bitflipper

When I was 15 my band played our first out-of-town gig. It was only 30 miles away but felt like the start of a world tour. After the gig, a group of hot girls - we're talking cheerleader-grade hot girls - brought a bottle of whiskey and hung out with us. Me, the nerd who actually liked Algebra class and could type 80 words a minute, being approached by girls who wouldn't have given me the time of day at my high school. I decided right then that a) this was the life for me and b) whiskey tastes like diesel oil.

Wow. That looks exactly like my grandmother's piano. I used to love the tone it produced. My grandparents were Dust Bowl refugees in the 30's. Before moving out West to homestead in Montana, they sold or gave away everything they owned, which wasn't much . Everything but that piano. Grandma wouldn't part with it. They travelled on a flatcar, as they couldn't even afford a seat on the train. I wouldn't be surprised if they had jam sessions on that flatbed to pass the time. They did well in Montana, becoming successful cattle ranchers before eventually moving to the Idaho panhandle shortly before I met them. Grandpa played guitar and mandolin. His band played Saturday nights at the Grange hall, a lively event that carried on until daybreak. It's part of the reason I wanted to join a band in my teens. Well, that and to impress girls.

Yeh, some of the stuff I've gotten rid of over the decades would be worth a lot now. Silly me, I actually thought that stuff would completely lose its value if I didn't dump it quickly. At one point I had some young guys come over to buy my Jupiter 6, talked them into taking my Juno 106 for a hundred bucks more. They ended up buying pretty much everything, including my 3-tier keyboard stand, mic stands, a drum machine and my Oberheim SEM. At the time, I thought they were suckers for taking all my old crap off my hands.

Broadly speaking, a bus is where signals are combined together. A project can have any number of busses (e.g. mixing all the drums together via a "drum bus"). A "master bus" is where all tracks and busses come together to make the final output for your mix. Busses are created and manipulated in the bus pane, a separate portion at the bottom of the Track View window. It's there that you'll find the master bus. For sound to happen, you need to a) direct tracks to one or more busses and b) direct the output of the final (master) bus to your sound card. Here's a picture. If you don't see the bus pane, click the circled button at the bottom. Note that in my picture, "Speakers (Saffire Pro Audio) 1/2" has been selected as the bus output. That's just what my audio interface identifies itself to Windows as. Your choices will probably be different. Note that technically you don't actually need any busses at all. You can simply route each track to the computer's audio hardware. But that's not recommended for a number of reasons. Usually, you have at least one bus and its output is routed to the audio interface. Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be named "Master". You can name it anything you like.

Now that you mention it, the whole room is indeed off plumb. However, I'm pretty sure it was the photographer that was listing, because the piano's got wheels and would have ended up in the kitchen.

The real heroes of this series are Mark Johnson and Enzo Buono, who record and mix those productions. It's hard enough keeping everybody in one band in tune, much less people across 30 countries, some playing non-Western instruments and disparate styles. Any of these could be a class in the art of mixing. Note how different parts and voices are brought up in the mix to coincide with their video vignettes that introduce them, after which it's easy to pick them out of the mix. Still one of the best is the very first one they did. Clearly they've made enough in donations to upgrade their gear since this one.

My primary criterion for selecting guitar strings is how much they 're gonna hurt my soft, delicate piano-player fingers. Back in the day when I played guitar on stage, they were Ernie Ball Super Slinkies (08's). In my defense, it was a Rickenbacker 12-string. Double the pain. I also used FingerEase. Remember that stuff? You'd spray it on the strings to make them slippery. Sure, it attracted dirt and oil and assured the strings would only last a week before they suddenly began drawing blood. But on a fresh set of strings it was like fingering a wet, uh, grapefruit.

I have an old VHS tape of me playing this piano, c. 1980. Fingers literally a blur, so frickin' fast! Zero finesse, zero originality, zero emotion. But very, very fast. I know a few folks still stuck in that mode. Mostly guitar players. My bandmates haven't noticed yet, but my secret weapon at gigs is Iced Starbucks Mochas. Without them I run the risk of forgetting what song we're playing, during my solo.

I first realized this back in 1971 when I plugged a guitar into an oscilloscope at electronics school and said "well, whattaya know? I can do that with my Heathkit signal generator." There are many more than two manufacturers, including some boutique operations and of course a bunch of Chinese companies that specialize in those awful strings that come stock with $69 student guitars . Here in the US, many (most?) are made by Dunlop Manufacturing in Los Angeles. Dunlop's chief string designer (yeh, that's a real job) used to be a regular on the old SONAR forum, under the handle Stringmaster. We met in person at the 2008 NAMM show, where I found out that they not only probably made your strings, but your picks as well. They don't advertise it much, but pretty much every brand you've ever seen in any North American music store is made by them. There are several differentiators among strings, but brand name isn't one of them.

Thank you. We don't see enough Phyllis Diller quotes here. I'm thinking about bringing back Erma Bombeck into our collective consciousness. The grass truly is greener over the septic tank.

Full disclosure: according to the datestamp, that photo was taken in 2013, a year before my wife died. She was 100% responsible for the tidiness, the plants, and that crazy-expensive Chinese table that my great-grandkids do their coloring books on today. These days my place very much looks like it's occupied by a single guy who spends way too much time in the garage in front of said computer. That reminds me, I'd better dust that piano before the tuner gets here. Once every 7 years should be frequent enough for dusting, no?

That singer from NZ is Mihirangi Fleming. Here she is looping on New Zealand's Got Talent.

Best version ever, featuring JP Jones, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi and a bunch of other awesome players. I especially liked the singer from New Zealand. According to the YouTube description, this song dates back to 1929.

It's a Young Chang (Korean), a 6' baby grand. At the time it was the biggest purchase I'd ever made in my life, by far. Took 10 years to pay it off. The day I went in to finalize the purchase, I wandered around the piano store playing on different instruments while the salesman drew up the loan papers. I sat down at one, rattled off a few arpeggios and then ran into the office shouting "I've made a terrible mistake! I want THIS piano instead". He looked over and said "fine, but that one's $40,000. Oh. Carry on then. As for those "folks really wanting a grand piano"...when I tried to sell it back in 2014 in preparation for moving overseas, I got no offers. I had it listed for $3k. I get it; you can buy a nice digital piano for half that. It just won't match your credenza. Unfortunately, it's too far from my DAW to record easily. Mostly I just want to use it for composing and to keep my chops up when my main synth isn't available (I often just keep the Kronos in the van between gigs because I'm very lazy and it's very heavy).

Last time I paid for a piano tuning it was $100. But that was 30+ years ago.

I found this fascinating. All I really knew about Tom before this was that his first product was a ring modulator. The first time I ever laid hands on an Oberheim was c. 1978. I had gone into a studio to lay down faux strings for a friend's record, bringing along an Elka String Synthesizer that belonged to my band's drummer that he let me use on stage. That thing didn't really sound like strings, but it met the expectations of the day. Compared to a Mellotron it was the frickin' London Philharmonic. After the first runthrough of the first song, the engineer approached me and said "I've got something you'd probably like to see". He took me into another room and there was an Oberheim 4-voice. It was beautiful. He then set out to set it up for strings, which took him a good hour to dial in because it had no programmer and therefore required tweaking each of the four modules in turn. In the end, we used the Oberheim on the record because it sounded amazing. After that, I literally dreamt of that synth nightly. But it was way beyond my financial means, and though I did pony up for a single SEM to slave off my Micromoog (that one SEM was $800!), owning a real Oberheim was never to be. Until last year, when I bought the 8-Voice emulation from Cherry Audio for something like 40 bucks. It sounds like the real thing, even if it's not as pretty.

I was about to buy a moderately expensive sample library, not because I needed it but because it's just been awhile since I've had a new toy. But this morning, with mouse hovering over the Buy button, I abruptly changed my mind and decided to have my real piano tuned instead. Although it's not a new toy (I bought it back around 1984), it'll feel new because I stopped playing it 25 years ago after it was last moved. I've had no desire to play it because it sounds awful, having never been tuned after that move. But I remember that it used to sound quite nice and once was a joy to play. Now it's just a nice-looking piece of furniture.

So are you able to insert Breverb into a new project and it works OK? It's just old projects that crash? Maybe it's a case of Breverb (or a dependency) no longer located in the same path that it was previously. The version of Breverb that shipped with SONAR was actually a different version than the one shipped from Overloud. That's because the version licensed with SONAR would only work within SONAR, and Overloud graciously offered SONAR users a free crossgrade to a DAW-agnostic version when SONAR became Cakewalk by BandLab. I just had a look here and I have three different versions of Breverb installed (ProChannel, SONAR and Overloud). Each is in a different location, each has a different datestamp, file size, internal version number and CLSID. As far as the project is concerned, they are three separate plugins, unrelated beyond their names. If your old project referenced a CLSID that no longer exists, that could be your problem. Directory of C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Shared Utilities\Internal 09/26/2012 11:30 AM 3,247,104 BREVERB 2_64.dll 1 File(s) 3,247,104 bytes Directory of C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\VstPlugins\BREVERB SONAR 11/08/2018 11:48 AM 6,089,728 BREVERB 2 Cakewalk-64.dll 1 File(s) 6,089,728 bytes Directory of C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\VstPlugins\Overloud 11/29/2017 05:08 PM 6,243,520 BREVERB 2 Cakewalk-64.dll 1 File(s) 6,243,520 bytes

Well, they're just going to have to wait until 22/2/22. That's when all the computers in the world reset to 1980 and airplanes start falling from the sky. Trust me, I am a computer expert, and for a small fee I can fix it for you.

Wow, that brings CinePerc down to, um, a meager $450. Yeh, it's an industry standard and all, but that'd heat my home for a month. Personally, I'd be OK with a cool library in the cold, but I live with other people who don't share my values.

Hearing loss is a topic that's come up here many times. Musicians, of course, are more prone to it than the general population. But so are audio engineers, who lose their high frequencies much faster than others (this I heard at a NAMM talk by a hearing specialist). Dave makes an interesting point here, which is that even though he has trouble understanding people talking, he still hears tiny details when mixing. This points out the difference between hearing acuity and critical listening skills. The longer you mix, the more dialed-in you become. I routinely identify flaws in commercial recordings that I've listened to for decades and thought were just fine. Kick beater squeaks, footsteps, traffic noise, people talking in the background - stuff I hear now because I've spent so many hours intently listening for such things. Even as my overall hearing continues to degrade.

Should also note that excessive VLF is quite common, even in sample libraries. Here's the first one I chose at random, from a reputable library developer. The greatest amount of energy is below the usable range (this is not a low-pitched instrument). The presumption is that you, the mixer, will decide how much of it you want to use.

Extreme DC bias in a full mix can mess with your speakers' dynamic range, by continually pushing the driver out or pulling it in and thus reducing its throw. Depends on the speaker, though. Many active monitors have their own DC filtering. As noted previously, just looking odd isn't necessarily a problem. FM waveforms are by nature wildly unnatural and often weird-looking. Also note that VLF content (subsonic frequencies) can look like DC. At what point do very low frequencies become "DC"? I don't know. However, I do know that for most genres, anything below ~45 Hz is mostly wasted energy, and anything below 30 Hz is definitely not needed. Even if you're making bass-heavy dance music intended to be reproduced on large full-range systems, there is a point where it's wasted energy that messes with playback systems and biases your mastering limiter to the point where perceived bass and overall loudness can actually suffer. For this reason, it's a good practice to always have a HPF on your master bus and just get rid of that stuff. If you can't hear it, dump it.

You may want to investigate convolution reverbs, which typically have more nonlinear options than do algorithmic reverbs. The old PerfectSpace reverb that used to be bundled with SONAR could do damn near anything you want with the tail envelope. It's not available anymore unless you have an old installation of SONAR, but there are plenty of similar plugins out there, including the Voxengo version on which PerfectSpace was based. The term "nonlinear" can mean many things. For example, it is often used as a synonym for "gated". If that's what you're after, then any reverb can do it by adding a gate. But if you're using the term to indicate a "bloom" effect, Toraverb from D16 Group does that well. If you're using the word to include "reverse" reverb, I'd recommend tkdelay from tritik. "Nonlinear" can also describe ducking, which the aforementioned tkdelay also does.

Well, that certainly is unusual. Technically not DC offset, though, which results in an otherwise normal-looking waveform whose center line is shifted up or down. This is just half a waveform. Unfortunately, I no longer have Dim Pro installed here so can't investigate further. But my assumption would be that as long as it sounds OK it won't cause any problems beyond looking strange. Note that sounds created using FM synthesis often do look weird.