bitflipper

It's all my fault. I used to buy most of those titles on a regular basis. Then they closed the nearest Barnes & Noble, making it less convenient. Couldn't be bothered to drive the extra distance. I accept culpability for my part in the demise of music magazines. OTOH, maybe it's your fault. You said it was a "time-filler'. Does that mean you were one of those people who read the mags but didn't buy them? Left the racks in disarray? Mixed up the drum mags with the keyboard mags? Or worse, stuffed the music production mags behind Cream and Rolling Stone?

I am not in the habit of playing virtual instruments while recording, having long ago established a methodology wherein I play and monitor hardware synths, record their outputs as MIDI and only apply soft synths after all performances have been recorded. That way I can keep buffers at max all the time while ignoring latency entirely. The only time I'd ever lower the buffers would be when experimenting with a new VI in real time. A couple weeks ago I was doing just that and had set my buffers to 64 samples, IMO the practical maximum for realtime playing at 44.1 KHz. Then I simply forgot to set them back to their normal values. By the time I noticed my mistake, I had a full project going with multiple heavy-duty samplers (Trilian, Kontakt, Superior Drummer) and fx, including Ozone. Sorry, Noel, but it didn't occur to me at the time that I owed all that to improved DAW efficiency. Knowing that it's now practical to track with smaller buffers will likely change the way I do things in the future. Way to go, Team Cakewalk!

It's unfortunately a common problem with many controllers, not just MAudio and not even just cheap controllers. Check your owner's manual, as there may be a trim adjustment inside. At any rate, it's unlikely to be a software problem.

Best line in the movie: "I pity your wife if she thinks six minutes is forever".

Brilliant! Even if that recording wouldn't have actually fit on a 78 RPM record. Coincidentally, just minutes ago I watched a video about Scott Joplin and ragtime, stride's progenitor. That and then this made me want to boot up the Kronos and jam out some old-timey piano...then I realized that despite my rather extensive collection of piano libraries, I have nothing that sounds quite like this. What is it?

Cool. It's been over a week since the last time that happened. Still getting my money's worth from those blotters in 1970. Now I gotta warm up the ol' lava lamp and try it again.

This beats October's National Sarcasm Month by a long shot.

Thread closed by OP until October 2020, contingent upon whether or not significant sarcasm remains in the world by that date.

I know you're as lazy as I am, Craig, so here's a handy shortcut to creative B.S. https://sebpearce.com/bullshit/

I have three: the one I use, the broken one that's still in the rack because it looks cooler than a panel blank, and the other broken one on the floor that's propping up an amplifier.

Are you sure about that? I've got 20 years' worth of advertising that says otherwise.

^^^ Scott is underselling himself here...I've seen a couple of his tutorials and not only are they well done, the lessons are applicable to many genres, not just metal. They might be a little more advanced than what the OP is looking for, though.

Everybody's allowed a screwup once in awhile, Wibbles. We gave you Hendrix, you gave us Johnny Rotten. We sent over the Dixie Chicks and got Spice Girls in return. Or was that in response to the Backstreet Boys? Whatever, the musical trade balance averages out in the long term. Even if we tend to keep your best musicians here once they've become successful (apologies to Canada, Ireland, Germany, Sweden and France too). I think we're done with Gary Numan, though; you can have him back if you like. We're keeping Knopfler, though.

I recently installed B3-X with no issues. At least, not with the installation. That was on 10/1/2019, so it would have been with the old scanner (current one is dated 10/25/19).

Hey, he sent his expensive car already. With a crash test dummy at the wheel. What more do you want?

^^^ This. It's a hard pill to swallow, but everybody has to eventually accept that presets are just for synthesizers - not for track fx or mastering. Even if you have, say, a favorite reverb preset it will almost always need to be tweaked to fit the need. The path to mixing and mastering nirvana is learning how plugins work. Lots of study, trial and error, and in the case of mastering, objective measurements. Sorry, there's no viable shortcut to the process. Limit the number of plugins you use: one EQ, one compressor, one reverb, and then learn everything you can about them. The good news is that most online tutorials are applicable to any DAW, as the principles are the same for all. No need to search out Cakewalk-specific tutorials, unless you're looking for advice on plugin that's specific to Cakewalk such as the Sonitus suite. There are a great many folks posting YouTube videos on the subject, from home recording enthusiasts to professional engineers to music software vendors such as iZotope. You don't need to use a vendor's products to get value from their instructional videos, because again, the principles are universal. Just don't get sucked into the advertising message that you need those products to make a good mix. You really don't.

That would have been funnier 3 years ago. Now it seems within the realm of possibility.

Just wait until Elon Musk starts shooting paying passengers into space. Which wealthy pop stars would you like to see buy a ticket? I'd pitch in a couple bucks to help Kanye West score a seat.

It's not bad. Pleasant-sounding. But also nonessential, being just a delay combined with a chorus. My first thought while using it was that there must be at least a dozen other ways to accomplish this using effects that everyone would already have. Now, if you're looking for something truly innovative, check out the overlooked Moodal effect. It's definitely a niche product, appealing to that small overlap between users who enjoy extreme sound-mangling and nerds who have the patience to figure it out. It's so out there that even its author struggles to describe what it does. As did I.

Use code 5YEARS for the discount. Good through the 31st of October. These are some unusual effects. The real winner is the delay plugin, tkdelay. It's my go-to delay for vocals. And I've got a LOT of delays to choose from.

My go-to shakers, tambourines and other hand percussion is Shimmer Shake Strike from In Session Audio. $79 at the moment for the expanded version. It's a Kontakt instrument, but does not require full Kontakt, just the free player.

So...you're going for the sisig and lumpia, then.

It's not the only synth that prefers to live on drive C:, e.g. Dimension Pro and Rapture. Fortunately, any synth can be relocated to another drive by creating a symbolic link. Google "mklink" if you don't know how to do that. All my sample-based synths live on drive E:, including all the Cakewalk content, Superior Drummer, Kontakt libs - and Xpand!2. That's how I found it today after reading the above posts; because everything's on one drive, I just had to type "DIR Xp* /s" and there it was.

Thanks, I totally forgot I even had Xpand!2. Haven't used it since 2016. I should probably get reacquainted with it. It's good to occasionally take an inventory and pull up something you haven't used in a long while. I did that this morning with Lounge Lizard. I can't remember the last time I used it in a project, maybe never. Turned out it perfectly filled the part I was hearing in my head. As for multi-timbral synths, that depends on what you mean by the term. Technically, it just means a synth that can play multiple instruments at once. That definition applies to Kontakt, so I guess that's my favorite multi-timbral synth. But if you mean one synth to do it all, then there's really only one in my software collection, the TTS-1, and it mostly just gets used for scratch and click tracks. (I suppose my Kronos counts as an all-purpose synth, but that's hardware.) I used to be a fan of SampleTank 2 because of its enormous library, but didn't like its successor at all and don't even have it installed anymore. That was the last one I bought, and honestly, I wouldn't even consider buying another general-purpose bread-n-butter synth today. A Swiss Army knife is great to have, but I wouldn't want to build a house with it.