bitflipper

PA is refusing to take my money. Maybe I'm not as smart as their software, but I count 3 products in the cart. The universe is telling me I don't need any of those things. Which is true; I really don't.

Next gig in Seattle is on June 9th, at a place we haven't played before called The Shanty Tavern. It's on Lake City Way, but that's all I know about the place. We'll be at a little hole-in-the-wall joint in Edmonds on August 12th. It's a lively venue, but claustrophobic. When we were a 6-piece I ended up playing in front of the ladies' restroom. Lovely aroma. September 1 we're in Carnation, at a brewery called Remlinger Farm. That one might be fun. $2.00 off pig wings! They have a train. And ponies. Everything else on the calendar is up north and/or out in the boonies, e.g. Sedro-Woolly, Rockport, Goldbar. There's a date in Clinton, which is close by but requires a ferry to get to. I hate taking ferries in summer. The tourists with their RVs take all the fun out of an otherwise pleasant boat ride.

Most of our gigs are in places you'd need satellite assistance to locate. Next up: Concrete, WA on the 28th. Skiers might know Concrete as the wide spot in the road on the way up to Stevens Pass. But those small towns are starved for live music and are loudly appreciative, if not always big tippers. I'd hoped you'd stop by and remind me that I'm just being a big wuss. I only play out 2 or 3 times a month. Last Summer it was 4 times a month, but we decided that was too much.

That was my thought. The only reason I can think of is if the previous X1 folder had different perms.

I'm still curious as to why this wasn't a problem under X3, which should be subject to the same Windows-enforced restrictions as any other application. I don't think I've ever had to run any version as Administrator. Most of my plugins (that aren't virtual instruments) are installed on the C: drive. Rather than argue with installers, I just let them default to wherever they want to go and fool them via symbolic links when necessary.

I didn't intend for it sound so negative. It can be physically grueling, sure. But I still derive great joy from it. A lot more pleasure than I would get at the gym, certainly.

Patience. Unlike paid DAWs, this one's driven by engineering, not the marketing department. That means there is no clueless bean counter demanding that a new release must happen on X date whether it's fully cooked or not. This is the Cakewalk we knew decades ago, when cool features such as slip edits and automatic crossfades were the kinds of things that got everybody excited.

It was a great gig. Hoppin' joint in a beautiful location, and close to home. We've already been asked back and hope it becomes a regular stop on our circuit. But jeez, I have never been so beat at the end of a gig. Played from 8:00 until 1:00. The last set was purely muscle memory because my frontal cortex had checked out around midnight. I've always assumed that a day would come when I'd have to admit that I'm too old for this. But dammit, I refuse to accept that day might have been yesterday.

That Space Echo is tempting. I haven't used the actual hardware since c. 1980, so my recollection may be more nostalgic than objective, but I loved that thing back in the day.

But when was the last time you used it?

The NS3 is actually four synths in one box. One's dedicated to organ, another to piano, another to synths and one plays samples. As a sample player it's not deep, nothing close to what you'd expect after being a Kontakt user. My Korg Kronos is a better sampler. Plus it's a true sampler, in that you can record directly into it. It's actually a sequencer that can record 16 channels of audio and 16 channels of MIDI, but I don't use that feature. It has a drum machine, too. But I don't use that onstage, either. The Nord's Hammond emulation is pretty good but the Leslie sim sucks. Consequently, I physically play organ on the NS3 but the actual sound is coming out of my Kronos. That way I get the benefit of a light-touch organ-feeling keyboard and physical drawbars, but with better tone and a better Leslie simulation. I've used it with a Ventilator, but that's extra gear and it takes me an hour to set up as it is, so the Vent stays home. The big benefit of the NS3 is that it's ergonomically laid out for real-time tweaking. I can, for example, add delay, reverb, distortion, chorus, etc. to any of the modules on the fly. The Korg, otoh, must be tediously programmed via gobs of deep menus and subsystems, so I don't fiddle with it at a gig. But tbh, the main reason I bought the Nord is that it weighs only 22 lbs, compared to the Kronos at 82 lbs in the flight case. I need help lifting the Kronos onto the stand, whereas the NS3 I can sling over my shoulder when I go to jam sessions.

You're making a damn good case for this tool, Mark. You've got me thinking about building an instrument from Omnisphere that I can load into one of my stage synths. Funny how these conversations can go down a rabbit hole quick. I know nothing about sample formats for the Korg Kronos or the Nord Stage, so now I'm thinking I've gotta learn those things too.

I still use TTS-1 regularly and have never had an issue with it. For me, its main limitation is the four audio outputs, which limits audio processing possibilities if you're using more than four voices. However, this is rarely a practical concern because, like the OP, I mainly use the instrument as a placeholder during composition that will later be replaced by more sophisticated synths. Combining multiple voices into a single audio output isn't a problem while you're composing a song. It only becomes a limitation when you start mixing, and you will have already substituted other synths before starting the mix phase. The main advantage of using one instance of any multitimbral synth is CPU efficiency, which may be important to you if you play the synths in real time and thus need low latency. The main disadvantage is that you can't freeze tracks independently. But this won't be an issue until you start mixing and may need to freeze tracks after adding CPU-intensive synths and effects. My advice to the OP is to do whatever feels comfortable, since it doesn't really matter which method you choose.

I was a fan of Myst back in the day, and was disappointed when I found out it was strictly DOS-only and unplayable under Windows. It was a genre unto itself, and a god-level achievement given the technological limitations of the day. I'd buy this title!

It's actually ~120 bpm. That's something AudioSnap sometimes does, guessing a tempo that's double the actual tempo. I still think it's pretty damn impressive, given that in this example it's extracting beats from a full - and in this case very dense - mix. An MP3, at that. It'd be more accurate on a drum track.

I was fortunate enough to sample my favorite patch from my old Yamaha MO8 right before it was stolen. Jeez, I wish I'd had the foresight to get the electric piano and sax patches! But to emphasize Mark's comment, it is going to be more tedious than you think. Though not exactly rocket surgery, it is time-consuming. But also fun. Note that when I did it I had no tools such as SampleRobot to help. Just Kontakt. It has all you really need, but you will have to become familiar with velocity maps and group editing, things that casual Kontakt users never need to explore. The good news is that older synths like your Kurzweil , due to memory constraints, had far fewer velocity layers than most current commercial Kontakt libraries. That means fewer samples to import.

Maybe Melodyne makes this easier, but I still use the same method I've used since SONAR 6. 1. Select the audio track 2. Press ALT-A to bring up the AudioSnap dialog 3. Click the "On" (enable AudioSnap) button 4. Click on "Set Project from Clip" 5. If you don't care about the transient detection, click the "On" button again to hide them You now have a tempo map that follows the audio pretty well.

I've seen plenty of audio-related tutorials that gave me GAS, but this is the first one to ever make me hungry.

Bite your tongue! The sacred memory of Neil Peart will not be besmirched by even suggesting that a song might be nailed down at 4/4 120 bpm from start to finish! You start thinking that way and the next thing you know you're insulting your listeners with a four-on-the-floor 808 accompanied by a looped 1-bar arpeggio and referring to your compositions as "beatz". Yes, your memory is correct. The Tempo window used to be dockable, scalable and floatable. That changed in 2021, to generally favorable reactions among the user base, many of whom had been previously requesting the change. There is definitely a benefit to locking the tempo track visually to the track view timeline and treating it like a track (which it technically is), but imo it feels vertically cramped now, especially when you want to insert large tempo changes. These days I'll often just build large changes into the MIDI sequence itself, e.g. ignoring the grid for a ritardando ending.

Running a dependency check would be a great convenience, but afaik this installer does not do that. And yes, APE definitely predates Kontakt 7 by years. Either way, it's wrong because I do in fact have Kontakt 7 installed. I was able to get the update to complete by running Native Access as Administrator. However, NA is still insisting that there is an update for APE. Screw it, APE still works fine. I'm not going to bother trying to update it. But clearly, NA still has a way to go before it can be trusted.

I totally forgot that I'd tried v2 back when it was first made available, didn't like it and rolled back to v1. Like John, I was confused that there is no "check for updates" feature in v1. Well, now due to fomo I'm at v2/3 and it still fails to update some products, just like v1 did. For example, it tells me Apocalypse Percussion Micro needs an update, but the update fails because it thinks I don't have Kontakt 7 installed:

Just temporarily disable real-time protection during the update. It will turn itself back on later.

Now this is weird and feels like a bug. I went to the Spectrasonics site and it clearly shows I am out of date. It says the current versions of the executable, patch library and sound sources should be version 1.5. My instance of Keyscape reports the following but still insists I am up to date: I was able to update by bypassing the built-in updater and just downloading the install files directly from Spectrasonics.

iirc, the last time this happened - not being able to update - it was with Omnisphere. After several attempts, the update button just suddenly appeared the next day. I have to wonder if they aren't purposefully throttling downloads to avoid the expense of adding hosting capacity to accommodate a big rush of requests.