bitflipper

The point of Kenny's post is that it doesn't snow much in his area, even during the coldest months of winter, so snow in April is indeed a very rare occurrence. I'm a few hours north of there, and even though we're farther north than notoriously snowy places such as Chicago and Buffalo, the jet stream usually protects us. That's what's spooky about the changes going on now - the jet stream has become unstable. That's why you can have devastating winter weather in normally-moderate Texas, oranges freezing on the trees in Florida, and snow in April in the Pacific Northwest. Those things happen when the jet stream deviates from its normal patterns. So yes, while it may be counter-intuitive to blame unseasonably cold weather on global warming, that is indeed the case. I struggle every year deciding whether or not to buy a snow shovel. My personal theory is that as soon as I buy a snow shovel, it will never snow here again. Just like the time I bought an air conditioner in July 1979 during a hot streak and never used it again. Left it behind when I moved. Then July 2021 happened. In an area where 90 degrees F is considered a crazy hot day, it hit 115 here. Time to buy another A/C, I think, for the good of all.

You're injecting a substance that makes nerves grow. Now, wouldn't it be cool if the treatment was somehow too good, like those fertility drugs that make women have septuplets, and the ear treatment left you with superpowers, like being able to hear bats and dolphins? We'd have to start mixing at 384KHz because we'd miss those upper upper highs in the crash cymbal tail. Not to mention having to buy some of those previously-ridiculed speakers with their 30KHz supertweeters, and expensive 40KHz Earthworks microphones to capture those frequencies. Or, it could go the other way and we'd be kept up at night by the sound of whales singing and distant earthquakes.

Look at the bright side. You're close to Mexico. Which is where you'll have to go for the treatment since here it'll be $100,000 and your insurance won't cover it.

Some smart fellows at MIT are testing a drug that encourages the regrowth of cochlear cilia, the little nerve endings in your inner ear that sense sound. They tend to die off when abused by loud sounds, and don't naturally regenerate. It starts with the ones near the front that react to high frequencies. We all know about that. It used to be called "age-related hearing loss", but we now know that it's not caused by aging, but by long-term exposure to this noisy world. If you are in the Boston area, they are seeking volunteers for the next trial (link to apply in the article). https://scitechdaily.com/mit-scientists-develop-new-regenerative-drug-that-reverses-hearing-loss/

I had Spamsilog for breakfast this morning. Filipinos will know what that is, even if over there it's considered a fancy breakfast, something you'd order at a restaurant.

That wouldn't be a bad deal if musicians got paid as much as movers. There was a bar manager who complained that we charged $50 more than the next most-expensive band. I think we were splitting $350 that night. I told him, "tell you what...if you can get a plumber who charges less for three hours' work, we'll take whatever you'd give him instead."

In actual practice, aliasing is hard to hear. SPAN can show it to you, but if the aliased frequencies are more than about 50 dB below the main signal, you won't be able to pick them out. You may, however, experience a vague dissatisfaction with how a track or mix sounds but not be able to put your finger on why. That's why it's a good idea to Understand what causes aliasing *, Know which types of processors are capable of causing aliasing** and Which ones don't*** Visually check for it with a spectrum analyzer **** * Aliasing happens when frequencies are introduced that are beyond the capability of your project sample rate to handle. Those frequencies can be generated by a digital oscillator or by harmonic distortion. I know of no other circumstance. ** Anything that clips the signal is a candidate for aliasing. Hard clippers are the worst, followed by compression with extremely fast (< ~8ms, but frequency-dependent) attack times and high compression ratios. Anything that generates tones (e.g. a synth) that can exceed the Nyquist frequency can cause aliasing. Note that most synths mitigate this internally and won't require oversampling, but there are exceptions. *** Most effects don't alias. No sample library made at or below your project sample rate is capable of aliasing on its own. Gentle compression with low ratios and medium-to-long attack times won't, either. Transparent EQs don't cause aliasing, even at extreme settings. As noted above, most synths don't have an issue. Even if they do, it'll be on specific patches that have a lot of high-frequency content, such as the Clav example Craig suggested. **** Note that just because you can see aliasing with a spectrum analyzer doesn't mean you can hear it. I've read some ridiculous threads on Gearslutz where people endlessly debated whether a plugin with aliasing at -160 dB is inferior to one whose aliased content is at -190 dB. It's angels dancing on the head of a pin.

Our sax player complains that he has to carry TWO instruments, an alto AND a tenor. Then I talked him into adding an FX unit, and just about broke him.

I was about to accuse you of duplicate posts, because right below this was Voices of Wind.

Same here. When my 1TB samples drive got full, I added a 500GB SSD for the overflow. But then I had to sit and sort out which libraries were most deserving of the faster drive and which ones weren't. It was an existential moment. Leaving one behind on the old disk seemed like an admission that I'd never use it again, and maybe I was an idiot for buying it in the first place.

Don't you Scots throw rocks around for fun?

I haven't tried them all, as many of them are clearly meant for more electronic-sounding styles that aren't my thing. But the ones I have used have all had plain and logical UIs that were simple to figure out. Even the ones that offer more than meets the eye, such as Ricochet, a multi-tap delay whose basic functionality is immediately obvious but which can still surprise you. If there's one plugin that you can use right out of the box and get nice results, I'd recommend the aforementioned Fluid. Try it on synth pads, background vocals, rhythm guitar - anything that can afford to get smudged.

I've got gobs of chorus plugins, which is odd because it's not an effect that I use often. But when I throw one on and it works, I always wonder why I didn't think of it immediately. And even though they all work on exactly the same principle, each of them has a distinct character, which is why I've accumulated a collection. Fluid just adds one more. On bright synth tones it sounds very 80's to me, reminiscent of the old Electric Mistress stompbox I used to use back in the day.

Unfortunately, those two gigs were already spoken for. Seems I've been downloading a lot of 24-bit wave files lately.

...all the old Audio Damage plugins are now free. I grabbed Ricochet, Fluid, Liquid and Vapor. Nothing earth-shaking there, just a bunch of solid, usable effects.

Yeh, every time I start cleaning up I think maybe it's time for Samplitude to retire to the bitbucket. But dang it, I paid a couple hundred bucks for that back during the Gibson debacle so it'd be like throwing out a perfectly good lamp just because it's ugly. Libraries are another matter. I just can't bring myself to toss them. You never know when that Kontakt 2 Factory Library might have just what you need.

Lemme fix that for ya... The keyboardist runs around the club at 1:00 AM trying to pry the guitarist and bassist away from the barmaid so they can help him hoist the keyboard into the van. The van he had to buy because no regular car is big enough for the keyboard. Then, hopefully, said string pickers will also help tear down and pack up the PA, which the keyboardist bought as well. If they're feeling generous, they might even bring the keyboard player a cola since they're all packed up and ready to go while he's still rolling cables. My standard whine: next time, I'm taking up the piccolo.

Apparently I've either forgotten to un-check the "AAX" option on installers (dozens of times), or some installers just don't give you that option. This morning I noticed that \program files\avid\audio\plug-ins had over 2 gigabytes' worth of .aax files and related content taking up space. Granted, 2GB isn't much on a 500GB SSD, but whenever I find things like this I kick myself for not being diligent about monitoring disk usage. Back when drives were much smaller, I used to be obsessive about such things.

Is that a Moog amplifier on the floor? Talk about a rare piece of kit.

It's been years since I last sat down at a B3, longer since I've had to haul one, but all it takes is a photo to remember exactly how comfortable it is to play one. Those lightly-weighted waterfall keys encourage your fingers to glide over them like weightless sprites. Aiming for a C and lazily press B and D at the same time? That sounds good, too. In fact, go ahead and lay your whole arm across the keyboard - there is no such thing as dissonance on a Hammond. As a Hammond acolyte, I am obligated to point out one trivial error in the linked article, though. It wasn't a B3 on House of the Rising Sun. It was the cheap Italian-made VOX Continental. I know this because at the time though I lusted for a Hammond I could only afford a Continental. Consequently, I was thrilled to see the likes of John Lennon or Alan Price playing one on TV. Those guys can surely afford a B3 and someone to move it, I thought, but there they are on TV playing on the same red plywood box that I used.

Quite likely. Seems like they're putting it in everything these days. Apparently you can make it in your garage with cheap ingredients from Walmart. Tom Petty was felled by what he thought was a headache remedy. I once wondered if I was gonna die after drinking a single rum 'n coke after a gig. I'd forgotten about the cold remedy I'd taken earlier, to clear my sinuses for singing.

Just an un-commented video of Dan mastering his own stuff. How you feel about the music is irrelevant, just appreciate those crispy transients! A couple takeaways for me. First, notice how most of the time the limiter isn't doing anything at all. I've always believed that if a good mix stands on its own before mastering, the limiter's mainly just a volume control. As you can see, he's adding a lot of gain because he mixes with gobs of headroom. Second, note that he uses no lookahead. I don't have an explanation for this other than if you're not continuously driving the master above the threshold you really don't need lookahead. I'm guessing in his examples it wouldn't make much audible difference either way.

Everyone, feel free to ignore everything I wrote above.

From Cherry Audio. A pretty good emulation, IMO, with a decent number of presets to get you started. Oberheim synths are also a good choice for beginners because they're fairly simple to program. So if you'd like to dip your toes into the world of old-school subtractive synthesis but are intimidated by all the controls on Synthmaster or Zebra, Oberheims are pretty quick to pick up. The free OBXD is even simpler, but not as fat-sounding as the 8-Voice. $19 for an Oberheim 8-Voice is a pretty good price, considering the first time I checked one out back in the 70's a real one went for about 4 grand. This one sounds almost the same. Are you into EDM and epic supersaws? This is the synth it was invented on.

So I finally got the piano tuned. For some reason I'd had difficulty getting tuners to return my calls. Cost was $200 because it was so far out that he had to tune it twice. He also straightened a hammer that hadn't been hitting all three strings, so I not only got an in-tune piano, I gained two strings! Not to mention 15 more keys than I'm used to having with my band rig. The puppy wasn't helping. He's part husky, so he offered to sing harmony during the procedure. Sadly, his only skill is making sticks into smaller sticks so he had to be relocated to the garage. Even the cat got in on the event. The piano is her favorite perch, but she'd never seen the lid open before and I had to drag her off the strings twice. It was only after spending a couple hours deliriously jamming away on it that I realized just how weak my wrists and forearms have become playing synths. Been awhile since I've experienced muscle aches from playing. Other than the usual back aches from hauling gear, anyway. That wasn't the end of the pain, though. This morning I jammed my pinkie attempting to hit a key that wasn't there on my 73-key KRONOS. But golly gee whiz, I'd been playing really fast right up until that happened. All this time I'd been bemoaning my loss of speed and blaming it on old age. Should have tuned up the old acoustic piano years ago.