bitflipper

Truth. It's been a staple here for years, on pretty much every vocal track.

Yes, yes I did. In addition to the ThickHeadOfHair variable, my aud.ini also includes: HairColor=0xFFFFFF and StrongBackMode=0 and LPFCutoff=13000

Surfing around the webosphere I see a lot of love for the Champion. Comparing feature-by-feature it appears to offer far more bang for the buck over the Marshall while being 10lb lighter. I'm going to suggest this one, and suggest that we order it today so it'll be here before next week's gig. Thanks for everyone's input!

I think it just comes down to the reality that much of what exists in the loop world is amateur-made by folks who just don't know that loops are more akin to samples than to finished mixes. Plus anything identified as a "backing track" is probably meant to be used in a live situation, which would suggest being mastered loud. Just a guess. I have rarely experienced this problem myself, which is most likely because the few loops I use are from commercial Kontakt libraries. I assume the loop you're talking about is one that's bundled with Cakewalk? If so, I'd guess those were not made by anyone at Cakewalk and probably sourced from a third party.

Hey, that's the same guy who sold me on the Marshall. I have a feeling he likes every amp. But I'll take the word of an actual owner/user over any paid presenter and if you say it's awesome then it's awesome. I'll have my guitarist watch both the Marshall and the Fender videos when we get together for band rehearsal on Sunday. At $400 the Champion is half the price of the Marshall. I'll just have to sell him on the idea that not having tubes doesn't make him any less of a man.

OK, then. That's a definite "maybe" from Craig. Thank you.

The price difference is large and the solid-state equivalents are usually far more powerful than their tube equivalents. For example, the Fender Twin Reverb solid state version is 200W and $1000, while the tube version is 85W and $1700. If I was certain this claim was valid about a modeling amp sufficiently emulating tubes, I'd press for that option. But not being a guitar player, I lack the authority to make such a claim to my friend. So how say the guitarists here? Do you agree with Greg's assessment?

My first amp was a Kustom in "Cascade", a sort of metallic turquoise pleated naugahyde. 100W head and 3 (!) 15" Jensens. No horn. Not a great amp for a Vox Continental, but everyone in the band had matching amps, including the PA, so at least it looked cool.

OK, got it. I'm thinking in terms of how I use tempo changes, which are never that severe. It's not just MIDI-driven synths that are affected by fast tempo changes; tempo-synced delays also have problems. So I generally avoid them. On the rare occasions that I do need a drastic tempo shift, I'll build the ritard into the performance and leave the tempo alone. Again, it's just my own way of doing things - all my MIDI parts are played, rarely hand-planted into the PRV. But regardless, the answer is still no, you cannot specify offsets in fixed time intervals. Seems that would introduce CPU overhead as the DAW continuously recalculated the number of ticks required to maintain a consistent absolute time. Tempo resolution can be as low as 3 ticks, so you could be recalculating offsets 320 times a second -assuming you haven't changed the number of ticks per second. I'd be looking at why MIDI timing offsets were needed to compensate for a sample library in the first place, and if there might be another way to approach it. Many synths let you change the starting point for sample playback, for example.

Wouldn't the time offset still be wrong after a tempo change whether you specified it in ticks or milliseconds? Assuming, of course, that the "negative delay" required by your sample library is dependent on tempo in the first place. Usually, when an offset is required, it's to compensate for a baked-in slow attack time in the samples, which would remain fairly consistent across a wide range of tempos. Just thinking out loud, as I've never had an issue with MIDI offsets. I usually set the time offset by ear anyway.

Well how 'bout that? I had no idea. Not sure why you'd want to do that, but good to know. Are you next gonna tell me I can load a ProChannel module into the fx bin?

I agree. When you're seriously into recording, you naturally become very nit-picky about even the most trivial of factors ("should I choose the linear-phase option on this tambourine EQ?"). Some of that attention to detail is bound to leak into other activities ("what, your bedsheets are only 400 thread count? Amateur!"). Truth is, in a live performance all you gotta do is make sure your beer doesn't rattle off the bass cab. (True story: a bartender once thought it was a good idea to put a Jack 'o Lantern atop my Leslie. I was too stupid to object, and midway through the second set the bottom rotor and amplifier were splattered with pumpkin guts, resulting in a repair bill that cost more than the gig paid.)

Thanks, CC. I wouldn't have even thought of Boss for amplifiers. Every Boss product I've ever owned ran on 9V batteries.

Oh, that wasn't my first computer. Just the first one I made music on. My first computer was a COSMAC VIP testbed. Came with 1KB of RAM; I had to etch my own circuit board to upgrade it to 4KB. It saved data to a cassette tape, sometimes. But it did have a nifty 9" monochrome monitor. And I walked 10 miles to school, uphill both ways.

Not in ProChannel. Of course, you can use anything you want in the fx bin. But ProChannel plugins are made specifically for ProChannel.

My first guess would be that you have a plugin running in demo mode. Nice production, btw.

My first music rig was over the top: 386 with 10 MB drive and 16MB RAM. In the mid-80's that was an enviable setup. The drive was $600 and half the RAM I stole out of a Sun workstation, as I deemed any computer that couldn't make music unworthy of a whole 16MB. Cakewalk 1.0 for DOS, five synths, a 2-track Pioneer and a 4-track TEAC 3340S. Altogether maybe $10-12k or so invested - when I was only making $30k a year. We have it so much better now!!!

Damn, if all tube amps had multicolored light shows inside, I might go back to valves myself! I did in fact have a look at the Hughes & Kettner amps during my research. I've always thought they looked awesome. But at $2500 I'll just buy some LED strip lights instead. Greg, is this your amp? It's considerably less-expensive than the Marshall, too.

Not to brag, but I was once the youngest person in the world. Granted, it was a title I did not hold for long. I like that you can approach CW old-school, as a replacement for a tape recorder if you want to. But if you're a beatz and loops kind of guy, CW will accommodate you just as comfortably. In fact, CW has encouraged me over the years to incorporate more modern production techniques. The result is a hybrid approach that combines old-school print-in-realtime audio, recording MIDI instead of audio, and hand-planting MIDI in the PRV. Even the occasional loop for tedious things like shakers and tambourines. The toolbox just continues to grow. The biggest breakthrough was discovering the hidden variable in aud.ini... DontSuck=1

Hmm. Now that's some food for thought, being as the Fender would be a whole lot cheaper than the Marshall, which will come to a grand with tax and slip cover. Only problem is he seems committed to tubes. Funny, he's 28 y.o. but often says he feels he was born in the wrong decade, being a fan of classic rock and classic tones. I guess that's why he's happy playing in a band with a bunch of geezers.

Good point. I've already warned him he'd better not become "that guy", you know, the one who decides he's the star of the show. Although in my experience it's usually been bass players who are more likely to have that problem. Anyway, his 40 Watts will still have to compete with my 4KW.

Put your glasses on, Ed.

Thanks for lending a few brain cycles to this, Shane. The amp had power and the light was on, but there was no sound at all out of the speaker. I spoke to the guitarist yesterday and suggested that he really needed a better amp anyway, as he has trouble getting enough volume on clean tones. Knowing he's broke, I volunteered to buy the amp myself and let him use it while he saved up enough money to buy it from me. Yeh, I know, that's almost as bad as loaning money to a friend, a practice I long ago vowed never to do again after bad experiences. But hey, if he bails on the deal at least I'll have a nice amp. This is the one we're considering. I watched some YT demos and it sounds quite nice, either dirty or clean. It's got an amp sim built in to the line out that I'll be able to run to the vocal monitors. Two channels, each with its own gain and master volume controls. Closed-back with a single 12" Celestion. Switchable between 20W and 40W.

That's how I do it. Always. That's really the key to recording most things: you can do anything with a clean recording, including changing your mind later. As to "real" vs. digital saturation - yes, it's an emulation and if you'd spent 40 years recording analog tape before moving to digital you'd be able to tell the difference. Nobody else will.

Channel Tools is an often-overlooked gem, probably because users don't initially get what it does or why they'd need it.