bitflipper

Maybe this is why they had to change the name of Gearslutz.

I started a fresh project last week, hand-planted a click track in the PRV to drive the TTS-1, and chose a Kontakt library to serve as the voice for a basic guide track. But when it came time to record said guide track, I couldn't record any MIDI. I switched to a different keyboard controller to see if I'd screwed up something in my main synth's configuration (I have a special setup for live music and have to reconfigure for recording). Still no MIDI coming in. Checked my Sonar MIDI settings but couldn't see any problems there, which was expected given that I never change it. Tried a different soft synth just in case it was Kontakt being weird, but that wasn't it, either. Could my trusty Focusrite be at fault? Geez, I hoped not. But this is my third interface, the previous two having died, so that was a possibility. But I needed to exhaust every other possibility before making that leap. I am running a beta version of Sonar, so as with a brand-new car anything's possible. But an older version yielded the same results, so it wasn't that, either. So I did what I always do when I'm stumped: lit up a bowl and stared at the screen while drawing a MIDI flowchart in my mind. At each potential point of failure, I mentally drew a red X over each one that had already eliminated, until almost every possibility had been accounted for. Almost. The only thing left was the line drawn between the synth and the interface. "No way", I said to myself. MIDI cables don't break. Well, it turns out that sometimes they do.

Yeh, they used to do that. I attended a session at Guitar Center in Seattle, c. 2005/2006. It was pretty good. GC supplied the venue and sold a bunch of stuff as a result. I distinctly remember seeing one of the attendees afterward holding a pair of brand-new Yamaha monitors under his arms, being picked up by his wife at the curb, grinning from ear to ear. I remember wondering if his wife was going to be as enthusiastic as he was, and thinking "good for you, stranger - I hope you put your foot down and let her know that your happiness counts for something, too".

I actually passed on seeing the Beatles in 1966, even though they were my favorite band at the time. The reason? The concert cost an exorbitant $5 with no opening act. That seemed excessive at a time when a typical arena show would feature 8-10 bands, each of which had a current or recent Top 40 hit, for an admission price of $2. In those days, a whole five bucks would cover a night out, including gas, drive-in movie and burgers. Which is how I chose to spend my precious fiver. I told my gf we'd see them when they came back through town the following year, which they never did. Sheesh, Ed, you're we're OLD.

Holy crap, abortio* pills of all things. A new low even for those miscreants. Wookie must have slept in today. I just deleted 14 spam posts and banned three users. Those dipsh*ts are making work for me. I don't like it one bit.

As the article explains, most people who fall victim to this scam will never know it's happened. The scammers create a made-up artist and then use bots to continuously play the song so that they can then collect payments from streaming services. The only way the scammers might get caught would be to issue a takedown request, because only then would the original artist find out about it. That seems like a pretty dumb move. This particular outfit, FUGA, does look sketchy. Their website's front page includes no information, but it does display programming mistakes (e.g. the word "<footer>" ). In the terms & conditions, the sentence "You shall be solely responsible for your own content and the consequences of submitted the content to FUGA." might suggest that they don't verify squat. And have plausible deniability if caught out. It'll be interesting to see who initiated the dispute, and will hopefully reveal the scam organization - assuming it's not FUGA itself.

Speak his name and the devil appears... I listened to the clips and it sounds pretty good. Anybody can stack a bunch of oscillators and come up with a reasonable Hammond tone. So what I listen for is the one thing everybody struggles to get right: the Leslie, its tonal coloration, distortion, stereo spread, doppler effect, speed changes and model types. This one seems to be doing a good job at those things, maybe even equal to IKM's Leslie. All that's moot to me, though, as EZKeys is not a product category that I have any interest in.

"Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact." - Homer Simpson

A true 60's icon.

My drives are littered with hundreds of "projects" that never got off the ground. My success rate for taking a doodle to finished song is less than 1%. Building a song from idea to completed composition within a DAW is a journey that can take surprising turns. I have some that I really like that began as nothing more than a synth pad but evolved into complex and interesting final products, guided by nothing more than "hmm, that sounds good" as a roadmap. Those successes, however, are the minority. Most just died because I didn't know where to take them next. By contrast, the majority of songs I'm happy with began life far from a computer. Most began on a piano or acoustic guitar, and had already developed into a fully fleshed-out song before I ever sat down at the DAW. Of course, once they became digital they quickly wandered off into new and unanticipated directions. But they all started with a prepared framework, which has proven to be the most common predictor of success. Or, at least, a finished product. The beauty of the DAW is that we don't have to choose one methodology and stick with it. It can adapt to whatever process works for us. If that means jamming with your band for a month, recording it and picking out just the best bits for a song, then fine. If it means plunking down colored bars onto the PRV and randomly scrolling through synth presets, that's OK, too. Whatever works for you. But what you don't want is to rely solely on serendipity to produce something you'll like. One of my favorite quotes is from Dwight David Eisenhower, famous for masterminding WWII military campaigns: "plans are useless, but planning is essential".

Does that stuff come in larger tubes?

Suggestion: try throwing in one verse in French. Maybe even layer in some accordion. Seriously. For some reason the whole thing sounds French to me, and I like it.

%appdata% is just shorthand for \users\Your_Name\AppData\Roaming. Less typing, and less confusing when the person you're explaining this to doesn't actually log into Windows as "Your_Name". You can simply type "%appdata%" as if it were part of the pathname. Also useful in batch files since the path works for all users. If in doubt as to whether you've found the right log, check its datestamp. If it shows the file was created 2 minutes ago, chances are you've found the right one. So yes, it looks like you are looking in the right log file. Bear in mind that each time you rescan with the log option turned on, the output is appended to any existing log. So the information you see at the top of the file is actually the oldest. I usually go to the bottom of the file (CTL-End) and then specify an upward search on the word "Logfile:" to skip up to the newest entries. Hit F3 to repeat the search, thus going backward in time within the log. If there are no warnings or error messages in the log, but the DLL does show up, then we can assume those plugins probably initialized OK. (I use the weasel-word "probably" because there are very rare circumstances where a plugin init fails so hard that the scanner stops scanning.) How are you assigning plugins? Do you use the browser or the context menu (right-clicking on the fx bin)?

Try a reset/rescan with the scan log enabled. Be sure to do the Reset. The log file will be %appdata%\Cakewalk\Logs\VstScan.log Open the log file in Notepad and search on any of your missing DLLs. Just seeing the DLL appear in the log means the scanner was able to find it and the problem isn't your scan path list. Keep searching for additional mentions of the DLL. If the DLL failed to initialize, there should be a clue in the log as to why it failed, e.g. a missing dependency or insufficient Windows permissions. One other thing to check is the exclusion list. I think the Reset clears that list, but I don't know for sure. Plugins on the exclusion list (assuming you didn't manually exclude them) usually get there because they failed to scan the first time around. Open the scanner utility and click on the "Show Excluded" radio button.

Nobody's gonna reprimand you for sharing this. However, this particular thread is specifically for feedback on the current release and it's to everyone's benefit that we all try to stay on topic. I know, it may sound punitive, but I'd suggest the Coffee House as a better destination for posts like this.

I prefer to let others do my deprecating for me. Takes far less effort.

Zebralette was what convinced me to initially invest in Zebra2 back in, hmm, 2012? It's been my go-to synth ever since. Here's my very first experiment with Zebralette from back then. Bear in mind that this little guy is basically just a single oscillator! But Zebra's oscillators are pretty impressive even before you start applying modulation, effects, filters and its fancy envelope generators. Everything you hear in this ditty is Zebralette - no fx, not even EQ. Needless to say, I will be purchasing Zebra3 on day one of its release.

On a related tangent, this YouTube music educator is worth checking out. While people like David Bennet address topics such as why Mixolydian mode isn't used often in pop music, this guy is all about chord progressions. Here he is dissecting Brian Wilson's key changes.

I see those little Chinese pickup trucks all over the Philippines, delivering everything from fish to concrete. I want one. But you can't buy them here. They are illegal. Sure, they're death traps. But cheap and seem to run forever.

A couple years ago my granddaughter took me to see Transiberian Orchestra as a Christmas present. I was looking forward to it more as just a fun outing with my granddaughter than anything else, since it was at a venue known for having the acoustics of an abandoned railway station. But holy crap, was I in for a treat. It was a jaw-dropping performance by world-class players, great lighting and surprisingly intelligible sound. Featured a melodic Van der Graf generator, no less.

I did much better on David's earlier quizzes based on hearing only drums and only bass. Some of these are iconic and thus easy to identify, but I'm guessing at least a few will stump you. I'm looking forward to his next installment, "Guess the Beatles song from the tambourine part". (Not a real thing. That's the comment I left under the YouTube video.)

https://www.amazon.com/Rhapsodies-Black-Exit-Eden/dp/B072ZDQ1VF/ref=sr_1_4?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XB8vUdxXwImkS5Zq22TskKA7pplQmGeU4pw64WtSJ8gkjCm1ZuqNX7l63YEp8FUjMYrbDQcJdvnRKHzwdDNDzSXFPAhGru_awiXQfb2-oqw0JTT_aWk9QRdpQvUdphvxBu-fm6_Tii3XsCCj2wwD9d8l2IymFBo4c5Lovp902vbRYrOWFR020V5HAypo0UwlPA6VcvQ969SjCGGyCoR7fHRxbIniII-J4kH_Ziwswj0.oUDVmHtLkMaZsrysjQBEGEUySmKF8W1knc-YyN_oHf0&dib_tag=se&keywords=EXIT+EDEN&sr=8-4 Their most-recent release features Nightwish co-founder and ex-bassist Marko Hietala on one song. The video below is what drew me to this band. These days they're down to just three singers and shifting toward original material instead of covers. I actually like the covers better.

At one point I had screwed planter hooks all over my ceiling for the purpose of hanging moving blankets. Somewhere around here I still have a box of U-Haul moving blankets I'd bought just for that purpose. They have convenient eyelets that fit over the hooks. That was early in my acoustical journey, though, and at the time I did not yet understand the relationship between wavelengths and the thickness and density of absorbtive materials. By the time I'd moved from the bedroom to the garage I was able to apply what I'd learned and now sit in a forest of rigid fiberglass. Still, there is some value to thin absorbers. They do work on reflections above 2KHz that tend to interfere with speech intelligibility. Certainly helpful in vocal booths, especially for voice-overs. Hopefully, it'll also help my bass player, who stands in front of said garage door at rehearsal, to locate those elusive pitches in his harmony parts.

Yes, it doesn't take much to render a conventional drive inoperational. But "operational" means running it in the normal fashion - connecting it to a controller and letting the O/S figure out where stuff is. There are indeed very small tolerances in there, and not just the tiny height that the heads fly over the platter. There is also a tiny stepper motor in there with a plastic actuator held on by screws the size of the ones in your glasses frames. The drives I worked on had linear accelerators - picture the coils in a speaker but with a 10" throw - that could be destroyed by dust or vibration. So it's true that a particle of smoke can indeed ruin a drive as far as you or I are concerned. However, if you are, say, the CIA, or anybody else with a great deal of patience, it's still possible to recover data even after it's been damaged. As a last resort, there is a fluid that can be applied to the oxide that makes data visible to the eye under a microscope. My company used to sell hardware to the military and the 3-letter agencies. I had to learn about stuff like that in order to be certified for high-security installations. Did you know they can watch what you're typing by picking up electromagnetic leakage from the keyboard cable? Imagine working in a Faraday cage. No listening to the radio for you! Fortunately, I never had to do a DOD install myself, only read up on it just in case. I had no desire to install a system whilst guys with guns watched. Out here in civilian land, it was mostly banks that were paranoid. Had to get my badge altered just to go the bathroom. But they were too clueless to think anything of it when I wheeled an HDA full of bank accounts right out the front door.