John Bradley

Random guess: are you using the computer's built-in audio (typically a Realtek chip)? If so, it's possible you might have the recording input set (in the various Windows/Realtek control panels) set to "Stereo Mix" or "What I hear" or words to that effect rather than "Line-in". If that's not the case... never mind!

Are You Gonna Go My Way Not from the '80s, but close - 1993. Good lord, this song's nearly 30 years old... Technical data: Minimal -- Straight ahead rock - guitar, bass and drums, no synths. Recorded in Feburary 2020. Drums: Session Drummer 3 as always Bass: IKM's MODO BASS doing what it does. The Rickenbacker model rather than the P-bass I typically use. At some point I stopped using the internal amp modelling in MODO, and just take the 'direct' out into Axiom, but this is before I figured that out. Did add a bit of Trash 2 to give it a slight edge, and some ST3REO and BREVERB to fill it out. Guitars: Two 'riff' guitars panned hard left/right, the one on the right playing up an octave and coming and going as it sees fit. A third guitar for the lead. All three are done on this '85 Japanese Strat (with EMGs) that I got for my 21st birthday so very long ago. BIAS FX doing the amp sim on each of them. Oh, and the "Les Paul rhythmic cutout using the pickup selector" thing at the very end was done by automating the Gtr1&2 bus volume after the fact. Strats don't do that. Vocals: Double tracked the whole way through, with some NECTAR 2 on each track providing some very slight chorus & delay, compression, limiting. Critically the 'Harmony' module is providing 2 voices of unison with a bit of pitch/time variation. So there's effectively six voices singing the vocal at all times. (vox, vox double, + 2 voices of harmony on each). And obviously, some Melodyne Studio 4... the magic whatsit that makes any of this possible! Effects: Beyond what's mentioned above, just normal ProChannel stuff and BREVERB, plus an Ozone Limiter on the drum bus and Ozone 8 on the master.

Baum baum... chika-chikahhh.

EMF mode enabled: You're unbeliev-a-bull!

You can also "Bounce to track..." in the Tracks menu above the track pane. Might be more convenient if you have multiple clips on a given track.

Fwiw, I use ISOL8 from TB Pro Audio. Does this and some other useful things. Free. https://www.tb-software.com/TBProAudio/ISOL8.html

Or they could do whatever nearly everybody else does. I don't know exactly what that is mind you, only that I have a lot of paid s/w from Arturia, iZotope, IKM, and NI, (not to mention Adobe CC), and none of them ever periodically lose their authorization, despite the semiannual Win10 updates. Just XLN. It's quite irritating.

Awesome. It's been 35 years since I've had a really good fan! Ya ain't seen nothing yet. I've got over 80 of these things queued up, and only a handful are too 'personal' (read: embarassingly bad) to release/inflict. And I try to complete a new one every week or so. Thanks! Regarding the sibilance, I almost certainly had Neutron 2's de-esser enabled and dialed in to something deliberate. It's a tradeoff between getting the S's to behave and killing the air, and I probably err more towards perserving the air. Some people are bass-heads, I'm all about the high-freqs. Though I acknowledge the possibility of partial deafness after being in various bands for 40 years. I'm always interested to hear what gear folks use to make their tracks, so I offer the info for any other "yes, but how does it work" people like me. When I'm 'done' with a mix, or at least ready to stick a fork in it, I slap Ozone 8 on the master, tell it to shoot for "CD, Medium intensity", and let it do whatever it wants. I might tweak the results a bit, but generally I find the changes pretty subtle other than the Limiter, so I assume it knows what it's doing. I do not. The intro... well, that's what the original song does, and it's only 4 bars before a the groove kicks in. Good enough for New Order, good enough for me! You and your wife wouldn't happen to buy millions of copies of any song you like, would you? If so, maybe I could actually 'make it' in the music biz!

Arturia has this very annoying 'feature' where the first time you load up one of their instruments or effects it shows a "hey, want to see the tutorial" dialog box. I've seen this effectively prevent the plug-in from doing whatever it's supposed to do and prevent it from loading up the DAW-supplied settings. Very irritating when you have a bunch of their things scattered in FX bins or the Synth rack across a project. Particularly if you transfer a project over from your main studio computer to a playback-only machine where you're unlikely to have opened any of the plug-ins in a long time. The solution is to open each plug-in (luckily, not each instance of each plug-in), click the "no, I don't need a freakin' tutorial" and close them. Then close the project (without saving), and reload the project. Should be good to go. Until the next time they update their stuff...

"Greetings, 'uhh Clem'." "What the...? My name's not Clem." "We're sorry, this ride is now closed" "Closed? Man, I've been waiting 10 minutes to talk to the President... Hey Paulo, I think he broke the President!"

Bought and paid-for software of any significant complexity is observably getting more unstable and crashy as endless piles of new code are added on top of old code that no one understands any longer. And that's from reputable companies that at least on paper would like their stuff to work perfectly. The last thing I'm going to do is 'save money' by buying ersatz software that almost certainly comes with trojans, keyloggers, and ransomware as an exciting value-add. If they don't just steal the money (and more?) and deliver nothing whatsoever. At least Adobe CC is up front about being ransomware!

Blue Monday '88 Another one from the '80s, because as a gentleman of a certain age, that's the music I like the best. Though for what it's worth, I'd never heard this song until a few years ago. Technical data: Got to play with lots of toys on this one. Drums: Session Drummer 3 doing the basic hat/snare/kick pattern Percussion elements: 2getheraudio's CL4P for both the claps and the echoed 'big claps' that show up every now and then, TX16Wx doing a 16th high-hat, Rapture Pro adding some echoed toms, K1CK and TX16Wx doing the high-pitched synth drums at the beginning of the song, another TX16Wx doing the cowbells that enter in verse 3, and a pair of free-floating samples for the explosion that kicks off verse 3. Bass: IKM's MODO BASS doing the quarter notes down low, with an Arturia MINI doing the octave bounce. Synths: Arturia's Prophet for the opening 'squeaky' synth and the 'chiffy' synth solo that appears before the first drum break. Arturia Jupiter 8 for the analog strings, the Mini again for the arpeggio that enters half-way through verse 1, CMI for the 'aahhs', and Pigments for the reverse sweep during the first drum break. Guitars: The baritone guitar was played at normal pitch, and octave-downed, distorted, and doubled with a bit of normal-pitch guitar in BIAS FX. The clean one is just a compressed+chorused strat, also done in BIAS FX. Effects: normal ProChannel stuff and BREVERB, a couple instances of Arturia's ETERNITY and MEMORY-BRIGADE delays, Izotope TRASH 2 on the aforementioned "high pitched synth drums", Izotope Nectar 2 and 2getheraudio ST3REO on the lead vox. The background vox (including doubling of the 'aahs') were processed through Izotope VocalSynth and 2getheraudio's RE4ORMFX to add auto-panning and filter animation. Ozone 8 on the main bus, doing whatever it felt like doing. Melodyne Studio 4 on the vox, for obvious reasons.

Thanks! I only do covers, because I'm an engineer at heart; gotta tear everything apart and see how it works! I typically don't do guitar/bass/drums songs (unless they have a lot of guitar parts). I can just do those in my band without involving Cakewalk. What I really like doing is sound design - making my own synth patches and/or fx chains to approximate the sounds on the original, using things I've literally got lying around the house. But yeah, Submarines was on a whole different level. Has around 20 tracks of just synths and samplers, way more than anything else I've assembled. Lots of one-shot sounds that play for maybe 5 seconds over the course of a 5 minute song. As for the singing... thanks. I've believe I've been blessed with a reasonably pleasant-sounding tone; it just doesn't reliably hit, or stay on, the desired notes. Useless for live work (not that it stops me) but something that can be fixed with modern technology.

You're a braver man than I am — I get so rattled by BSODs that I don't dare provoke them!

And yet they still want me to spend $149 to upgrade from the Legacy Bundle (with the Odyssey) to KORG Collection 2. So I could buy the Triton all by itself for $199, or, because I own everything they've released prior to the Triton, I can get it for $50 off. And that's not been affected by this sale at all, as far as I can tell. I'm sure a Triton is a nice thing, but that's a significant pile of money that could be used towards UVI Falcon, KOMPLETE, or some other high-ticket synth package that I'm unlikely to buy anytime soon. It's as if they don't want to take my money! Which, I suppose I should thank them.

Anyone have any experience with the Steinberg UR22C? Has USB 3.1 SuperSpeed technology (which could be so much marketing wank), and does latency-free monitoring with built-in DSP effects ala the UAD stuff if you're into that.

Not necessarily! I would not recommend anything in the Focusrite Scarlett range at this point. The hardware's fine, but they've more or less given up on driver development. Releases come out rarely, and don't quite work. I currently have my choice of 4.63.24 (which BSODs if I switch buffer size while CbB is running), the no longer available 4.64.15 beta (which started BSODing on boot at some point), and the current 4.65.5 release, which occasionally BSODs and exhibits some other odd behavior. I went back to 4.63.24, because at least the behavior is deterministic.

It's gettin' hot in hare, so take off all your clothes...

Preferences | MIDI | Playback and Recording - make sure "Channel Aftertouch" is ticked .

As you probably know, you can't. Not even close. Current prices are around $170 for a 1TB Samsung 860 Evo $400 for 2TB, and $600 for 4TB. $200 is roughly the price for an 8TB mechanical drive (3.5" internal).

Paraphrasing Hitchhiker's Guide: "In America, the people would sit on the beautiful little buns, whose backs would snap instantly. But they continued to do so anyway."

But the important thing is, IS EVERYTHING LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE? ? I mean, it's not a modern mix if it isn't pummelling the listener into submission. As for the guitars, something something BIAS FX something... Anyway, thanks for the comments guys. Feedback is always appreciated!

So... if you fried up a rabbit and put it on a roll, would that be a Bun-Bun? And if you ordered the extra-large version of same, would that be a Super Bun-Bun?

Hmmm.... Downloaded the demo of Largo, and while I was there grabbed the demos of PPG3 and Nave. Not impressed. I suppose they all sounded nice enough, but the UI! The preset browser defied my attempts to change presets. A single click does nothing, and a double-click lets you rename the preset. Very old-school with banks and whatnot. (I'm coming from the perspective of somone used to Arturia's excellent preset browsers, where all patches are in a single giant list, and you can search, filter by categories, easily move up/down through the search results, etc. It's all very civilized.) And the chrome look: needlessly fancy and hard to read. Compare to the plain, but eminently usable UI of the Valhalla plugins. The PPG3 demo was even less intuitive. And Nave was just ugly. Oh, and none of the demos created entries in the Settings | Apps list, and only one of them left a "uninstall" shortcut in the start menu, so cleaning up the mess was slightly irritating. Wouldn't buy any of the 3 at $25, let alone their crazy-high 'normal' prices. Again, maybe they can make some great sounds, and maybe with some reading one can figure out how to use them. But the first impression was godawful.

I hear that. I see these synths (both keyboard and desktop versions) being demoed at NAMM, or on Sonicstate, and I'm like "great: make a VST version of same for <$100 or so and get back to me". Most recently the KORG Wavestate. (I have the old Wavestation vst, but the new synth seems much better... which could be just an example of "gives good demo".) Not a keyboard player; no desire to own any hardware. I'm one of those do-it-all-in-the-box guys.