bitflipper

That's a pretty good Photoshop job, Paulo. You did that yourself? I'm about to go in for my semi-annual haircut, just might take this in to show the barber.

I don't know who that is. Pretty sure it's now Bowie. It's either somebody who can't shave himself in the morning, or has unsupervised children with access to Sharpies.

Next band rehearsal is Sunday. I'm going to ask to measure our sax player's hands. Hope he doesn't think it's weird, but at this point it's important research. If I find out I have the smallest hands in the band I could risk my credibility as musical director. They might all start questioning whether someone with such short stubby fingers even knows what the hell he's talking about! That could lead to an insurrection and me being deposed in favor of the guitarist. That SOB has long fingers and loves Iron Maiden. Suddenly we're an 80's glam rock cover band and I really can't pull off Spandex. Then I break my back because I've had to replace my compact QSCs for Marshall stacks, my hearing blows out from playing at 140 dBSPL and my kids think my new David Bowie haircut looks ludicrous. I have to buy a 1972 Chevy van, which we all live in while we tour the Midwest playing at NASCAR events. The bassist, now suffering from a heroin habit, can't keep his sh*t together because his wife has left him and we have to fire him after he gets into a fistfight on stage with the drummer. Then again, I might just be overthinking it.

Well, they finally deemed me worthy of the upgrade. Shut up and take my money! I begged. First impressions: some nice new samples added, but more importantly they've added more velocity layers to some of the existing instruments. For example, there's one named "Shells" I liked from the old version but it didn't respond to velocity, but now it does. Sequencer still seems to start at whatever step it wants to, but now that I can drag it onto the MIDI track that shouldn't be an issue anymore. The new kick and toms are deep and full-sounding. Weird thing when I attempt to use more than two instances of the nki - the third instance will not play and a clicking sound comes out. Will investigate further, but for now it doesn't look like this will be my go-to general purpose percussion instrument since I can only load 3 sources per nki and only two nki's per Kontakt instance.

Just realized my right and left hands don't match. Left is 7.5", right hand is 8". That might explain why it's hard to find gloves that fit. Makes sense, I guess, given the superior work ethic of the right hand. It does everything, from scrubbing pans to pruning roses. I am, however, impressively ambidextrous when it comes to nose-detritus removal.

Quite possibly. There is little to no downside to just keeping larger buffers in place, with the exception of when you play virtual instruments. Mine are set to 2048 samples and almost never changed. The only time I reduce them is when I'm playing a VI in real time, and that's usually only when I've acquired a new Kontakt library and want to explore it. Most of the time, large-buffer latency isn't an issue because I'm listening to outboard hardware while recording MIDI. Once the MIDI has been recorded, I route it to a virtual instrument.

Will is correct. However, increasing the buffer size doesn't always solve the problem. Sometimes the root cause of CPU overload can be obscure. Often, it's a background process or interrupt service routine (ISR) that's hogging the CPU. Troubleshooting this kind of issue begins with a free diagnostic tool called LatencyMon. Interpreting the results can be challenging, but there are some instructions on the Resplendence website that may help. What this utility does is measure DPC latency, the time it takes for your computer to process hardware interrupts. Interrupts take priority over pretty much everything else, so if they're taking too long it can keep your system from handling audio properly. Sometimes it's a sloppily-written driver, sometimes it's a broken interface card. The most frequent offenders are network adapters, in particular wireless wi-fi. But run the tool and report back what it tells you.

Yes, there are sampled B3s for Kontakt. Native Instruments themselves sell a product called Vintage Organs, which includes not only a B3 but also an M3, C3, Farfisa and Vox Continental. It's $99. Here's the link: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/keys/vintage-organs/

I used to have a programmable keyboard that allowed any keyboard shortcut to any sequence of commands. It was very handy in the DAW, although CW already uses so many keyboard shortcuts there weren't many left to assign. Such keyboards are popular with gamers. Go on Amazon and search "Programmable Keyboards". There are also software-only solutions that intercept keystrokes before they get to the application. The advantage is that they work with any application, even DOS programs. Here's one I haven't used myself but have long thought would be ideal because it offers its own keys.

Sheesh, you guys are all giants. We may have to switch the conversation to gut diameters so I don't feel like such a dwarf. I remember reading about a guy who had 6 fingers on each hand. Somebody wrote a piece specifically for him that literally no one else in the world could play.

Mallets are awesome. And the virtual ones are almost guaranteed not to cause physical injury to bystanders.

Yeh, I thought it was pretty cool that they left that in. Maybe they ought to start making blooper reels to accompany these videos.

The video description calls it "Indian Folk Metal". I guess that's as good a description as any. Cookie Monster rap in a delicious vindaloo sauce, maybe.

I've always wanted this one, but I'm still traumatized after recently buying Requiem Light Symphonic Choir only to find it nearly unusable. Wish I'd known Venus would be going on sale; I'd have waited.

I don't have "piano player's hands". My fingers are too short and too fat. Unfortunately, the standard keyboard was designed to accommodate the hands of Franz Liszt, who had exceptionally large hands. Prior to that, keys were narrower and shorter. Consequently, generations of keyboard players have had to struggle with keys that are too large for their hands. You'd think that nowadays when most keys are made of plastic, it would be possible to buy a smaller keyboard. Well, you can, but only those tiny keyboards made by Korg and Akai, which typically have only 25 keys. As this video shows, there is only one guy in the world making 88-key keyboards with smaller keys. The standard size is 6.5" per octave. I measured all of mine and found that even my compact Axiom 49-key controller adheres to this standard, as does my little Hammond clone. Only my itty-bitty AKAI LPK-25 was smaller, at a smidge under 6" per octave. But I've always struggled to play fast on that little guy. I still like it, though, because it slips easily into my laptop bag for travelling. So I'm curious. Keyboard players, get out a ruler and see what your span is. Mine is a wimpy 7.5", capable of an octave + the second, but not octave + a third. Good thing nobody told me, when I was starting out, that my appendages were too small for the task. NOTE: bapu, don't even think of making a parody of this thread, you perv.

Perhaps Fate is looking out for me. This is what I get when I click the "Buy" button. insessionaudio.com says....OK. Does that mean "OK, we get that you make foolish impulse purchases from time to time and maybe you should think about it first"?

True, but that's often more work than even a clunky sequencer. You either spend your time editing, or browsing hundreds of loops until you find one that kind of fits. I much prefer playing percussion parts on the keyboard or hand-planting them in the PRV. Most of my perc instruments have sequencers, arpeggiators and loops but I tend to use these libraries as just another one-shot sound source. SSS works fine in that capacity as well. Especially now with the addition of toms and cymbals. These days, when I want a repetitive percussion part such as a shaker, I usually reach for Skaka. It's lightweight, easy to program and doesn't require Kontakt. If only they'd add more instruments to it! It would be perfect for congas and bongos.

There is a pub nearby that has open-mic on Wednesdays. I've stopped in several times over the years, usually just to provide moral support for friends who were performing. But many of the participants are honestly pretty awful. Not fun to sit and listen to, and equally un-fun to play along with. A few are delusional, thinking they're the next Joe Bonamassa just waiting to be discovered. Some of them seem to be oblivious to the drummer and take it upon themselves to make up their own tempo and time signatures as they go along. While blasting out this cacophony at the highest possible volume. I used to try to be charitable. Some of these guys normally perform exclusively in their own basement, and Wednesday nights are their opportunity to take the stage and live out their fantasy. Who the hell am I to deny them that joy? Plus most of them are genuinely nice folks. But to get up there and play along? Yeh, nah. What if the audience thinks its me who has no sense of timing? Last night I played along. While bravely trying to enforce something akin to a groove amid the onslaught of 1-4-5s in E, I had an epiphany. This is real folk music. How good you are at it is mostly irrelevant. It's all about the joy of making music, and community. Amid all the staged, formulaic, posturing, lip-synced and choreographed phoniness that is today's music scene, jams are real and in the moment. You get what you get - might be great, might not. But it's real people expressing themselves in a most natural way. I think I'll be back.

I'm not sure if I'll ever be in a situation where I'm thinking "this shaker's not quite right, better audition the other 39". And it still doesn't have bamboo. The sequencer doesn't seem to have been made any easier to use in odd time signatures. And yeh, I would have liked a lower upgrade price. But this is such a good instrument I'm probably gonna spring for it anyway.

I'd encourage him to go for it. Motivation is the key ingredient for success in anything, and rather than letting him worry about the competition, suggest the benefit of being around players who are better than you. If he doesn't get in, or he gets in and finds it's not a good fit for him, he can always change course. Lots of MBAs play music and can actually afford to indulge their GAS impulses. Heck, Brian May is an astrophysicist. I wanted to be a paleontologist. Your natural path will find you.

Bass, too.

All of the above recommendations are good. MeldaProductions' MTremolo is my favorite of the bunch, as you can go nuts customizing the LFO waveform. If you want to try something unique for grins, check out the free Darvaza plugin. It's a tremolo effect but with multiple sound-mangling features such as pitch-shifting. Also lets you tempo-sync left and right channels independently.

Last night he thought he was being sneaky, chewing on a cardboard box in my cord bag. Except that's the box my tambourine came in, and I still use it so the jangly things (yes, I know, they're called "zills" but nobody ever uses that word so I don't either) don't get bent in transport. So I'd tell the dog "NO" and then turn back to my computer. After a couple minutes, I'd hear a little "ching" and he was busted. But the pup can actually be motivationally helpful. I've been procrastinating buying some new shoes, but now I have to.

ASIO vs. WASAPI doesn't seem to matter with Cakewalk. I had been using ASIO for a long time, only switching to see if it made a difference. It didn't. I don't think I've ever run Windows audio and Cakewalk at the same time. But I have had used them sequentially while both applications were open, e.g. pulling up a new export in WMP to check it before closing the DAW. What's weird is that my problems are intermittent and seemingly random. I can go a week with everything working flawlessly, then suddenly have the interface go silent for a couple seconds or start distorting while playing a video game. I still haven't decided if it's a hardware or a software issue. Software problems tend not to be truly random. Randomness usually suggest a hardware problem, e.g. a leaky capacitor that mostly works most of the time, or a poorly-seated edge connector. But sometimes what seems random isn't; sometimes it's combination of factors so rare or obscure that correlation is extremely difficult. If I buy a second interface, I'll probably get another Saffire. Then, if the old interface proves to be the problem I can more easily swap it. And if it isn't the problem, I'll have a capable mobile (ok, semi-mobile) rig with enough inputs to record live multitracks of the band.

I've been troubleshooting software and hardware for a very long time. I've learned to play the percentages. I usually assume initially that it was my mistake. Even knowing that's not always true, the percentages remain in my favor.