bitflipper

So you should be rested up and ready for a challenge!

I know it's a personal failing, but I am incapable of playing piano without giving the left hand something to do. If I don't, it'll twitch and often just start playing unbidden. Happens to me all the time onstage - I'll be in the middle of a blazing organ lead and suddenly realize my left hand is trying to butt in. As you noted, the piano is meant to be a solo instrument. It covers more notes than any other instrument short of a pipe organ, so of course it's going to compete with pretty much everything. Especially if there's a vocal on top of it, in which case you'll have no choice but to carve out a spectral notch for the vocal. Some other ideas... Keep the left hand parts simple, like just hitting the root note of the chord. That's enough to quell my OCD need to keep the left hand busy. If it's a MIDI recording, I may go into the PRV afterward and simply delete the left hand notes. Roll off the low frequencies with EQ, much the same way as you'd do with an acoustic guitar. When recording, I often automate a HPF so that wherever the piano is alone (e.g. an intro) it can have the full spectrum. On stage, I use a fixed HPF that greatly reduces the low end to mitigate conflicts with the bass. Try duplicating the bass part with your left hand. Bass and piano actually blend very nicely in unison. I especially like the piano an octave below the bass, in much the same way as celli and basses are traditionally layered in classical and film scores. Give your left hand something else to do that's not playing low piano notes. If you have more than one keyboard, or can split your keyboard, try playing string parts with the left hand. In my band, I do a lot of dual voice stuff, e.g. horns or organ with the left hand, piano with the right. When I'm super caffeinated and feeling frisky, I play shakers with my left hand.

"large spring with a pickup" sounds plausible. After all, every band had one and it long ago occurred to many that it could make cool thunder-like sounds. But I've no idea how you'd get anything melodic out of one. Unless it was just a cute name he'd given to a repurposed Hammond spring reverb.

In 1969 I got dragged to a live play in London's West End. It was a revisionist interpretation of Macbeth, with a live rock band on risers above the stage. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of multi-media presentation, with its gorgeous saturated lighting. The anonymous band was really, really good. Made me realize how crappy live sound reinforcement was at most rock concerts. In 1970, I got dragged to a nightclub in Frankfurt, Germany, to hear B.B. King. I honestly did not know who he was - it was just before "The Thrill is Gone" would turn him into an overnight pop star. It was a small room, and my buddy and I were sitting in comfy overstuffed chairs with only a small dance floor separating us from Mr. King. He didn't seem to be fazed by the small weeknight crowd, and talked to us as if we were chilling in his living room. He talked about his car, a Cadillac land yacht that he described as being just like him: "built for comfort, not for speed". Later that year, we went to see another new band, except this time I was familiar with the individual members. That was ELP. It was only their second performance, after their debut at a free concert in Hyde Park the weekend prior. The performance was a little ragged, but they did the entire first ELP album (which we hadn't heard prior), including crowd-favorite Lucky Man. It was my first time seeing a Moog synthesizer in person. The synth was attended by a technician in a lab coat, who was responsible for setting up patches and keeping the thing in tune - with a frickin' oscilloscope. Nobody complained about the pace of the show, as it had been delayed 4 hours during which time the audience patiently sat on the floor and passed joints around. That was a Friday night on what would be a truly memorable weekend. On Saturday night we saw Deep Purple, where they covered the entire Deep Purple in Rock album and brought the house down with Sweet Child in Time. Jon Lord became one of my heroes that night, but I was most impressed by Blackmore's effortless virtuosity and their new singer's (Ian GIllan) incredible vocal range. We'd each eaten a gram of hashish in preparation, and wound down afterward by parking at the end of the Frankfurt airport's runway to admire the strobe lights. I don't remember what admission prices were in those days, but they must have been dirt cheap because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to afford it. We'd go almost every weekend while I lived in Munich, usually to Circus Krone, where we saw the likes of Moody Blues, Mothers of Invention and my favorite, the jazz/blues/rock fusion band Colosseum.

Maybe I'm just making this up, but I've always thought it was a voltage-control input device, probably hooked into a Minimoog. Like the handheld ribbon controller Keith Emerson used to use in the early days of ELP.

My philosophy is don't worry about it being original (not possible) or stolen (everybody's been stealing from J.S. Bach since the 17th century ). Worst-case scenario is you write a hit and Smokey Robinson's grandkids come after you.

Duh. Have you never been to a Dunkin' Donuts? They re-sell the holes. How they retrieve them after the initial sale remains a mystery.

You can demo it and see for yourself. It's pretty neat. I do not use it myself, mainly because I have a superior more versatile tool called MSpectralDynamics from Meldaproduction. That one's considerably more expensive, though. In either case, both work best on complex sources such as busses, rather than on individual tracks. Most of the time the result is meh, but once in awhile it can do magic.

Looks like you can. The attached executable above is a crude tool I slapped together years ago when I was translating my software into French and didn't have a French keyboard. It lists out the ASCII character set, so that any character can be copied/pasted from it. It also converts typed text into ASCII, hexadecimal or binary. Handy when you need to throw in the occasional °, ¥ or ¿.

An experiment, to see if I can attach an EXE to a post... ASCII.EXE

Happy birthday, Rain. Am I remembering correctly, or did you not move to LV from Montreal? That would be an adjustment, for sure. I've been in LV when it was 110° and I've been in Montreal when it was, um, really really bone-chilling cold - whatever that is in Celsius. Up here in Seattle homes don't have air conditioning, so when it's in the 80's at night, that's what it is in my bedroom, plus 5°. Very poor sleep the past couple nights. At least I got my annual haircut last week in anticipation of the coming heat wave. Bald as a billiard ball now, and plan on keeping it that way through August.

Have to agree, she's a handsome woman. But here's a better reason...

Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, we don't discriminate.

Bapu doesn't get a vote, for the same reason John Hinkley doesn't review Jodie Foster movies.

Are you saying I'm not average? I even sat through that dismal Wonder Woman movie because of the HZ soundtrack. He was in the Buggles, man. He played on Video Killed the Radio Star.

This will work fine and won't break anything. Maybe it's a personal flaw, but I am reluctant to delete anything. 'Cause, you never know, ya know. So the stuff I never use goes into a separate folder that isn't in the scan path. But preserved, you know, just in case. My active folders contain only about 300 plugins, which is easily three times what I need. A normal rescan takes 10 seconds. A full reset/rescan with logging takes a little over 4 minutes, so it's probably time for another culling.

When I initially saw your post, my first thought was the famous whale explosion, but then realized that was more than 11 years ago. And that it happened in Washington, not Oregon. Funny how when something like this happens, it's always reported as a "software glitch" instead of "somebody really screwed the pooch".

Saw a short video clip this morning where Hans Zimmer said: Well, there ya go. I, for one, am not going to claim to be smarter than Herr Zimmer.

Unless the keyboard is your main thing and you are picky about keyboard action or need a full 88 keys, just about any MIDI keyboard controller will suffice. Something like this, for example. It's a hundred bucks, has almost all the essential features (except for a 5-pin DIN), and fits in a backpack. I have an older version of this that I throw into my laptop case when I go on vacation.

CAPS LOCK KEY SUX. WHENEVER A PROMPT SAYS "PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE", IT DOESN'T DO ANYTHING.

One of the most epic performances of all time, with a huge orchestra and choir that would have had melted Beethoven's face. There must have been over 300 people on that stage. This just ticks all my boxes: lush strings, epic brass, big dynamic shifts, sweeping melodies, and a children's choir. (Anybody else a fan of Omnisphere's "Japanese Childrens' Choir" patch?) After years of searching for a proper recording of this to purchase, I finally resorted to an audio grab of the YouTube video so that I can fall asleep to this music whenever I like. (btw, the best audio capture plugin I've found for my browser (Brave) is called Smart Audio Capture). The video is easy to find online; the one I've linked below is my favorite, which has had all the talking (all in Japanese, which I don't understand anyway) and applause edited out. This is at Budokan, an arena in Tokyo originally built for martial arts competitions but its size and great acoustics have made it Japan's Kennedy Center - if the Kennedy Center was the size of a dirigible hangar. There aren't a lot of indoor venues that could accommodate as big an orchestra and still have room for an audience. The Beatles played there. Led Zeppelin, ELO and Fleetwood Mac all made live records there. Joe Hisaishi is to Ghibli Studios what John Williams is to Steven Spielberg. That's Joe conducting as well as playing piano, and the singer in white is his daughter. If you're unfamiliar with Ghibli, they make, um, cartoons. But saying they make cartoons is like saying Stradivari made fiddles. Everything they do is classy, from the metaphorical fantasy story lines to great soundtracks that stand on their own. This is the kind of music I'd create if I was good enough.

If I was building a synth collection from scratch, I'd start by asking Wookie to list out his VSTi inventory. Of course, you'd have to take out a second mortgage to match it completely, but he's the guy I'd consult. Or, just fork out the bucks for the One Synth to Rule Them All, aka Omnisphere. That'd keep you busy for a long time to come. But if money is tight, there are a number of freebies out there that are fun and useful. Here's Music Radar's list. I am a fan of the first one on that list, OBXD. It's probably the simplest one on the list, with a classic feature set that makes it a great starter synth for folks who aren't into synths.

To answer jngnz's question, what Pan Knob does is implement a proper stereo panner, meaning it treats L and R channels as two mono channels and pans each one as if it was mono. This is different from the Pan slider in Cakewalk, which is a balance control, essentially two volume controls working in opposition to one another. This works great for mono tracks, but not stereo tracks. Picture a Leslie speaker with two microphones, a true stereo source; if you want the Leslie to sound like it's on the left, you don't do that by lowering the level of the right mic because that would destroy the Doppler Effect. Instead, you feed some of the Right channel into the Left channel. I use this plugin on every stereo track. Most of my tracks are mono, but in some cases there might be half a dozen stereo tracks that need a stereo panner. True, you (almost - never say never) never want to pan very low frequencies, certainly nothing below 100Hz and in practice rarely anything below 400-500Hz. Pan Knob offers a HPF going into the pan circuits, so that you can explicitly tell it sum to mono everything below a specified frequency. The plugin therefore does just the opposite of what you're thinking - it only pans the higher frequencies. To be fair, some DAWs do provide such a feature. iirc Reaper is one that does. Plus you can do most of what Pan Knob does (and some things it cannot do) with the Channel Tools plugin, so Cakewalk does cover that functionality, albeit less conveniently. One of the reasons I use Pan Knob over Channel Tools is that I can automate panning with a single automation envelope, whereas Channel Tools requires two automation lanes to achieve the same effect.

I don't use clippers, but Pan Knob has long been an indispensable part of my kit. Yeh, even $19 might seem unwarranted for a feature every DAW already has built in, but if you use stereo tracks it can be the difference between indistinct mush and a nicely-balanced mix.

I only check it when cclarry tells me to.