John Bradley

FWIW, "Bad" was much later (1987), after "Thriller". You might be thinking "Off the Wall", which was his first solo album, released in 1979. Suspect you're a few years older than me. First 'new' album I believe I had (that wasn't the Beatles, "Hair" or "Jesus Christ Superstar" albums I swiped from mom) was KISS Alive II in 1977.

Thanks! Hey, it was only 43 years ago... we're just getting warmed up! Didn't buy Bat until much later, but I do remember buying The Wall the day it came out in 1979. Sides 1 and 3 spent the subsequent 2 months on my turntable.

Paradise by the Dashboard Light Got 9 minutes to kill? Here's a mildly exciting adventure from back when songs had sections, pianos, lots of guitars, and told actual stories. In this case, that would be the story of "getting SOME" and the post-SOME-getting regret, presented in the form of a long argument between me and myself. Which is somewhat awkward, but whatcha gonna do. --- Drums: Session Drummer 3. Running 5 outputs (kick, snare, hat, toms, cymbals). Added a common "drum verb" on each, as well as a "drum comp" send on the kick/snare/toms with a BOZ Manic Compressor sitting on that aux to do the NYC big drum sound thing. An Ozone 8 Vintage Limiter sits on the drum bus to smooth it out. Bass: IKM's MODO Bass, direct out, running through Blue Cat Axiom for amp/speaker sim Percussion: A 2getheraudio CL4P clap synth comes in for the disco section. Synths: Two TruePianos Cakewalk's, (I did the left and right hands as separate tracks, for reasons). An Arturia Solina comes in for some synthetic stringage during the second go around of the "cold and lonely" bit. Arturia Clavinet funks it up during the disco section. Guitars: Five in total. There's a left-right pair playing more or less the same thing on two different amps throughout most of the song (sans the disco section). Guitar 3 is playing roughtly the same thing on an even cleaner setting, diverges to play the little answering high bits during "our bodies are held so close and tight", and the "let me sleep on it" parts, as well as playing the higher half of the disco riff. Guitar 4 only plays during the disco section, doubling Guitar 3's part only crunchier and down an octave. Guitar 5 provides the power chords that enter in the last third of the song (starting with "Stop right there...") All guitars recorded direct, run through their own instances of Axiom. Vocals: The lead male vocal is single tracked, running through Nectar 2 (gate, de-essing, slight unison doubling, bit of saturation, compression, EQ, and some chorus), then into a BOZ T-Bone to roll off the highs a bit and boost the low mids somewhat. There's also a MEqualizer doing a 4.5db cut at 300Hz and 3db boost at 3kHz which I switch in on a few lines that I sang quieter or whatever and weren't as bright as the majority of the vocals. Got them back to a similar timbre. * The lead 'female' vocal is of course just my wimpy falsetto, running through a Nectar 2 (de-esser, gate, little saturation, compressing, EQ, slight chorus & 1/8th note delay). A Blue Tubes BQ2S-3 does a 3db cut at 800Hz and a 2db cut at 10k and above. A Tokyo Dawn NOVA (free version) is added to do a substantial amount of dynamic cutting at 10.5kHz (wide bell, Q=1.0) to reign in an annoying squeak in my voice on some of the notes. Though I suppose a 50db cut at 20Hz and above would have done that even better. It is what it is. Phil Rizzuto: (aka, the baseball section) run through an iZotope Trash 2 (modified patch using 'mild excitement' distortion, and 'cheap radio' convolution), with further shaping in the ProChannel channel compressor and eq. Backing Vocals: Many of them, from 1 up to 7 tracks in places. Each track gated, compressed, and eq'd (cut below 100Hz, roll off starting at 10kHz) in their respective prochannels, with a Blue Cat Chorus and a BREVERB on the bus. Melodyne Studio 4: Big heaping slabs of it. Tokyo Dawn Slick EQ (free version) on the master 'Music' bus just to thin out the mix a bit (-2.2db at 600Hz), to give the vox a little more room. A GW MixCentric and Ozone 8 on the master to add a little bit of 'magic' and loud, respectively. --- * About the line "But god only knows what I could do right now." Wound up re-singing that line each time I did a refinement of the final mix. The Loaf sings it at C5 which is solidly in my falsetto range (and his). Sang it there the first couple of times. But I've never worked out how to do a powerful manly screech like the best rock vocalists (e.g. Daltry, etc.), and it came out sounding unsurprisingly identical to the 'female' voice. Lacked the right amount of menace. So I went down an octave (or two, hard to decide). Not what I wanted, but it's an improvement, trust me.

"Bounce to clips" to convert them to a normal clip. Or use Volume Automation on the track.

Yet somehow two companies are allowed near total control over what you can and cannot do on 99% of the smartphone market. As MS learned too late, it's important the lobby (aka, buy) the government before engaging in certain monopolistic practices. Also, on topic: Macrium Reflect Free Edition does everything anyone might need. Been using it for many years.

No prob, always good to learn "Yet Another Thing that CW already does and you just never bumped into it." Anyway, nope. Shift constrains node dragging to 90 degree angles, which is very useful as well. Lets you move nodes up and down without accidentally moving them in time. Likewise, lets you move them left and right while keeping the value from changing.

"I said 'lunch', not 'launch'!"

Just tried to do a backup of my current magnum opus to a BUN file, to transfer it to the PC in my band room. It zipped along as normal (always a thrill how fast it is compared to exporting audio), but at the end of the process it popped open a little tiny dialog box with the yellow "!" triangle... and nothing else. No text, just the icon and an OK button. Not sure what that's all about. The resulting BUN file is 2.33GB (2,506,762,030 bytes). If there was a limitation on BUN file size, I'd have guessed 2GB, so that doesn't explain the cryptic error. Also, I just opened the BUN and had it extract its files to a different location than my working project, and it all seems to be there. So no clue what CbB (ver. 2020.08) was complaining about.

Haven't had any in months. And the last time I did, I paid full price!

The dangers of opining on things you've never wanted to do. ?

Value-wise, I rely on the tooltip that shows up when you drag the nodes. As far as I know, there's no equivalent to the Event Inspector where you can directly type a value.

What I'd like is the ability to select 1 or more control points and move them up or down by "a small value" (say 0.1db for volume automation, 1% for pan, etc.) via some key binding. Don't need the ability to move points left and right, though I wouldn't object if that came along for the ride. As it stands, unless I vertically maximize the given track/lane - which is annoying to do, especially if working on multiple tracks simultaneously - it requires pixel level precision with the mouse, and even then the minimum step size is dependant on the height of the track (typically 0.4db on my screen). It'd be nice to select the points, loop playback, and just hit some ctrl-num-8 or whatever to tweak the mix of that section without getting fiddly with the mouse.

I took that as "I bought Carbon at full price not that long ago, and now they're giving it away for free." Which, if the case, would annoy me as well.

Like when his friends and acquaintances must have told him early on "Stick to the songwriting, Bob. The singing, y'know, it's not really your thing..."

"Looks like you're gonna need a bigger cat..."

Hmm... I've only got the one DAW, and I've got to believe it's one of the ones Larry would have tried. ?

Thinking maybe I don't need a free copy of Carbon after all. The whole process sounds more than a little annoying for a thing I'm unlikely to ever use, beyond the initial dick-around-with-and-then-forget-about stage.

Thanks for the advice. Both solutions look like they'll do the trick nicely. Gonna play with that Notemapper thing first, as that looks like it could solve several other problems I didn't know I had! And the CAL approach appeals to my past life as a C programmer, two careers ago...

So, the cover tracks I produce often serve a dual purpose: standalone hunks of music for my own amusement, and backing tracks/teaching tool for my band. (Which granted, hasn't been an issue for 6 months, and may never be again, but I'm an optimist. Or possibly an optometrist.) Currently, I use Session Drummer 3 for nearly everything. I'd like to use Addictive Drums or the freebie version of SSD or whatever; something with more hi-hat and snare articulation, at least for some 'real drummer' songs. BUT, for the purposes of programming my real-life drummer and/or producing notation, I'd also like a way to flatten such complicated MIDI down to standard GM MIDI drums (e.g., all the snare hits become note #38, all the various types of closed-hat hits become #42). Anyone know how to do that automatically? Note that I don't care how good or bad the resulting midi sounds, it's for looking at, not listening to.

Thanks... and having now watched a couple videos on it, I can see why. I'd rather keep 37GB of hard drive space empty.

FWIW, here's my list of potential pickups to get Carbon (already have Trash 2). If you've played with any of them, let me know what you think. Strike 2 by AIR Music Technology - $49 TDR Nova GE by Tokyo Dawn Labs - $36 Mini Grand by AIR Music Technology - $5 W.A. Production Mutant Bundle - $6.90 Vocal Cleaner by W.A. Production - $7.90 W.A. Production Make It Loud Bundle - $9.91 I'd like a better druminator than Session Drummer 3, particularly one that has a few levels of high-hat closedness. Have Addictive Drums 2, but it annoys me. Need to watch some vids or d/l the demo to see if Strike 2 does what I want. TDR Nova GE - Got the freebie version of Nova and like it. Could see getting the real version. And Mini Grand and the various WA Production things might be of some use. Don't really need another piano, but $5, y'know. Was reasonably impressed with WA's Babylon synth, though I picked up ther Venom fx thing for cheap and have never used it, so who knows. Still, the prices are so low it doesn't really matter. Though I should probably save some of them for future "get the free giveaway" purchases!

Automation. Mute the track / cut the volume, or if it's a single effect producing the tail you could also bypass the effect or adjust it's wet/dry param if it has one.

Arturia upgrade pricing always leaves something to be desired. As far as I know, they never offered the 'good' price ($99) to upgrade from (synth) Collection 6 to Collection 7, and even that'd be debatable given what's in 7. Similarly, I bought "3 filters..." and "3 delays..." when they were released, but they never offered an acceptable deal to go from those to FX Collection. (Admittedly, the only part of FXC I'd have wanted was the reverbs. Compressors, I'm drowning in, and preamps... too cork-sniffery for my needs. So that lowers the relative value of same quite a bit from my perspective.) Still, I'd have thrown money at them if they'd made me a deal.

As opposed to the ones that don't? ? Anyway, unless Zalman offers those particular fans as a replacement item, you're pretty much gonna be replacing the whole assembly. Personally, I'd recommend similar designs - such as the Deepcool Gammaxx 400 - that use standard rectangular 120mm fans, for cheap & easy replacement down the line when (not if!) the bearings start to fail. Also, unless you're overclocking or some such, a single 120mm fan on the CPU should be more than adequate. And quieter (and cheaper!) than a dual-fan cooler.

All I want to know is, Why Isn't Waves Berzerk Open Source? They could be doing anything in there! <runs screaming in the opposite direction>