bitflipper

Glad to see 2024 tossed onto the bone pile of the past. Always the optimist, though, I am looking forward to 1 Jan 2026 when we think back on 2024 and think "ya know, it really wasn't that bad, compared to 2025".

I had some reservations going into this one, partly because we'd be opening for another act and there'd be the stress of quickly tearing down, but also because it was outdoors. In December. Like, seriously? But we took the gig anyway, based on the venue's assurance that the stage was heated and that they've been doing this for awhile. And somehow managing to get patrons to pay to sit in the cold and listen to music. I did not change into my usual stage clothes, preferring to keep my sweatshirt on. But it actually worked out OK. The stage and seating area were indeed heated with large radiant fixtures. It was a little cool, but not to the point where fingers stiffen and voices shake from shivering. After a couple tunes I forgot we were outdoors. The biggest issue was with their PA. We do not use amps on stage other than monitor wedges (and my plan is to go completely silent in 2025, once I convince the others that in-ears are better than wedges) and run everything into the board and the mains. In order to pull that off, I have invested a not-insignificant amount of $$ into our PA. With everyone going through the PA 100%, I can confidently mix the band from the stage. Plus, adjusting the overall volume of the whole band is as easy as turning up or down the radio in my car. Most places we play where there is a house PA, their hardware is over-spec'd and they can easily accommodate us. Not last night. Theirs was a hodgepodge of garage sale reject speakers with a few higher-end pieces. When I met the sound guy and told him about our setup, he was, um, a little displeased. He said they'd just had two monitors repaired after being blown out from running bass through them, that the mains wouldn't do much better, and who the hell told you this would be OK? I told him to roll off the low frequencies on the monitors, since that range would be augmented by the mains. He gave me a look that said "wtf do you know about any of this? Can't you see *I'm* the one with the iPad?". So I just let him be. In the end, the audience did not get what I'd call a high-fidelity experience, but at least we got some compression out of the overloaded system that made up for the lack of any intentional compression. Plenty of compliments from the crowd afterward, which I chalked up to lowered expectations. I took some comfort from the headliners - friends of ours - sounding just as bad albeit twice as loud, and the audience didn't seem to notice. Seems I was the only one there who was disappointed. A post-gig cheeseburger cheered me right up.

You don't often hear this guitar maestro's singing chops, but he does pretty good for an old codger. But keep listening, it's the bass player who steals the show vocally. The drummer's no slouch singing, either. What a f*ck'n awesome band all around. I do a lot of faux guitar on keyboard, but I have never had the nerve to do it in a live situation when there's a real guitar player on the team. Can't even imagine having the balls to do it alongside such a legendary picker. But this fellow pulls off the second guitar part in Apache with panache. (Note that despite being the son of David Crosby, he became a non-singing keyboard player. It would seem that musical genes are plastic in the neurological sense.)

Is there more than one "Steinberg ASIO driver"? What I am using is named "Yamaha Steinberg USB Driver" (v. 2.1.7). It was a prerequisite for using my Yamaha mixer as an audio interface. Yes, it does seem that by design you can have only one ASIO driver enabled at a time. I use it only when recording through the Yamaha and switch to WASAPI when I'm using my Focusrite. But all that is to accommodate outboard hardware; I would not expect a software tool such as Spectral Layers to be picky about the audio driver. Then again, it's Steinberg.

Sorry, I could not repro. Try the ExceptionHandlingSeverity variable and see if you get additional warnings before the fail-to-open dialog.

Glad to. But I'm gonna need GPS coordinates, to avoid sending my positive thoughts to some undeserving recipient by accident. Better yet, let's make some pretty electronica in the Wookie style so that he's got something to listen to during recovery. If your composition is good, it'll inspire him to get up and start doing it again. And don't worry if your composition sucks, as that may provide even more motivation.

I have not seen this, but I'm willing to try and reproduce it. Could you provide more detail about your bounce process, e.g. are you combining tracks, embedding fx, creating a new track vs. bouncing in place? You might get additional information by enabling more detailed error reporting. Here's how you do that:

Thanks for the heads up, Zinc! I don't check for updates often enough. Went in and found there were updates for Keyscape and Trillian as well, including a new patch for Keyscape: Wing Upright Saloon.

I was once convinced that I'd gone on a blind date with one. Turned out she was just Scottish.

It does not overwrite previous versions, so any projects with v3 will be fine.

Until the inevitable Dan Worrall demonstration. If you can resist that, you are a better man than me, Tom.

For me, it does. Although I assume you meant "pretty", not "petty". The former refers to its brilliantly ergonomic user interface that lets you dial in EQ very quickly. The latter means, um, something more snarky?

The sad thing is each previous iteration of Captcha was eventually circumvented by AI. Alan Turing imagined a scenario in which humans needed to determine whether they were talking to another human or to a computer. He didn't imagine that someday we'd have to routinely prove we're human - to a computer.

I know what you're thinking...what's possibly left to add? Doesn't Pro-Q3 already do everything you'd expect from an equalizer? Well, I thought the same thing when the two previous versions came along, and now wonder how I could be so naive as to think the original Pro-Q was the do-all/end-all EQ back in 2010. But each new feature set added more than just convenience, they changed the way I use EQ. Pro-Q4 looks to be a game-changer.

I'll say nothing of the plot because you'll enjoy it more if you don't know what's coming. Except to note that the protagonist is a music producer, a detail I missed at first but becomes significant in retrospect. We're not told what her specific job is, only that she works in a studio. In the opening scene, she's listening to music and has a DAW open. Then the software insists that it needs to be updated, which starts us down the rabbit hole. Enjoy.

I've seen enough spy movies and police procedurals to know all you have to do is stare intensely at the screen and say "Enhance!".

So what happens when those kids grow up? You get this... Saw these guys live last year after following them on YT since they were kids. Yeh, they did this song and nailed it. Now in their 20's, they just kill it in a live show - no backing tracks, just 5 good singers.

And another father-daughters band. I like these folks because they actually play 100% live, no post-production sweetening.

Meanwhile, the spirit of Jeff Beck lives on...in a teenage girl? Yup, girls can play guitar, too. I think Grace is around 18 years old. The way she builds her solo shows a maturity beyond her years. Also, remember when Johnny Carson used to regularly give the house band a slot in the show? Nowadays, you have to be in the studio audience to see stuff like this.

Seeing young people playing rock 'n roll gives me hope for the future. It's reassuring that not every teenager dreams of being a gold-toothed rapper. btw, the drummer in this video is 11 years old.

Already my favorite delay. What a treat to get two more algorithms! For free, no less.

To be fair, almost everything does. My first experience playing a Steinway was when I was hired to do background "music" at a high-end wedding in a private club. During that period of my musical life I'd been taking a bunch of those kinds of gigs because it was ridiculously easy money that required no moving of gear, no setup, just walk in, diddle about for a couple hours and walk out. But I didn't really like them. Nobody listened, and the only comments I got were to "turn it down". It's a frickin' acoustic piano. No volume control, except to play very lightly. The quality of those pianos was atrocious and they were usually out of tune. At one hoity-toity "athletic" club the piano sounded especially bad. I peeked under the lid and discovered the insides had been stuffed with flattened cardboard boxes! So when I sat down at that Steinway and began to play, I was floored by how responsive it was. Whereas many pianos when played very softly produced no sound at all, the Steinway delivered a beautiful soft tone. But bang on it aggressively and it roared to life. I didn't know any acoustic instrument could have such a broad dynamic range.

That's Tracy Collins, the developer, playing those demos. He's got a knack for making virtual instruments sound good in performance. Yeh, this one's gonna be added to my already-expansive Indiginus collection. I feel a new genre coming on...

This appears to be the exact same model I grew up with! Oh, how I abused that thing. When I was 19 I decided to turn it into a tack piano, painstakingly inserting brass tacks into each hammer. Then I attached large paper clips to the felt bar that comes down between the hammer and strings when you press the "soft" pedal. My idea was that I could switch between normal and tack via the pedal. That didn't work well, and the soft pedal never sounded right afterward. Coincidentally, my mother stopped playing piano around that time (it was her piano). My 19-year-old brain could not comprehend that it might be because I'd destroyed her instrument. And I can relate to learning to tune a piano - I thought it would be easy: just tune it like a guitar, going around the circle of fifths. Um, nope. By the time you come back around it's out of tune. I also learned that every time you move a piano you have to retune it. Because the piano was lightweight (relatively speaking) and could be moved by just two people, I had the idea of dragging it on stage. This was in the early 70's; there was no credible electronic equivalent to an acoustic piano back then. Well, I figured out why the only bands that used real pianos on stage were the ones wealthy enough to afford having them professionally moved and tuned for each performance. Having a portable "real" piano would be my holy grail for 30 years, when I got my Yamaha MO8. Totally agree with the premise of this thread. Sitting down at my piano is like a writer sitting at a typewriter with a blank sheet of paper. No inspiration from some cool-sounding sample library or synth, it's about creating something from scratch every time.

What does Fender's marketing department know that we don't? Are there legions of little girls dreaming of becoming guitarists? If true, that would be a very positive thing.