Alan Tubbs

I believe the ‘Jimmy” preset for dimpro will do it, tho it might be the rapture synth. But it works upside down, diminishing the vibrato as you raise the wheel. Great preset.

It depends upon what editing you want to do. Many edits in cake are non destructive. SF and other audio editors are destructive editors, so that you save the file as a new sound, such as for mastering. let us know what kind of editing you want to do, but I will say having SF is a great tool for workflow. It does certain tasks a lot quicker and easier. @

Duet. Best sound available is always a good choice.

Touch is best for controlling larger movements and unless you have a 3 foot screen many functions are just too small. It is best used within a system of keys, keyboard and mouse (which is more precise for smaller changes). I prefer the mouse for envelopes, keyboard for numbers and naming and touch for other aspects. If extremely large touchscreens become more affordable, more functions can be take on via touch. touch is great for synths and some hardware emulations.

You shouldn’t need 2pres to get a good signal. That being said, it shouldn’t hurt your signal to use the boost. But If you need such a boost for electric guitar or kick, Houston you have a problem.

For recording any acoustic instrument, the most important ingredients, descending , are player, instrument, room, mic, pre and conversion. for an interface less than $500 I love the audient line. The TAscam line, too, is fine. The TAscam uh 7000 is a superior audiophile unit with bad drivers, but if you go digitally into another unit you can get the best of both worlds, tho the TAscam must be the master. Over 500$ is lynx card. the warm pre should give you nice options with a transformer sound as opposed to cleaner ic interface.

Don’t go to sleep n the PC EQ. It is as useful as most 3rd party software.

That should work fine ... the vs 100 has rca ins? I can’t remember.. but should be no problem. You don’t need to overcapture the cassette audio. The vs has a lot more dB range so you don’t need to hit the red with the old songs and you don’t need any extra noise.

Vocal rider is a third party plugin. You probably don’t need it. you can record the vocals twice, with the gain set appropriately for either singing level. Then splice together. and as pointed out above, vol automation is the first step. Even it out and then comp to hold the volume even enough.

Ugo still has some free if old synths at Ugo audio. Rez is still a great bass synth.

I could feel some difference in those rates 20 years ago. There should be no difference today. And no appreciable difference in sound. Switch back to 44.1 at 24 bits. Many pros use that, esp. if they don’t usually transfer files. Synths and FX mostly up sample internally these days.

Great synths and I don’t know why they don’t rerelease them. Bandlab has done a lot of good if not flashy work with cake. Although they haven’t said anything about synths, an updated rapture would garner a lot of press and make many of us happy. Whether it would make money and be worth it to bandlab with their free daw is another question. That market is pretty saturated. But even with all the NI stuff and assorted synths I’ve collected rapture is a go to synth.

Usually the eq follows the comp, tho there are times you want to thin out the sonic herd before it triggers the comp. but there are no rules, only what works to your own taste. If you are worried, try both eq before and after. however, the remainder of the rules are there because they work most of the time.

Ribbon mics to record. Also remember that the songs were mastered for optical tracks and vinyl and have little bass and attenuated highs. Some noise can be injected, but most noise you hear today is from old optical tracks transfers, not the originals. The sound as recorded was as clean as you can get today, if thicker and not quite as precise. a soundstage ir could be a nice complement.

And some practical advice. If you are recording acoustic instruments, a high pass filter is the one piece of software you need first. Don’t “master “ (wrong term, to master means polish a finished recording for publishing) individual tracks just solo the track, enable your high pass and slowly expunge the muck below 60 HZ or 100 HS or 150; depending on the instrument. Like most sonic adjustments, go extreme so you can hear the difference, then back off until you can’t hear it unless you punch the filter out. You can be surprised how well this can work and how much noise and useless air you can remove and add back space between the sounds. That will clean up tracks individually and make your entire song more open.

A good mix comes from an OK room and access to a pro listing environment helps. You can’t fix what you can’t hear. Corning or rock wool are your friends and a cheap date to boot. Personally, I’ve got a pair of great speakers I’ve had for 30 years and know them well, but I still take home brewed recordings to a pro studio to check the bass, etc. spend time and thought on the song’s arrangement. The space in songs is important, as well as introducing new “elements” and instruments sequentially. Many musicians coming from bands have a hard time hearing the song as a recording artifact instead of live. One young band freaked out when I suggested playing a second rhythm guitar since they couldn’t play it that way live. This stuff happens esp. with cover songs. another thing is to buy a nice signal chain. Once that problem isn’t there and you can’t blame the tools anymore, you have to concentrate on your technique. lastly, it takes time. You didn’t learn to drive in a day or play an instrument in a. Hour. Recording is a skill. And if you are trying to record yourself it is harder. Even having a gofer around to bounce ideas off of, move the mics and asking a 3rd person which sounds better develops your ear for this stuff. The old studio system put one into a situation where you learned with those who had ears already as well as decent equipment (usually). Once you learned the basic bag of tricks and your associates’ tastes, you could adapt them to your own style. But it still took time. In the meanwhile, it is easy to do horrendous mixes and have no idea why. Don’t let that stop you. @

Peaking at -12 to -6 dB

Yea, the modx connects via usb 3 with the apps mentioned above, as well as user presets etc. online. using it over usb as an interface you can mix between the modx and return signal from your daw. It is all pretty easy. Go to the site(s) and download drivers and apps so you will be ready when the synth arrives. It is pretty slick.

I use analog for saturation. Just about every software saturation I’ve ever used comes off the track bus before I’m finished. I will use soft amps, however. Adds some air as well as saturation.

You might could find a used Dbx 160 series for cheap. The 160x was sub $100 originally and gives perfectly good service in the studio and better for live work.

Do pro and rap are staples, but it is hard not to like kontakt. There are libraries for everything. Synths, orch instrumentation drones and rhythm beds like Heavyocity’s stuff. Ni has sales twice a year and once you get the paid engine there are many free libraries. that being said, you can program dimpro as a sample synth, you just need to use a 3rd party editor to cut the sample. Then a text editor to use Sfz. Now import the sample into dimpro and filter and envelope away.

Noel, impressive list over time. Maybe someone should try to pitch It to the mags ...

Conversion is easy these days. That sounds like the early problems with algorithms and not enough processing power to do a good job of it. My favorite example was the old creative audigy cards. It natively worked at 48k but internally resampled to 44.1k. I still have clicks in my old lp transfers from that conversion which sound worse than vinyl scratches.

True that. I actually like the fact there are usually no glitches when loading in the latest updates. Still, I want some excitement and if bandlab releases new products I will be berry happy.

Sound on sound has done plenty of reviews of cake software. But there is nothing new to review, really, since bandlab bought out the software. That was the last big news to hang any writing on, and the last cake review I know of was in tape op talking about just that. If rapture pro 2 was released, or boardwalk by bandlab with large additions, the magazines would run reviews. But it it hard to write a new car review if all they’ve done is add new tires to last years model, no matter how smoothly it now rides. And as for the old complaint about money buying reviews, any publisher will look to review new products from advertisers. That is how the BUSINESS works. That doesn’t mean they will say 2+2= 5 or this $5 pre is a neve etc. If too many readers buy crap because of lies, guess what, they don’t buy your mag and your ad rates go down. Doubling your losses. That is how things work, not slipping money no one has under the table so a pet writer can waste their time trying to turn lead to gold. It is the same for any review writing, be it daws or cars or better home and gardens. So any conspiracy theories about payola is a an idiotic trope. Please stop. if bandlab releases new products they’ll get reviewed. Until there is something good to review more than stability fixes and ergonomics, any review would simply be plowing the same field. @ Ps writing on an iPad precludes a lot of easy editing, as you can tell from the copy.