bitflipper

That's just the nature of a business in which products have a short shelf life. Unfortunately, the result is more often redundancy than revolution. OTS guitars are a good example. Every one of them is excellent, but my favorite is still the original Strawberry. Well, that and the Jumbo. And the Rick bass. Then there's the acoustic slide guitar. OK, so maybe OTS isn't the best example.

Same here. I don't care. My stuff is expressly tailored to my own preferences, and anything I don't like I can change. It therefore stands to reason that at least some of it will be among my favorite things to listen to. btw, it might help if the soundclick link in your signature went somewhere besides 404.

I am only familiar with the original library, which I like. But I am confused about the product line - how on earth do they have four volumes without repeating themselves? I've listened to the demos, and they all sound lovely, especially Lumina. I can't justify buying all four. And wouldn't Orchestra Essentials be a closer analog to Albion One?

In my initial post, I had typed "no VSL suggestions, I can't justify that kind of money". But then deleted that line before posting. I didn't want to influence anyone's suggestions by eliminating anything up front. The first time I heard VSL was at NAMM in 2008. I walked into their booth and was almost lifted off my feet by what I heard. My first question was why the VSL patches that came with the Kontakt factory library didn't sound anywhere near that good. My second question, "why is this so expensive?" didn't need to be asked. Two downsides to BBO: First, although the basic library is free the add-ons that truly make it pro-sounding are not. Buying the entire collection would be over $1,500. Second negative: dongles.

That "slap a glob of strings on" aspect is actually part of the appeal. I normally don't work that way, preferring separate tracks for violin1, violin2, viola, cello and bass. Over the course of the mix, I like to bring up different sections at different times and apply different amounts of reverb/room to each. I like the basses dry, the violins wet. Maybe not realistic, but I'm not a purist for realism. I like to play bass parts in their upper register and cellos in their lowest notes, and have the violins and violas weave about each other. I like to have different articulations for each section or instrument. But I already have libraries for that. There are times when I just want to underlay some strings in a piece that's not primarily orchestral, using them as pads. I would like a nice-sounding library for that kind of stuff.

And here you thought you'd never have a use for that 1000 LPM band printer you picked up in 1986.

I'm generally a Spitfire fanboy, and have always liked the Hollywood-esque tone of Albion One, but have never owned it. It's currently on sale for $269, and has recently added some new brass samples. So I am considering the purchase. I hesitate because I already have a bunch of orchestral libraries and don't actually need another one. (But when has "need" ever been a factor in G.A.S. mitigation?) Also, it seems more geared toward epic trailer music, which I love but just ain't my thing. Furthermore, a friend who does have it has said he rarely uses it. That could just come down to our respective genre preferences. So my question is: for those who do have Albion One, do you find it useful? If not, can you suggest an alternative (preferably < $400) worthy of consideration? I don't have a problem spending money if it means never buying another all-in-one orchestral library.

Wookie has, in his characteristically diplomatic way, answered your question.

Always fall asleep with headphones on. But sleep is a temporary luxury us elder folk only get to enjoy during those too-brief intervals between pee breaks. The cans come off before my first nocturnal trip to the other can. It's weird being the same age as old people.

Late at night I slip into bed, put on my best headphones and pick something at random. Often, it is my own stuff, sometimes going back more than 20 years. And quite often, I am pleasantly surprised that it's better than I'd remembered. Sometimes I hear a little detail and think "ooh, I should do that more often", or "I gotta find out what library that effect came from and use it again". Sure, occasionally my reaction will be "what the hell was I thinking?". But reviewing your past work is a great way to get better at it. At the end of the day, the path to music-making satisfaction is tailoring it to an audience of one: yourself. If you like it, it's good.

Yes. The one I so carefully baby and transport in a custom case that cost more than my previous mixer. That one.

Wish I'd taken a photo of last week's stage. It was outdoors, in the Cascade foothills. When I looked up their website there was a photo of what appeared to be a nice, covered stage. But when we got there it wasn't nearly big enough for the five of us, so I set up in front of the stage, on uneven grass. Now, here's my stand: It's called a spider stand and looks like it might not be stable on an uneven surface. Surprisingly, it is. German engineering. But every time I set those heavy keyboards on it I wish it was 4x4s rather than spider legs holding it all up. Because the stage was so small, we had to place monitors off to the sides, on sticks raised up to about 7'. A gust of wind rocked a canopy next to them, which pushed a monitor over. Luckily, its momentum was somewhat slowed by crashing into my mixer on the way down, before settling atop both keyboards. Even with my heart temporarily stopped , I couldn't help mentally totaling up the replacement costs while watching it all in slow motion. Incredibly, there was no serious damage. I still don't quite know how. That's a 35lb speaker falling 7 feet onto my little Yamaha DM3, then on to the Kronos and finally the Montage. The mixer wasn't even dented. I remain a fan of Yamaha mixers! Both keyboards were askew but didn't fall. So good job K&M. I will stop saying your products are overpriced. Apologies to Notes for straying off-topic. In my defense, I am still traumatized by this near-tragedy and who better to commiserate with than all of you guys?

I snapped that photo between sound check and going onstage, so it was more likely our soundcheck that forced that lady to retreat into her phone. At least she didn't get up and leave, so there's that.

Hey, Craig, your psychedelic animation video got used again last night:

Cheese, man, don't share that result with her! If she finds out you can actually hear just fine, she's gonna start formulating hypotheses to explain why you're unresponsive when she's offering helpful self-improvement advice. In none of those hypotheses do you come out looking better.

That is in fact a fact. I have to make a conscious effort to go easy on the 2-5KHz band, because even though it makes everything crisp and bright to my old ears, I remind myself that most people won't hear it the same way I do. But the FoH guy tonight is at least 40 years younger than me. His ears shouldn't be shot yet. Then again the first time I met him I asked how he felt about the PA (because it seemed oversized for the room) his response was "oh, it gets plenty loud!". Priorities, I guess.

I'm playing a venue tonight where I'm convinced there really is a SUCK knob on the console. It's an expensive PA in a permanent installation with a dedicated FoH operator, so it should sound a lot better than it does. But it seriously sucks, with a seemingly-intentional 5KHz spike that feels like an icepick to the ears. We only play there because they pay well, we get free food, and it's over at 9:00 PM.

The easiest and most reliable solution is to add volume automation to the MIDI track, even if it's just a single data point at the start of the song. That way, you'll always know where the volume is going to start out regardless of other factors. It's easy to edit in the PRV if your initial choice turns out to be too low/high. When adding a Kontakt instrument, my standard procedure is to open the Instrument Settings and set the cc7 range to 0dB or +6dB, and to bump up the DFD buffer size. The latter has nothing to do with volume, but both are steps that I end up doing so often that now I just set them up from the get-go.

I didn't know if it was day or night

Once upon a time this was my go-to limiter. Good to see it's still being maintained. Even though W1 has since been superseded in my own toolbox by fancier ($$) limiters, I think this still has a place on individual tracks due to its light weight. Although if somebody's just starting out and making do with freebies, then this will also work just fine on the master bus and is a lot simpler to use than, say, Limiter No. 6.

Lol, that's the attitude! Help keep the industry afloat.

Why? Is that the premise of a current show on Netflix? I'd like to see that. Of course, any fictional treatment will get it all wrong...the key to initiate the malware will be a physical thing that spies shoot each other over and one heroic CIA agent will destroy just as an LED countdown timer has 1 second remaining. While sweating over whether to cut the red or black wire - finally impressing his hot female boss who had to have him retired after a bad psych eval.

Y2K was a gift to coders around the world. I, with a partner, worked for three years completely rewriting the property tax system for a local county. Three years of 80+ hour weeks - at 90 bucks an hour for each of us. Shaking that kind of money out of a county budget was only possible due to popular culture overhyping the coming apocalypse. Remember a TV show called "Millennium"? Its whole premise was airplanes falling out of the sky and elevators dropping at midnight. Of course, software devs already knew about the problem and had actually been working on it since the 80's. But I was careful not to seem too flippant about it, lest I inadvertently dispel their fears. That fear made my mortgage payments for three years. Unfortunately, because we all survived Y2K, nobody's taking very real existential threats seriously now. WW3 won't start with a surprise nuke attack. It will begin with a massive power outage.

Clever! Same applies to devices that read magstripes, like the ones on the backs of credit cards. I used to have a keyboard with a built-in magstripe reader. We used it at trade shows to log the badges of visitors to our booth. I wrote the software for that, so naturally I first sat down with the reader to see what's written on the backside of credit cards, hotel room keys and employee time cards. Made me realize how insecure programmable hotel room keys are, since they can be easily duplicated. Ever have your hotel room key not work, requiring a visit to the front desk to have it reprogrammed? You'd probably stood too close to a magnetic field, such as a transformer. Or had a souvenir fridge magnet in your pocket next to the room key. Or you were a mischievous tech geek who likes to experiment.

I'd suggest installing the VST2 version for simplicity. When I installed the VST3 version, it scanned OK, showed up in the vst inventory in the registry, and was listed in the Cakewalk Plugin Manager as enabled. However, it would not show up in the Insert Synth menu until I subsequently also installed the VST2 version, after which both versions were listed. I haven't installed a VST3 instrument in awhile, so I don't know if this is a Sonar issue or not. When copying the presets for the VST3 version, the actual path is %userprofile%\Documents\VST3 Presets\gunnar ekornaas\MinimogueVA. You will need to create the "gunnar ekornaas" and "MinimogueVA" folders before copying the files. If this is your first VST3 instrument, you'll probably have to also create the "VST3 Presets" folder.