Shane_B.

Got an email from iZotope that they are extending their Christmas sale till January 11th. I didn't see this bundle before but they have a Diamond bundle that has Nectar 3 Plus in it. It has 12 plugins all totaled including O9 Standard and Neutron Standard. The whole bundle is $149. Nectar 3 Plus alone is $249. Nectar 3 Plus is the only thing in the bundle I would use since I have the Advanced versions of N3 and O9 and have no interest whatsoever in the other things included. They do include RX Elements but it's pretty basic and wouldn't do much for me. I would have to upgrade it to RX 9 Standard. I don't know. It seems like the best way to get in to Nectar 3 Plus without having to contact them and beg for a stand alone discount. To me the ultimate bundle would be Ozone 9 Advanced, Neutron 3 Advanced, Nectar 3 Plus, and RX 9 Standard. Can I have that for $249 please. Yeah, nice to dream. ?

When you give up everything for them and wind up depending on them for food and shelter it kind of changes the dynamic of everything. ? IOW, that's not an option. ?

IRT the music you are making, I'd say partly that and partly the person doing the recording. If you know how to EQ and stage with mic placement I think it doesn't matter if you capture it in digital or on analog. I personally spend 99% of my time fixing bad DI recordings because I don't have a good space for mic'd recordings. But when I have tried to use mic's and mess with placement they always come out better. Time spent placing is the same as time spent fixing for me though. I had a left handed 83 Gibson Les Paul Black Beauty. Everyone loved the sound of it and wished it was right handed so they could buy it from me because I always said I didn't like the sound. It sounded like a sponge was rammed under the stings at the bridge to my ears. I sold it to someone on the old forum. I mentioned on the forum that I had it for sale online through a local music store and they went online and bought it and had it shipped to them iirc. The best sounding LP I ever played was an Epi stripped down Studio. That thing sounded and felt great. But I didn't take your advice. I walked away and came back the next weekend to show my wife and beg her to let me get it and it was gone. I think it was like $299 or $399? It wasn't very much at all. It was smaller and light but it sounded and felt great. I have a LH MIK Epi Sheraton II I got at G.C. in K.C. Man, that's a lot of abbreviations. LOL. I love it. I think I paid $250 W/Epi logo hardshell case. Epi doesn't make a LH Sheraton anymore and I've been offered double for it. I might consider it if they ever get the Gretsch back in stock in the color I want. All anyone has is orange and I hate the orange ones. Want a black one of these. Again, I played one at the G.C. in K.C. and fell in love with it. Put it on the shelf thinking I could find one online and not pay tax. Never happened.

I saw your video of that Martin DX. I have the same one only Lefty. It's a really nice guitar although I wish the DI sounded a bit more natural. There is a guitar shop in Des Moines that has a huge selection of lefty Martin's. I played about 7 of them ranging from $3500 to $500. That DX felt and sounded better than all the ones there. I really don't know what all the hubbub is about high end Martin's. The neck on the most expensive one was so difficult to fret that it actually hurt my hand and was twisted really bad. I've been to Martin's factory. I was born a few miles from Nazareth PA and stop in when I go back home to visit. It's quite a place to visit. The DX's are MIM but they are excellent guitars. My brother bought me a really nice Ibanez acoustic when I was a kid. I fell on the ice carrying it in from band practice one night and shattered the back in to a thousand splinters. Made me sick.

Had my ENT appointment today. My hearing test proved that I did indeed regain some high end like I had thought. I asked my doctor to compare my previous test to this one and told him about the NAD + I started taking right after the first test. He confirmed exactly what I I was hearing. I have almost total low frequency loss in my right ear and I gained some high end hearing back in both ears and a little low back in my left ear. The low end may come back in the right. I have a couple problems going on that may or may not clear up. Good thing is, bass is kind of mono. It sounds normal when it's centered on headphones, I can only tell it's not there when I pan a bass track hard right. So it's bearable. He was supposed to take the permanent tube out of my right ear today but didn't and I didn't feel like I could push the issue. I think it is the cause of the low end loss. But 3/4 of their staff are out because of the big C and they were really backed up. I asked the lady who gave me the hearing test about that and she said nobody was really sick. They all tested + and just had the sniffles and were told to stay home. Apparently this new O variant is a shadow of the prior ones, especially if you've had a shot or 2. So yeah, the NAD + does seem to help especially your high end hearing like Kush experienced and my hearing tests proved it in my opinion. He didn't give me a percentage of how much it improved but he was shocked that it did and said it wasn't just my imagination. Don't expect miracles especially if you have really bad hearing to begin with. He always tells me my hearing is really good for my age. Frequency wise it's ok I guess but the ringing blocks a lot out and gets worse if I turn things up to hear it above the ringing. Headphones are brutal but I'm stuck using those for the time being. ? I hope all this info helps someone. I think it's worth a shot to see if it helps you in any way. What I don't know is if the effects are permanent if you stop taking it. I ordered another 3 month supply because it was on sale and haven't stopped taking it since I started several months ago.

I can only think of one who was a real Demon on bass ...

I have some cassettes that are 40 + years old. That has never happened to any cassette I've ever had. I think the whole sticky thing was with certain brands or types of the wide mastering tapes used back in the day. IIRC they bake or heat them to preserve them now after they clean them. I can't find it now, but years ago I saw a website for a studio that used a Studer that recorded in a short loop to save money. They ran the mix to the Studer which had a 30 or 45 second loop of tape or something like that and it played back while recording in to a high end DAC's to capture the sound. PS Audio built a high end studio that uses Sony's DSD system. It's basically the digital version of analog. As pure as it gets. And they charge you for it too ... Uhg.

My last year servicing copiers I drove 45K miles. My calculator tells me that's about 3750 miles a month. I kept track in an excel spreadsheet and still have it from when I did my taxes. In that job I wasn't supposed to be driving at all. I was hired as a manager, but that's not what ended up happening. It's the same place that also took out S.S. taxes out of my check for several years and never paid them in to S.S. It got ugly when we parted ways between me, them, the S.S. office, and the I.R.S.. Prior to that I was averaging between 32K and 36K miles a year. It wasn't uncommon for me to be on the southern border of IA near MO in the morning and the northern border of IA on the MN border in the afternoon. I enjoyed driving in IA. I could drive for hours and see nothing but fields. But it took a toll on my weight. I was enormous. I'm back to near my high school weight now and don't want to have a driving job again. Sitting is terrible for you for long periods. It's good to have a standing desk. There is a lot here but it's all either factory/warehouse, professional business type/IT, or retail/fast food. There's no manufacturing to speak of that I'm aware of and the office equipment repair places have dwindled away. The Ford plant is quite a ways from here but they are always laying people off. I couldn't imagine working there if my home and family depended on it. My brother has owned his own office equipment sales and service place since the 70's. He's still there, but the only thing keeping him going is taking on contracts from those 3rd party contract sales companies. I could do it from my house. Anyone can do it if you have copier/printer experience, but I would have to go to KC every day and I don't want to do it. Business in his area died years ago and what's left is small mom and pop places and they use disposable equipment from Staples. If I were still home he wouldn't have been able to keep me on and I wouldn't be working for him now so it all worked out in the end I guess.

Careful. You're gonna Macca someone mad ...

Oh quit yer' grumbling Mr. 220V @ 50Hz. ⚡⚡

It's really rare to find a guy who has been a copier repair tech for that long. The toner and developer dust, not to mention the chemicals we used daily, usually caused illness or they had enough of being on the road constantly and dealing with pissed off customers and quit. I did it for over 20 years and I've only ever known three guys who made it to retirement. One made it to 62 and the other two retired early in their mid 50's. Wow! I haven't heard the term ARCNET in decades. I seem to remember having to get certified to be able to install ARCNET based P.O.S. systems way way back in the very early 90's when they were all starting to switch from their proprietary wiring systems to a 'standard' networking system. I'm glad you are still working and have moved up. I'm very lucky that my wife found her dream job in the middle of all the chaos 10 years ago. I could go back in to copiers but I don't want to drive here in the KC metro. I'm trying to get in to a factory about 20 minutes from my house but they told me I was overqualified and not to apply again. I hounded them for a couple months. That was a very long time ago. They have huge signs out front along the highway saying they are hiring full and part time again and I'm going to stop in. Maybe there's a different person hiring now and they won't remember they already told me not to come back. LOL. I want something where I'm on my feet moving, not sitting driving. Anything but retail. Uhg.

I hear he's a real gas.

I thought for sure it was going to be 'Question for those uneducated in the US'.

Hey, I tried to make it about music. I mentioned the Christmas tunes. ?

This one I got was sitting somewhere damp a very long time. It smells moldy. I cleaned what I could get to and it worked so I transferred as much as I could while I could. ?But yeah, I imagine whatever drives it if it is belt driven will eventually die. You can buy packs of belts in various sizes. Belts were a little different. I always used oil on those. I've never had a tape based machine of any kind that would keep the roller engaged unless it was playing. I know the mechanically activated ones you could, but I guess I knew better even as a kid. I had a high end Sony dual cassette one time. All digital controls. I wish I still had that. My first Tascam 4 Track was mechanical IIRC, but I never left it in the play position when not in use. But yeah, I could see rollers getting dented. It happened on copiers and especially printers because they would sit for long periods of time without being used. There is a unit called the fixing assembly. It bakes the toner to the paper so it doesn't smear off. The top roller is aluminum coated with teflon with a 1200 and higher watt lamp running through the middle. The bottom is a heat resistant foam roller. Those would get dented if they sat for a long period of time and it would cause problems. Then they changed from aluminum rollers to a heat resistant "fixing film". I could definitely see it with the pinch rollers in tape decks. I hate how things have changed in electronics. I had 3 of those 4 sided 5 foot tall spinning parts racks at work. Filled with belts, IC's, transistors, diodes, and other specialized copier and cash register pcb components. I remember changing the ribbon and ink in the old mechanical brassy National cash registers back when they were still used regularly. All but gone now. My brother started out in the business working on those and started his own business and I worked for him. He could tear those things down to the base and put back together in his sleep. Those and IBM typewriters are mechanical miracles. All but gone. I hear you about the eyes not being what they used to be. When I was in my early 20's I could hold a PCB up to my face and look for cold solder joints and broken tracings. Those days are long gone. I had one of those lighted magnifying arms on my bench but never used it although my brother who is 12 years older than me always had to.

My wife and I were out and about on Saturday Friday, doing some after Christmas shopping looking for some sales and driving around listening to my Christmas music I've recorded over the years in CbB and S1. It was a tradition I started since the first year I moved out west in 98. I'd record a song and send to family at Christmas every year but stopped 10 years ago when we moved to MO. I have quite a collection of Christmas music I've recorded over years. We ended up about an hour south of where we live in a nice little town called Clinton. I saw a sign that said "Tightwad 13 Miles" so of course I had to go check it out. I came in to town and the sign said Tightwad Population 69 and about a block in to town there was this ... This is one of the things I love about MO. They used to have a sense of humor. The town I live near is called Peculiar and there are other places with funny names too. But Tightwad MO is a real place. Back when my dogs were still around I would take them for rides and we'd go exploring. There are still tons of tiny little towns in MO with populations from 100 down to a dozen. It was a good day filled with my favorite music, it was 64F, sunny. But seriously, I could live there. And now with Elon providing high speed satellite internets to us country folk, there's no reason whatsoever to live near town anymore. Unless you like being in town. ??

That was very 80's. ?

I paid $250 for the one I got on Facebook Marketplace. It was the 4 Input, 4 Track, 4 Output version. He had a 6 Input, 4 Track, 4 Output one he wanted $325 for IIRC but I didn't want it for recording, I just wanted it for playback. The original one I used was a different version of the 6/4/4 but luckily the heads lined up and the I could adjust the speed to make it work. I wouldn't be surprised to see Tascam release a new tape based machine. You can still get the rubber pinch rollers but I've never needed one. Keeping them clean with Distilled Water is the key. I used to work on office and business machines. Copiers, cash registers, printers. There is a chemical called Fedron that will actually bring rubber rollers back to life, but it's a last resort and it is nasty. If it touches anything plastic it melts it. Distilled water is the only thing that should ever touch a capstan rubber pinch roller. Alcohol dries them out and kills them. Distilled water without all the tap water chemicals cleans and rejuvenates them. That's all I've ever used on my tape machines. A tiny bit of oil also cleans them and brings them back to life on office equipment but I would not do that on tape machines. Distilled water on the capstan pinch roller, alcohol on the plastic and metal, and I still have my Realistic Tape Head Demagnetizer. When I was a kid I used to put drops of 3 in 1 oil on the back tires of my AFX race cars and hold them there. They would start to smoke and get really tacky. You could take corners at full trigger throttle and they wouldn't come off the track for about 5 minutes. Hah.

Things I like about CbB. The updates are free, for now. I like how Noel has been set free to fix it and he's done a great job. I still use Session Drummer 3 and Dimension Pro. I get those because I was a paying customer before it went free. I don't know if everyone gets those or not. I still use Zeta once in a while too. There are some excellent string samples in Dim Pro and SD3 uses real samples of drums. I'm sure there are newer better drum samplers out there but I'm so used to it, and the type of music I do doesn't require drums to be a major part of the mix, although I have done songs like that and it sounds great. Again, they are real samples. And if you use the PX64 Percussion VST that's buried in CbB there isn't much you can't do with SD3. I still use the PX64 Percussion VST in Studio One. It's a bit flaky though still. Sometimes it bypasses and doesn't tell you so I use it as an Event FX in S1 to do non-destructive freeze and can keep adding Inserts. I'm not in to external midi gear at all so the things those complain about being missing in other DAW's does not apply to me. I have a basic midi controller that triggers my synths and drums and I'm A-Ok. The GUI in CbB feels Windows 3.1'ish. That is my main gripe with it. The way you use your mouse on the timeline to expand or shrink the view is extremely clunky, especially compared to S1. Everything else, it's apples to apples for what I use. Although, Studio One gets a tiny edge on stability. I can honestly count on 1 hand the amount of times Studio One has crashed on me, and I used it with no HDD's at one point all off of thumb drives. That said, in recent times, I can almost say the same thing about CbB. It will still hard crash with a plugin problem but it is extremely rare. Studio One seems to have found a way to keep it from hard crashing and just tell you about it. Same as Reaper. Although, I have to say S1 is becoming spyware and I'm prompted to report a problem now when something happens and I do not like that at all. Melodyne is extremely clunky and will cause problems regularly on every DAW I've ever used it in. It's a great program, but the GUI sucks and it works best on bounced clips with just a few words sung. Replacing a synth is super easy in Studio One. You just drag the synth from the Browser over to the Track the current one is on and it asks if you want to replace and you say yes. Boom, done. One area where S1 kills CbB is setting up outputs. It's automatic. For example, I still use Session Drummer 3. It has 12 stereo outputs. You drag it in to a Song, open up Instrument view in the Channel window, click on SD3 then click Expand, and a checklist of all available outputs for SD3 are displayed. You check the box next to the output you want enabled and S1 automatically creates an output channel. Takes all of 3 seconds. It takes forever in CbB. These are just tiny nitpicks though. I really don't have anything bad to say about CbB now. Noel has done a fantastic job getting it stable now that he's been unleashed. I would have no problem switching back to CbB full time if something changed for the worse in S1. I have CbB and S1 on my system and keep both updated and I still use CbB for some midi things. It's a lot easier to export midi tracks in CbB. You just drag them to the desktop. It's it's pulling teeth in S1. And TTS-1 still works in CbB. People can laugh at me, but there are still some great sounding instruments in it. You have to use a DXi wrapper in S1 and S1 says there is a problem loading it after you use it a while. It works for a little bit and you can freeze, but it stops working after a while for me every time.

Oh this is gonna be good. ?

No, not crazy at all. Analog is making a comeback. It actually never went away. I was also reading that kids are finding that they can get a nice natural distortion out of them. LOL. Everything is coming full circle. LP's are coming back, cassettes are coming back, analog recording is coming back. I've tried them all from Radio Shack, to Memorex, to Normal to Metal, and all points in between. The best tape I ever used was the Maxell UDII 90. The gold one. The cassette plastic and label colors changed over the years, as well as the quality. There was a newer version with a grey plastic case. They were garbage. Almost every one of those I used have a warbling sound on them now and some of the masters are destroyed. But at a certain point you couldn't get the gold ones anymore and I had to switch, back before the internet and eBay. I still have gold colored master tapes from the 80's that have not aged a day. Never stretched, never lost any frequency response, still roll smooth. I used them in my car, spilled coffee on them, soda, squished donut icing all over them. Still play great. If you can find NOS ones of those, jump on them. Here's a pic of the ones I use. Borrowed this photo from eBay. I just bought a vintage Tascam 4 Track on FB marketplace to replace the one I used decades ago that died. I've been transferring my old masters in to my DAW and having a blast. I also have a Tascam 8 Track but it only has 4 outputs. Honestly, the 4 track sounds better. Must be the tape speed because it is normal speed while the 8 track is double which may be why the tapes make a warbling sound over time as well. I don't know. This was back when I got my 4 Track on Facebook marketplace.

Phase Elimination Never Is Simple Relevance my dear Watson.

I've come really close in the past. LSS it was a song written in a specific style for an artist that died. There was supposed to be a film about his life and death. The contract was on the table but the record company got sued by the guys estate to stop production and it all went in to the garbage. But I got close. I'll always be proud that some big wig in NYC heard my music and wanted it for a movie. I would have had nothing to do with recording it but still I wrote it. There's some guys here who make a living off music. Hopefully one day they'll have some.kind of hit and won't have to worry and stress over money more.

I really try to avoid the downer stuff these days. Stuff like my post and the beer. Lol. I actually have an original song I'm working on that I believe could actually make money in the right hands. Nice to dream eh? Hah. I read that people died in TX because the power went out during that cold snap and nobody was prepared because it never gets cold there. Sad. I'm a bit south of KC in MO. I'm right on the North/South weather line. For example when we moved here 10 years ago my neighbor laughed at me because I was getting my tractor ready for winter to plow. They said it never snows here. Only ice and freezing rain. We had three blizzards that year with 8 inches of snow each time plus two more storms with about 6 inches each. Yesterday it was 64F bright and sunny. Today it was 14F and so far we have had freezing rain and 2 inches of snow here. 6 inches and more 20 minutes north. Going down to 0F tonight. It's very unpredictable here. I preferred IA where you knew it would be -21F regularly and you could prepare.

I set it to Private. I could change it to public. The worse that could happen is they take it down for copyright stuff. Side note ... It's all done in Studio One but I don't post there because for some odd reason they don't allow you to post private soundcloud links. Thanks for listening and responding.