bitflipper

I have two main presets/track templates for Superior Drummer: the simple one where everything's mixed to a stereo out via SD3's own mixer, and the full-on version with separate outputs for kick, snare, toms, overheads and room mics. It really comes down to how much I want to effect each kit piece. SD3's internal fx are good, but I have better ones as plugins. Plus I lose the ability to tweak effects after the drums have been frozen. Sometimes I only realize the kick's not punching through after the mix is near completion, and then have to un-freeze SD3 to tweak it. I also like to route individual drums to a distortion bus, which requires separate tracks. So it'll be the full-fanout template that gets used most often. One issue you need to confront when seeking a natural-sounding drum track is managing mic bleed. The beauty of sampled drums is that each hit is pristine and isolated. But that's also why you end up with results that just "sound off". Real drums aren't isolated. They interact with each other. That's why many engineers still use old-school methods for recording acoustic drums, using a minimal number of microphones. Each drum sampler has its own way of implementing mic bleed (Superior Drummer probably has the most sophisticated bleed features), but most of them have at least token support for it. In addition to mic bleed, judicious use of room mics also does a lot for achieving a realistic sound (again, it's SD3 that offers the most sophisticated room mic options). Bottom line is to think of your sampled drums as if they were real drums, and how you'd handle those physical instruments in a real space. It's messy. Your digital equivalent is therefore going to get a little messy, too.

I stopped hearing notes above the 12th fret ten years ago. I realized that after buying a new synth that had only 73 keys (a concession to my aching back) and soon found that I didn't miss the other 15 at all.

Don't try to do orchestral arrangements with solo string instruments alone, as it's a lot of work. Get a nice library that includes both solo instruments and ensemble sections. Layering the two will get you the fatness while preserving clear melodies. My orchestral projects will usually have a minimum of four and up to 16 tracks. But if the strings are just serving as backing pads, then the right library will let you do it all with just one track. The number of tracks has little to do with how full a sound you get - more tracks let you get more creative with the interplay between instruments, but won't necessarily make it sound fatter. Cellos and basses, that's where the beef is. Orchestral libraries can get incredibly expensive, but there are some good-enough ones for cheap. In my most recent orchestral outing, I set aside the monster string and orchestral libraries and exclusively used Amadeus Symphonic Orchestra from Sonic Scores. It's got both ensembles and solo instruments, and not just strings but also brass, woodwinds, percussion and even a serviceable choir. The downside is that it needs the full version of Kontakt. If the only playback option you have is laptop speakers, you're going to have a real difficult time of it. They are simply physically incapable of informing you about how the music really sounds. Invest in some decent headphones, which will set you back between $150 and $300. Bear in mind that some higher-end headphones won't perform well when driven from your laptop's headphone output without adding an external headphone amplifier, so if you don't want to go through that hassle choose low-impedance (< 150 ohm) headphones.

Craig, thanks for that YT link. Sheesh, I hope that's not a preview of the show I'll be attending. Poor Todd clearly didn't do his vocal warmups before the show. Granted, old folks like me do lose the upper end of our pitch range (see Robert Plant), but they could have at least lowered the song keys for him.

Are you sure the problem is with the interface? It could be, of course. But it would most likely be an issue with its driver (as opposed to a hardware problem or with the firewire port). I'm sure you've already verified with Apollo that you have the right driver for Windows 10. Another possibility is that something is running that wants to own the Win10 audio subsystem. When you migrated from W7 to W10 it will have re-enabled some services and features that you probably had turned off before. Win10 is like that...I've had it, for example, re-enable my motherboard's integrated audio interface as part of a W10 update (resulting in similar symptoms to what you're describing). When SONAR attempts to set the interface's sample rate, it won't necessarily know why (or even if) the operation has failed. That's why you get such a vague error message - too many possible explanations and the driver ain't talkin'. Examine your background processes and see if there might be something monopolizing the interface. Just an idea...have you tried switching to something other than ASIO as an experiment? If, say, WDM didn't exhibit the problem then you could at least eliminate the interface as the problem. Or if shared-mode WASAPI works, that could suggest a software conflict, e.g. some other process laying claim to the audio driver.

Craig...a hippo, a parrot, deer, sheep...is this one of those "which one of these doesn't belong" puzzles? Re Todd Rundgren: I was not a big fan during his heyday, and only became interested in his career after reading his biography. That's when I realized how much of a premier musician/engineer/producer he is/was. How he could take a mediocre bar band like Grand Funk Railroad and turn them into superstars. He wasn't just their producer. They'd come in and record rhythm tracks and lead vocal and then go home. When they returned in the morning, overnight the song had become fully fleshed out with backing vocals, keyboards and lead guitar - all done by Todd while they slept. Nowadays, he's more or less retired, but still enjoys jams and collabs with friends. The show's being billed as "An Unpredictable Evening with Todd Rundgren", which I take to mean there may be unbilled guest artists. At a hundred bucks a pop, I figured it would be a lightly-attended affair of interest only to geezer music nerds such as myself. But he's sold out two shows, so I guess I'm not the only one who's curious to see what The Runt's been up to.

That was my first thought, too - that a defective plugin might be causing the phase shift. But if the polarity reversal actually shows up as such in the phase button's icon, well, a plugin can't do that. I'd start with a global fx bypass and play the song "5 or 6 times" to verify that it's an effect that's causing the shift. If the problem goes away, start eliminating the types of plugins that affect phase - a tape echo, phaser, chorus, flanger or delay would be logical candidates.

Hey, I celebrated my birthday on Sunday, too! Burgers, brats and a jam session in the garage. My birthday gift was tickets to Trans-Siberian Orchestra next month. My gift to myself was a ticket to Todd Rundgren. And I know it's extravagant, but I also sprang for an EP from an obscure Australian band that I bought off Bandcamp for $3.37.

That didn't just put a smile on my face, I literally laughed out loud. Just because it's mind-blowingly technical doesn't mean it can't also be fun. Somebody should convey that idea to all those grim-faced metal guys who think you won't take them seriously unless they look like they're suffering.

Building commercial Kontakt instruments is a lot more complicated than you think, even if you've created some instruments yourself. It takes great attention to detail and multiple skill sets. The last skill a library developer learns is scripting, and because most of them have never done any programming before it's a steep learning curve. Even though I'm a proponent of giving newcomers a chance, I'm more comfortable with more experienced developers who know where the pitfalls are (e.g. hard-coded keyswitches) and how to avoid them. I get to try out a lot of sample libraries in the course of researching topics for review, but I select only a fraction of them to write about because so many are just not ready for market. Some of those developers subsequently withdraw from the market after realizing that being a good recording engineer is only the start for a fleshed-out commercial product. Gregg Schlaepfer of Orange Tree Samples and Tracy Collins of Indiginus, for example, are two guys who've been doing it long enough to have got the scripting stuff down. They make everything configurable, including keyswitch assignments, and rarely screw anything up. That's why I tend to steer people toward companies that have been around awhile, and who do their own scripting in-house as opposed to farming it out.

YouTube's algorithm suggested this...pretty obscure and you can only buy it on their Bandcamp page (5 bucks Australian, that's $3.37 US, a real bargain). Track #2 is in the same metal-ish vein but on acoustic guitars.

There must be a very specific set of circumstances for this to happen. It could even be a corrupt cwp file. The CW folks could solve the mystery easily if you sent them the project (assuming the symptoms are reproducible). Like others, I freeze and un-freeze synths all the time, including Omnisphere (that synth in particular gets the freeze/thaw treatment often, because it can be such a resource hog). Over the years I've witnessed a number of weird things happening after an un-freeze, but attaching the wrong synth has not been among them. Could it be that you moved Omnisphere since the track was frozen? I did that once, after deciding to get Omnisphere off my SSD to recover disk space. The problem with this hypothesis is that you'd normally just get the missing-synth dialog. I have seen one strange phenomenon wherein the missing-plugin dialog did not come up and the wrong plugin was chosen instead. But that was a highly unusual situation, in which two plugins had the same CLSID. That doesn't seem likely in your case, but I'm just trying to remember any comparable symptoms I've seen in the past.

Not a new band, just new to me. I got tipped off to this guy by Rick Beato in a video about odd time signatures. It's become my new favorite falling-to-sleep album.

Thank you, Jose. Seriously, I never knew what that icon meant. I just assumed it was my computer's coat of arms.

No. Homonyms don't count - read the T.O.S.

I've seen that phenomenon a couple of times in older SONAR versions. The workaround was to simply copy the track to a new one without including automation. I've seen nothing like that in CbB, so you might consider just migrating. All your X2 projects will open in CbB just fine and as long as you don't uninstall X2 you'll still have all the SONAR goodies such as PerfectSpace and PX-64.

In a previous life, I used to be the service manager in a shop that sold marine, ham and cb radios. The CB'ers were always getting complaints about interference because they wanted to talk to South America and the legal 5 watts wouldn't cut it. Their neighbors would then call the FCC, who would send me out to do a field-strength measurement. Me, the same guy whose boss had sold them the illegal gear in the first place. It was an easy gig - all I had to do was call the offender ahead of time and tell him I was coming over, so he could stash his 1KW amp in the closet. I'd fill out a report for the FCC and that was that. But then it happened to a friend of mine. His neighbor's illegal CB was interfering with all the TVs in the neighborhood. We had to come up with a more permanent solution. I suggested that he insert a pushpin through the fellow's coax going up to his antenna. Next day, he shows up at my shop with blown power transistors. I repaired it and took time to demonstrate to him that it was working - so that when he returned the next day with more blown transistors he couldn't blame it on my repair. He must have gone to another shop after that, so I don't know how many more times he blew up his amp before figuring out his antenna was shorted. Yes, this post is on-topic. It's about cables.

It isn't necessarily a problem, but worth some investigation because it could become a problem for future, larger projects. Defragging doesn't hurt anything, but probably won't address the high disk I/O you're seeing. And of course it won't do anything at all for the high CPU. What you're seeing may actually have little to do with the project, but rather might be indicative of some other high-CPU processes that are running in the background. A DAW's "cpu meter" is an indirect measurement of CPU usage. It's really based on how much time is needed to service audio buffers. Your meter is not showing that the DAW is using up 60% of the available CPU cycles; it is showing that the CPU is taking 60% of the time available to assure uninterrupted audio. It's a significant distinction. Most important, it does not indicate exactly what those CPU cycles are being expended upon and therefore cannot distinguish between what's going on in your project versus what's going on with, say, your network adapter. Start by getting a baseline. Open the Windows performance monitor after rebooting. Let the system settle down for 5-10 minutes and make note of what the resting CPU, I/O and page faults are. If it remains high, figure out which processes are consuming the most resources. You might solve the mystery right there. Next, start up the DAW. Ignore the metrics while the DAW is first initializing. After a minute or so, compare the perfmon numbers to what they were before starting the DAW. Other than RAM usage, they should be essentially the same. Open a blank project - again, the numbers should not change significantly. Load up your favorite synths (give any sample-based synths time to load) and then check again. If any of them add a significant amount of resource usage, you've found your culprit. Synths (and many effects) typically use CPU while idle, but it should not be excessive. Some older synths and fx go crazy with silence, being unable to distinguish it from random noise. If you have that problem, there are plugins available that will fix it so that you won't have to abandon a favorite plugin. Make sure you haven't inadvertently changed your ASIO buffer size. The number shown in the DAW's cpu meter reflects how much of the available time is being used to fill output buffers. Larger buffers means fewer of them per second, so more time between them. That's why the meter readings go down when you bump up the buffer size, regardless of whether excessive system resources are being consumed within or external to your DAW.

I've got lots of reverbs, some of which have built-in ducking, but none of them do this metallic culvert / vacuum cleaner hose sound.

$159 for ATH-M50s (that I've seen for as low as $99) and they don't even throw in the 1/4" adapter. Sheesh. Plus even if you really like the ATH-M50s (and I do) one thing you cannot say about them is that they are any kind of "reference".

Periodic silence usually indicates a plugin that's running in demo mode. Bypass all your effects and see if you still have those gaps. Don't know about the distortion issue, except to suggest that maybe your ASIO buffers are set too low. Or maybe there is some volume/expression automation or other CC data you're unaware of. Does the distortion always occur at the same point during playback, or is it unpredictable?

Jeez, if I created a template with ALL my libraries I'd be waiting an hour for them to load, only to ultimately crash the DAW when I ran out of memory. And yes, it definitely is a slippery slope. But then, so is just about everything else. Kontakt just happens to have an especially low viscosity. However, it can be quite helpful to make templates, especially if you're into orchestral stuff or use super-configurable instruments such as Superior Drummer. And while I fully appreciate Bill's reluctance to be constrained by pre-selected instruments, templates needn't be restrictive. You can create as many as you like, and you're not obligated to always use them.

I've always heard it called "the roadie wrap". But I'm always shocked at how few roadies know it or use it. Like Brian, this technique has become so second-nature to me that I have to make a conscious effort to not roll a cable this way. Which is kinda silly when it's a 3-foot patch cord.

Not a waste of time - because you took the time to come back and share the solution and thus potentially help out somebody else down the road. If it makes you feel any better, I had a similar issue just a few days ago. I have a 6-year-old great-grandson who cannot resist turning the knobs on my mixer. Hosted a jam session here on Sunday and when I turned on the PA it erupted into ear-splitting feedback. At least that problem was easy to diagnose.

I thought this was hilarious. Unfortunately it's also telling about how social media can be abused. Or maybe it's actually good news, since the fraud was found out. Maybe we're not all as gullible as was feared. Then again, I'm sure you can all cite exceptions to that hypothesis.