicked in the head by a mule, they go straight. I don't know." and he shrugs his shoulders and walks away.

Wow! There's a name I haven't heard mentioned or seen in years. Or is he here under a different name? He was a pretty unique individual and very friendly and outgoing. I think I'd recognize him if he were here.

I can't wait for the 2022 stereo remaster of that one.

That's exactly how I feel lately too. I do find myself re-visiting old recordings and I enjoy using Ozone to help me remix and remaster them to sound as good as they can, but I'm pretty much done with recording. I don't even use my monitors anymore I just use headphones. Maybe it will change. I hope it does because it was such a huge part of my life. I'm not exactly sure why I'm going through this phase. It's the first time ever. I don't have much advice for the OP other than what's been said. I personally find music to be an addiction. If I'm in that zone I want to do it more and more and get obsessed. If I get busy and drawn away doing something else I find it getting harder to get back in to it as I get older.

Personally speaking, I'm not anti anyone or anything. I just want the truth and everyone to pick up a little garbage on their way out ...

Thanks. I don't know what the answer is. I think people have believed the sky was falling since the beginning. I also believe that if the people who we have placed in decision making positions truly believed this is happening, they would be focusing on fixing the largest contributors to the problem, not financially punish the ones who are forced/locked in to using what those largest contributors provide. The longer I live and the more I see from these people in decision making positions, the more I realize that pretty much the opposite of what they say is what is really going on. That said, I have seen several cycles in my 50 years from what they said was normal at the time to abnormal back to normal and so on. There's also proof it has been constantly changing since before people were established as we are on the planet. I do not think we're the full cause or will be the demise. I've been hearing we have 5 years left since I was a kid ...

@bitflipper or anyone ... Serious question (IBTL) because I truly don't know the answer to this. My question is ... does the Jet Stream effect everyone? I thought it did but I never actually looked in to it. I ask because the weather here has been normal for this area (KC area) since I've lived here going on 10 years. Doesn't the word 'global' mean 'everyone' or are we going to go down the 'well you are effected but you just don't know it' invisible boogie man path?

Yeah. Times/weather changes. I remember when I was a kid the snow was all the way up to my chest. But I was just 5 years old and a lot shorter then. ? When I first moved to IA 24 years ago it snowed a lot more then. Then it warmed up. The guys at work were playing golf on Thanksgiving which was unheard of in IA. Now they're bitching because the winters are like 'the old days'. I have pictures somewhere of the road I lived on way out in the country. When I saw way out ... I had 4 acres in the middle of a 4400 acre farm. The snow drifts were up to the bottom of the road signs. Then nothing for years. Now it's back that way again. When it comes to weather there is no norm. All kinds of things effect it 99.5% of which we have 0.5% control over.

I've seen it snow well into May in NJ, PA, IA, and MO. It can snow anywhere, where it is normal to get snow, well in to May.

That is one of the few benefits of not being able to hear. We've actually got in to some good ones about that. LOL. It's especially bad in stores like Lowe's and other places that have the big fans going on the ceilings for the ventilation systems. Any consistent background noise like road noise while driving, the ventilation system fans in stores, and I can't hear a thing. It all becomes and jumbled unintelligible mess. Yet I can hear 1 specific group of frequencies that is out of place while mixing and spend hours trying to set the their proper dB levels so they sit good in the mix. Funny how that works isn't it. The background noise problem is actually caused by nerve damage (in my case from chronic ear infections) and I don't think re-growing the tiny hairs would help that. But it's a start for sure and I'm certain they are working on that too.

You mean you don't now? *gAsP*

@Starship Krupa I'm leaning more toward it being the extensions and/or the .Net Framework versions I had to install and not actually the browser that is giving me grief right now. IOW I think I would be experiencing the same behavior if I had those same extension in Chrome. I've been checking out the resource monitor very closely. My system is still running lean and clean. When things won't load on web pages I'm showing 0% network activity. Unless I'm reading that wrong that means the connection isn't responding and it's not that something else is using it dragging it down. I really don't think I have anything malicious. I think it's some sort of conflict with all the different .Net Framework versions I had to install. But unfortunately a lot of these older things I'm running won't work without them.

Things have changed somewhat in that regard ... For example, insurance will pay for an experimental stem cell replacement for the deteriorating bones in my hip. They take your own cells, refine them somehow, and needle them back in directly to the bone. They caught it early enough to where I am a "viable candidate". I was shocked when it was presented to me and told insurance now covers such things. This is great news about MIT. I figured it would be some kind of neural implant but this is better. I knew it would just be a matter of time and I'm glad to see some progress in our lifetimes.

Funny how different body types are. I'm 6'3" and got down to 238 last summer and I was in a size 40. They were a little loose but looked normal. I couldn't maintain that. I basically starved myself and drank water all day. Not intentionally but I was incredibly busy outdoors last summer. I was out all day in the 100 + degree weather all summer and in to early fall. As soon as I stopped and started eating my normal lean high protein no carb diet I went back to my 'stable/normal' weight of 245 ~ 250. Over winter I put on 16lb on top of it so I'm up to 266 ... and I'm still in 40's. I don't get it. I'm trying to get back to 250 before I go home at the end of May. I've been pulling every trick I know. Diet, carb cut, carb blast, lifting at the gym, walking, I am stuck. Getting really mad about it. But the whole waste size thing is weird. Even when I was 220 in high school I was 36 ~ 38 depending on the brand. So I guess for my body type being size 40 at 266 is pretty good actually. I'm just a big guy everywhere except where it counts. The wallet and the shorts. ?

Something changed in the last couple months in regard to 'safe' browsing, at least on my system. I've been using Brave with Duck. A lot of web sites flat out won't work now. I'm forced to go over to my totally unsecured Chrome browser now for several sites. One good example is, the dotpdn download link I was talking about in my last post in this thread won't even show up in Brave. I have to pop over to Chrome with no extensions. Facebook is another huge problem. It's how I stay in touch with family back home and it's pretty much unusable in Brave now with ad-blocker extensions. I was using an ad-blocker for Youtube that had a ton of nice features and it just disappeared and a totally new stripped down version with a watermark on the video's just randomly appeared one day. They must have updated it and started charging for the extra features or something. That's fine as long as I don't have to suffer through all the ads. And I wouldn't even mind that but there are way too many. It makes watching a lot of content unbearable. I have gotten tons of invaluable information from Youtube. They are the only streaming service I am considering paying for that I can't get on sale for pennies a month. If you use it as an encyclopedia it is well worth the money they want to remove the ads.

Those are the links that I was talking about. When you hover over the top 'dotpdn' link and do a search for the file that you are actually downloading you get hits as it being a malicious file. I downloaded it and sent it to two online virus checkers and they say it's clean. The other link is the one I was talking about that has a several hundred character link so you really can't tell what exactly you are downloading or clicking on. That's why I have never downloaded it. But if that's where you get it from and have never had any trouble then I'll check it out. It has to be better than MS Paint. LOL I used to use Paint Shop Pro by Jasc. They had a free version iirc. They must have or I wouldn't have used it. Or it was dirt cheap. I really don't remember, it's been well over a decade since I last installed it. That was a really great program but I stopped using it when Coral bought them and started charging a ton for it.