John Bradley

Now, now! Everything Native Instruments makes is so dirt-cheap, practically free! How can you expect them to stay in business without ads? ?

Bought and downloaded, though I’ll wait a bit before installing on my DAW system. I installed the recently released Axiom 2.0 as soon as it was available. It made CbB randomly “crashy” when freezing guitar tracks. They’ve fixed that in Axiom 2.05, and patched it pretty quickly, but lesson learned. I can wait a week or two to see if there’s a Destructor 2.01 or whatever!

I don’t suppose power-cycling the midi controller while leaving the pedal attached helps? My ancient Alesis Quadrasynth correctly works with pedals of either polarity by looking at the state of the pedal on power-up and calling that the default, un-sustained state.

My take on The Ting Tings hit from way back whenever it was. The original didn't have a 90 second guitar solo; this has been rectified. Literally. My friend Rachel did a fine job of channeling the snottiness of a too-cool-for-school 20something, I think. She'd never heard the song before I said "hey, can you sing this?" The video is a collection of pet pictures from my friends, online and 'real'. The beasts are shown with their real names and the goofy names their bored owners made up for them over the course of their lives. I'm told this was "a thing" over on the Instagrams. I can neither confirm nor deny this. I highly recommend hitting the 'Watch on YouTube' button to see it in its full 1080p60 glory. The embedded version doesn't look nearly as good, at least for me.

Yeah, it's not a phrase you run into all that often. Maybe in some love songs, I suppose...

It'll prevent squeaking, which can be very distracting for all concerned.

When you're busting out the Irwin trigger clamps, you know you're in for quality rim job.

Multiple tacos & burritos were consumed during the making of this track. For research and verification, you understand.

Absolutely. It’s all about achieving the end result. No one, other than other musicians & engineers, cares how hard or easy the process was, as long as the result is interesting in some way. Look at how much more depth there was to music of the early ‘70s when 24-track machines were a thing (thinking specifically of Genesis, Yes, Floyd) compared to what was attainable a mere decade earlier when the Beatles were basically recording live in studio to mono or 2-track. Was that cheating? Who cares. It’s lovely music that wouldn’t have otherwise existed.

If there is an eel near the reef Eating fish with its teeth That’s a moray!

Indeed! Who's got time for that, there's product to ship!

It’s also useful on occasion to take a lead line and slam it to on-pitch and on-time, and shift the blobs aroud a crazy amount (+/- 7 semitones?) in order to recompose the melody and make it more interesting. Then resing a few more takes using that as a guide track before deleting it. Also works for guitar solos and working out vocal harmonies. Melodyne Studio is a very useful compositional tool, even if you need to rerecord the parts afterwards.

Yeah, you can get away with a lot on the backing vocals. Crushing them to on-grid pitch, shifting blobs more than a semitone up or down, etc. Things that’d sound completely fake and weird on a lead vocal, or in isolation, but mixed in with a couple extra backing vocal tracks plus the lead line and they glue together into something pleasant. Within reason, of course!

…they’re really not that great. Wholly inferior to that Prince of Foods, the Burrito. I try not to get too political in these songs, but sometimes you’ve just got to tackle the important issues and speak uncomfortable truths. Nearly all shots were generated with Adobe’s “text to image” AI mcjibble, so that’s why they’re all a liitle “off”. AI doesn’t understand the number of strings and tuners on a guitar, what human hands look like, whether taco stuff goes on the inside or outside of the shell, and so on. But they’re colorful things to look at while the song plays, and that’s largely the point of a music video.

Thanks, glad y'all liked it! Couldn't have made the video without the help of all the wonderful lunatics who dress up their dogs and share pictures of same. It was once such photo that got me rolling the phrase "punk chihuahua" around in my head and thinking "that's got a good rhythm". Originally was thinking of Psychostick's Girl Directions, but opted for Holiday in Cambodia as it was more musically my sort of thing. Wrote lyrics and recorded the song (in CbB, obviously. All processing (including amp sims) done in-box.), and then had to find images that kinda matched up with the lyrics. The Internet did not disappoint!

“Peanut, in this house we sit in front of the pillows, not behind them.” ”AROOO?”

Here's a song (and video) I did this week. The song is the Dead Kennedys' Holiday in Cambodia but with new lyrics about an anthropomorphic poseur dog with Short Man's Syndrome. Obviously. Some songs just write themselves. Also, there's some guitar nonsense.

Select the clip(s) in question. Right click and go to Associated Audio Files in the context menu. Click Recompute Picture(s) in the dialog box.

Hopefully 3.9 will happen soon. Nectar’s been my vocal strip of choice for years. In the interim, I’ve been working around it by not using the Harmonizer module, only enabling Nectar when I’m in high latency mix mode (1024 samples at 44.1), and freezing the track as soon as possible. It’d be nice if it just worked again, like 3.7 did!

All the hip kids have switched to Notepad# at this point.

I just position the 'now' cursor where I want it to be, and drag-and-drop an MP3 file onto the track pane. Creates a new track with the MP3 audio starting at 'now'.

Melodyne is the Secret Sauce that turns my tracks into something I'd be willing to play for other people!

While not quite the same, I contacted them a few months back about the questionable behavior of their horizontal scrolling. A German assured me that it was perfect the way it is. ?

Thought some of you might like to take a look at this one. It's like the original, but with like 800% more guitars...

The entire video was assembled from free stock footage, so I had to work with what I coukd find. Yeah, funny thing. It’d been up on SoundCloud for a year and a half, and then out of the blue it was hit with a copyright strike and removed. “Cover” is not “fair use”, so there’s no defense beyond “don’t do covers”. Which is all I do. Anyway, thanks for listening. Glad you liked it!