Kevin Walsh

I'm no professional, but I think the mix sounds pretty good. You've done a really nice job here. Look forward to a cut with the vocals in it.

Thanks for the kind words, Steve. Speaking as a rank amateur, it's incredibly gratifying to hear people with your kind of talent say such things. My wife says I need to get a hobby that pays better.

Thank you bjorn!

Fantastic track, Nigel with an amazing video. You have such a great vocal going on here. Love the keys in the breaks. As always, just wow. Am I the only one hearing a Duran-Duran vibe here?

Wow, steve! I feel like I just left an opera! You have a great skill for vocally negotiating these bouncing, rolling chord changes that makes for an endlessly interesting experience. Very tight arrangement and the vocals are just great. Oh, yeah, the guitar break was great and the bass that walks all over the place under it is amazing. Great work, worth the effort!

Glenn, this is a beautiful song with a powerful message. You have a wonderful voice and you use it perfectly here. I was kind of yearning for a cathartic breakout too, but I get the drone thing. The repetitive cycle matches the intent of the lyrics. The background vocals are amazing. Love it! Kevin

Thanks! I re-amped the guitar from a Guitar Rig marshall to a Tonex marshall. Night and day. I should have centered the guitar too but whatever. Thanks!

Thanks for the listen, Steve! I added the lyrics above, just for you. I'll the take the Clapton reference, dusty or no, with thanks! Kevin

Hey, Lynn, really like this one, nice way to stretch your legs. The mix is damned nice. Really like the vocal treatment and the lyrics are great. I liked the break too and the lead work is great. Really like the overall vibe and the arrangement, it's a good song. One nit is that, to me, the vocals feel like they're sitting on top of, and separate from the rest of the mix. I admit this is my personal preference for how vocals should blend with the instruments so take that with a grain of salt. If you feel that's the case too, here's the two main things I focus on. Please excuse me if my amateur advice is a bit presumptuous, and of course, you're probably already doing something like this anyway so feel free to ignore me. First, I like to put a side-chain compressor on the instrument bus and do a send on the lead vocal to the input. Then I can drop the vocals into the mix volume-wise without losing definition. Play with the compressor threshold to avoid pumping on the instrument mix. I'll also sometimes put Izotope's vintage limiter (with the analog glue preset) to get a nice cohesive mix. When it works right it's magic. The second thing is that I tend to do some mild eq cuts on the vocals at various points on the low and low mids (varies with the vocal performance) to avoid clashing with guitars, bass and keys. Mind you, the song is good as is and doesn't really cry out for anything else. Thanks!

Pretty damned good, Jesse.

Nice work jack, great lyrics.

Thanks. Nigel I appreciate it!

Ha ha, nice!

Killer track!

Every now and then I go digging through my audio folders mining for song ideas, rummaging around in the hundreds of bits of crap that had I recorded on my phone or started in Cakewalk and then abandoned or forgot about. Most of them really are best forgotten. The other day I stumbled on something I started in 2015 and for some reason never found a way to finish it, or maybe I forgot about it when a shiny new idea came along. So I thought I'd dust it off, slap some new paint on it and see if others find anything worthwhile here. It's clearly a Pink Floyd wannabe track, which may be while I set it aside as a bad job, and the end is kind of abrupt, but I'm kind of pleased at my former self's chutzpa. Lyrics: Invaders from Outer Space who are these people and why are they so bold? I see them everywhere they seem so cold. I will not trust these men, I see what they can do I've heard their vicious words, I know what they mean to do and i feel the anger in the air they suffer so when the times are hard and the chips are down no I can't believe they're just standing there while women weep and children cry they can't be human whoa they just can't be so we'll take a nod and stay away they're no ordinary men i was once alone and quite unafraid but maybe i was a fool to believe so hard when she came to my window on a cold and dreary night she said come oh yeah that's what she said come to me come to me come to me i did not realize i did not see all the truth was standing there right in front of me and i see the people in the park they're running wild with fists clenched and their hearts aflame well i can't believe that i'm still here most fortunate one around oh i can't be human no i just can't be so let's take a nod and stay away they're no ordinary men oh men.

Sorry I misunderstood your comment and the fact that the plugin was causing the crash. I know there's not a lot that a DAW can do to prevent a plug-in from taking the whole thing down. I assumed it was cake walks problem because it doesn't crash with reaper. Speaking philosphically as a software user who isn't qualified to make the distinction between crash culprits, it would be lovely if all the companies involved could gather around a table and figure out how to prevent that from happening. Thanks for the information.

That's all very useful to know, thank you, it's great to have a good workaround from the Cakewalk team. Still I've got to believe there's some way Cakewalk could handle this situation without a crash with no error messages whatsoever. I know that for many people, running to a forum for an answer isn't something they normally do. Just my two cents worth.

That wasn't the problem in this instance. As I said in my OP, I reset the plugin, moved the plugin file, TONEX. vst3, to the common files\vst3 folder, and then delete the IK-TONEX.vst3 folder. I believe that if I had simply reset the plugin and rename the foler to say. IK-TONEX it would have worked as well. Thanks!

I have no doubt the Windows has that problem but in this case the file and directory were not identically named. In fact, the file was a in another directory below the unfortunately named directory.

I keep my Sonar 8.5 key fob in a safe deposit box.

Reaper seems to have the secret as well. I only have CbB, Sonar and Reaper so those are the tests I ran.

Yes, and that worked, but in the end I just moved it up to the top of the VST3 tree for simplicity's sake. In either case, SONAR seems to be crashing when it encounters a folder is named with a .vst3 extension. Note that it doesn't crash during the scan, it crashes when you try to add it to the fx bin on a track. The rename workaround is all very good, but imho in most cases it's not good form for software to crash.

I updated my TONEX plugin today to 1.71 and after installing, opening a pre-existing TONEX instance or trying to add a new instance to a track would instantly crash SONAR with a dump file. Turns out that IK installs the plugin into this folder: c:\program files\common files\VST3\IK-TONEX.vst3\Contents\x86_64-win\TONEX.vst3 I had to delete the SONAR registry entry for the plugin, then move the .vst3 file to c:\program files\common files\VST3\TONEX.vst3, then delete the old folder and re-scan. After that, it worked. Prior to doing all that, I tested it in CbB, SONAR and Reaper. Reaper worked, but CbB and SONAR crashed. I suspect SONAR sees the IK-TONEX.vst3 folder and assumes by it's extension that it is a vst3 file and tries to open it as such, but that's just guessing. Hope this helps someone else who sees this.

Thanks, Lynn. I think I shaved maybe 8 seconds off of it. I appreciate your comments!

Thanks for coming back for another listen!