RexRed

Thanks Jack, much appreciated compliment buddy! ?

I have remixed and mastered this song from a while back when I was still learning to mix. ( still learning now but not quite as much) ? Please let me know your thoughts Cakewalk peeps! Happy first day of summer! All my best! RexRed

It's either personified ads or a plethora of toenail fungus ads. Pick your poison... ? In the middle of a vocal session and Cortana opens up and says, "I sorry I did not understand that". I know I can turn off Cortana, I assume I will be able to choose to go solo and disable AI as well. AI could be text based or voice assisted. It seems to come mostly in the flavor of a search prompt. But when it is hardwired for "novices" I wonder how many hoops us advanced users will need to hurtle to defeat it and go manual. It seems Microsoft is planning on integrating AI into Windows. I have 8 inputs and 8 outputs and at any time any one of those inputs might have a signal. Having a dedicated mic is not always the plan. I prefer manually deciding when and what input and which mic, source, app, interface etc... I will use. I thrive in complexity over having things decided for me. AI, take this image, send it to Photoshop and put these filters in this order on it then upload it to Facebook with the caption, "Out to lunch". Then, email the Facebook image link to all the people in my email address book list. ?

Just decaf coffee for me ?

Hello awesome Cakewalk peeps! Here is a new song, I have been hard at work with it. Please let me know your thoughts on it. All the best to you! ? RexRed

Will AI hog Cakewalk resources? Imagine trying to record and AI suddenly has menopause or a midlife crisis? AI starts worrying if they will get prematurely bald and your resource meter flatlines. There are bottlenecks in Windows as it is, can we have a "ghost in the machine" trying to solve pi and figure out how to save the planet while I am trying to mix a 50 track song? My luck I would get an AI with a gambling habit. Microsoft intends to add AI to Windows. Perhaps the last update already added the seeds of what may one day become a sentient being? I love AI, but can our PCs really handle it? I have 18 Intel cores and 2 x 3090s and I still get bogged down in effects and my latency can sometimes be a number of seconds behind... Do we want an AI in the background trying to "learn" how to congregate verbs in Icelandic? Just a thought. Sorry Wilber, but I need to shut you off for a while... I hear the metaverse calling me.

I know this is a really complicated subject but, When I open VPS Avenger synth VST within Cakewalk, I cannot type a search word i.e. "pad" into the patch search box because it opens the preferences window. Even with VPS synth as the active window, Cakewalk is still responding to hotkeys. I type p for pad and the preferences dialogue box opens. This is good because on one hand I can invoke the transport controls like play, rewind and stop while in the VST. On the other hand I cannot search through the patch library. Just wondering if anyone has encountered this problem? My other VSTs don't do this and allow me to type in them. It is nice to have the save projects hotkeys work globally also... ?

Thanks a lot Lynn for the compliment! I really appreciate your comment about this song. I wonder if my intentions with this genre of music are well placed. I love classic detective/sleuth shows and this is my tribute to that obsession of mine. ?

I am always glad when advice is given here. It is very helpful and it encourages me to work harder on my songs. The drums that I use in this song are one unit so I am not able to break them apart, but I did try and make them less up front. I brought the bass out more as you suggested and I actually listened to this song through my speakers and not just the headphones. I should know better than release a mix without using me speakers as well as the headphones. After hours of working in the headphones I seem to resist using my speakers to get another view of the song. I hope in using the speakers I may have gotten a better mix out of this song. I uploaded and replaced the song with the new version. I really like this song but it is challenging to get it right.

This song is a departure from my love songs. I hope you enjoy it, thanks for the listens and critiques peeps! Yes, that is me doing to voice acting too. lol ? This song just underwent a huge facelift yesterday. I hope it is an improvement.

Thanks very much for all of the vocal compliments! I am very happy that my voice is liked. I do consider myself a singer first and foremost. I guess that is because I think a lot of my vocal ability is a "lucky talent" that I have tried to polish, strengthen and utilize most of my life. I create most of my songs from start to finish. I wish I had other people to help but I am not that lucky. ? I am a firm believer in simultaneously mixing and mastering at the same time. So my mastering process is mostly fixed with mixing tweaks rather than mastering tricks. I have a 18 core Intel processor and I record 48khz 24bit on a RME Fireface UCX II. I also incorporate a Rodecaster Pro 2 into my live streams. My mastering bus usually only has Ozone 10 or Fab Filter Pro L2 or both. Again I try and fix my mastering issues by mixing. I use a side chain for my vocals so they cut themselves out of the mix and this fixes any banding conflicts. If you visit my CBBTV YouTube channel you can watch me "live" working on many of the songs I have showcased here. You can chat with me during the live broadcasts and add input or ask questions as well. I would really love it if Cakewalk people showed up for my live YouTube broadcasts. I do live song writing, live tracking, editing, mixing, mastering and I also showcase a lot of my VST instruments, effects I use, favorite patches and discuss sound subscriptions. (talk about my old days at the music university) There is no part of the song creation process that I do not cover in my live videos. Please click subscribe and click the bell for notifications of when I go live. I have a few people who sometimes show up for my live broadcasts, come and say hi to them as well. I have made many many videos, some of them are like 8+ hours long, some of them are quite helpful and I share even my, erm, "trade secrets". They are still useful because I share a lot of really important stuff that took me a lot of years to learn and accumulate knowledge. I have been using Cakewalk since way back with Cakewalk for MSDOS (longer than anyone that I know of making Cakewalk videos on YouTube) so I have learned a bit in all that time. ? I have seen nearly all of the YouTube Cakewalk video creator's content and there are none quite like mine, long form and "live". Thanks for your inquiry Lynn! All the best Cakewalk peeps! My channel: CBBTV https://www.youtube.com/@cbbtv My suggestion, go to the "live" video section of my YouTube channel and watch from the latest videos backward to the oldest videos. Some of my oldest videos are bit outdated as I have changed my recording processes a lot since then. Skip ahead if it gets repetitious. (music making can be that way) All the best to you! Sincerely, RexRed

I have not heard any clicking but it is possible. When I punch in for a vocal segment, sometimes my mechanical keyboard can make a click in the mic/recording. I actually did not listen to my vocal alone in this song (I usually do) so a click or two could have snuck in. When I revisit the song, I will do that, listen to my vocal and see if I missed some clicks. I did hear a couple breaths that could have been tamed a bit more. ? Thanks for the heads up FreeEarCandy! ?

I totally agree about adding some acoustic hooks, I need that in a lot of my songs. Many years ago I used to do a that a lot more but got out of the habit. Lately I have been thinking a lot about the guitar hooks I used to add to my songs. It is like getting back on a bicycle after many years of not riding one. This song would really benefit from them I think. I just need to do it I guess. Since a lot of my songs need it, it may have to wait until my next song and maybe someday I may come back and revisit this song. I too am wondering about betraying the simplicity but I really do not know without trying. Thank you David for reestablishing this thought that I have also been considering, it makes that more important to get these subtle embellishments back into my songs. I believe that also adds to the replayability factor. There is more to the song so listeners will tire of the song later, rather than sooner. All the best and thanks again for the very helpful input. ?

Hello Bjorn! I love country music very much, as well as rock music. I fit somewhere in the middle and this is why I have chosen "folk rock" as my genre, even though I can at times stray across both gambits. I usually aim for "acoustic" sounding music. I find nylon guitars seem to epitomize the feeling I am looking for. But a nice piano song can be a sweet change as well. I have tried to make it in music but the powers that be seem disinterested so I just plug along merrily making new songs and gradually building a fanbase of awesome people as yourself. It has always been about the music and I LOVE Cakewalk... Cakewalk has enabled me to get the music that I feel inside, out of me and to the world. Cakewalk is a thing that dreams are made of... Musician dreams... Thanks for listening! ?

Since I removed the dubbed voices I assume that what you are hearing is the slight sweep of my chorusing effect. I will look more at that and see if I can tone it down more or disable it. Thanks for the comment Andy!

There are nefarious means with which to acquire the old Cakewalk versions which I do not subscribe to. I purchased lifetime updates and bought many versions of Cakewalk all the way back to Cakewalk for MSDOS. It is a word to the wise that some VST instruments go under and become no longer available. This is why cloud based backups are not always foolproof. I would think Gibson would want to profit from the products that remained in their possession after the Cakewalk acquisition. But they simple let them fall to the wayside for whatever reasons. Speaking of VSTs that go under, the same thing happened to Emu... Emu/Creative Labs/Sound Blaster Creative Labs shed their professional wing of their company, they had Emu audio interface cards https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/EmulatorX--e-mu-emulator-by The entire legacy of Emu synthesis is now a thing of the past. Emulator X3 cannot be purchased. But, not exactly... After a time these products lose their patents. And the time is not like 90 years as it is for songs. It is only a couple decades. So different companies revive these products after the patents run out. It may only be a matter of a few years and Dimension pro will be revived as a revamped product by some company that specializes in reviving old synths. When you have invested in tons of "sound packs" and a synth goes under, sometimes you are left without a working product when you need to change computer systems. Dimension Pro can still be found online but the means with which to find it are not necessarily, "legal". I paid for my version(s) of Dimension Pro several times over as well as buying Rapture too. I might add that there are other offerings for sounds today that really outdo Dimension Pro entirely but then there are some signature sounds in Dimension Pro that in some instances, nothing seems to sound sweeter. You might be able to buy and old version (CD/DVD) of Cakewalk X3 on Ebay. As long as it comes with the serial number and activation codes it should work, but I am not absolutely certain of that. By installing it, it does not negatively impact your Cakewalk by Bandlab version. You just have an older version you can open as well. You might have to use the Cakewalk Install Manager (Command Center). I am not sure how a "new user" would apply in that instance as well. Make sure the version you buy from Ebay has the serial numbers and activation codes also for Dimension pro and Rapture. When you install Dimension Pro you have to right click and install and open it as "administrator" to get the serial and activation codes to work right. Perhaps there are others that can answer better and I am sure there are entire threads on this forum that discuss how to get a hold of legacy Cakewalk synths, instruments and effects. Best of luck on this Keith!

Well, I made the final changes to this song today. I made the nylon guitar a bit wider and the bass also on the upper end. I fixed the dubs so they did not shift the lead vocal as much left to right, lowered the volume on them and aligned them better, added vocal rider. I fixed the timing on the lead vocals and fixed the phase problems with a lot of the tracks. I think it is done. (maybe) ?

Many kind thank yous for the compliment Ross!

On the voice I used a Waves Kaleidoscopes Chorus and I also widened the vocal with IZotope Ozone 10 imager and during the chorus part (the part that is repeated) I sang 2 extra dub/unison tracks and panned them left and right, I am not sure which of those effects is the offending one. Probably the dub tracks during the chorus. I can put vocal rider on them and then use Melodyne and align them up with the main vocal a bit better so they do not undulate as much. Thanks for the heads up on this! ? I still have a few vocal lines that are late and a particular note I sing on the wrong pitch I need to correct as well. I will go in and make a few more changes before this gets published. I love the critiques, you people are so good at finding my mistakes and alerting me to them! Best to you!

I have a lot of different string instruments that I usually prefer but sometime fall back on the trusty old Dimension Pro violins (strings) as I did in this case. It was the espressivo fortissimo ones I believe.

New tune for you beautiful Cakewalk peeps! ? Critiques welcome!

I am not sure what you mean by "active". When a part of a Melodyne clip gets erased its blobs should no longer be seen in Melodyne. Currently, that is not the case. If you record over a part of track take with a Melodyne instance applied to it, it will gray out the Melodyne section that your recording overlapped on it. Then if you add Melodyne to the new recorded take and then delete the old grayed out Melodyne section, the blobs from it still remain in Melodyne even though the clip has been deleted. If you close the Melodyne window and open it up again, the blobs from the deleted clip are still there. The only way to get rid of the deleted blobs is to close Cakewalk and reopen it. Once Cakewalk is reopened and you double click on the Melodyne clip the deleted blobs are finally gone.

Aww, thanks Jack for the really kind compliment! Best to you buddy!!!! ??❤️

For some reason this is not playing for me. Try http://trexred.com You will find this single at the top of the "Songs" list. Song purchases help support my efforts, thanks to my fans! ???