Lord Tim

And this is when I learn exactly how many of you jerks have me in your ignore filters ? Haha!

Hold up, we have to quit when we reach 4 pages? One single reply of mine goes for nearly that long. ?

For me, there's always 2 things I keep in mind when I do anything: Consistent bass - if it's something that's really dynamic like a bass guitar or a really fat modulating bass synth, I'll usually always flatten the hell out of that. It's not the most interesting thing in isolation but the problems you get by the time it hits the mix bus is exponential. It can make the entire mix sound uneven and if you plan to really squish it at the end, unless you're taming everything with a multiband (which has its own issues because that'll also tame things like kick drums and sub hits, etc.), your mastering limiter is going to give you the stink eye as it absolutely ruins your project on the way out. And guitars, yeah - I never clone anything, if you get stuff "perfect" it actually sounds smaller the more you layer onto it. But I'll always edit everything to be pretty tight, either cut out or automate silence into the gaps, and then bus that with a multiband on it, and then decide what I want to do in relation to the other stuff in the mix with low frequencies. I'll more often than not play into amps or amp sims with too much high or low end for what the mix needs because it feels good as I'm laying the track down, but then I'll do some serious carving after that - what ends up on the record is usually surprisingly thin when it's solo'd, but you'd never know in context. I never really worry about phase issues though, I've only found that's an issue if you're cloning anything or doing split sends from a single DI guitar track into multiple amps with different IRs or mic positions, which I'll never do, it just doesn't sound big or exciting enough. For my main band, I don't think we have anything less than about 8 or so heavy guitar tracks (not necessarily playing at once all of the time, mind you) so it does start to pile up. Layer in bass, bass synth, low strings, fat polysynth... wow, yeah good luck with that! HAHA! Add in the 60 or 70 layers of vocals over the top and... yeah, check me into the asylum now, please. ? On the other hand, my thrash/death band is a different kettle of evil because there's so much going on with kicks and guitar low end, that needs to be tamed or it rapidly spins off into the block of festival toilets.

^ good ideas there! I'd also like a dialogue with check boxes when you open in safe mode so you can choose everything in one go, rather than OK'ing one at a time (or a blanket Yes/No to all) like we have now.

The other thing to think about is: 1. Does it *need* compression? A lot of times we throw a compressor on a track because... well, that's what we do for that instrument, right? Maybe carving out space with EQ and some clever automation might be best? 2. Don't forget you can also use compression as a transient shaper too if you play with your attack and ratio, so you could get things sounding even more spiky rather than doing the opposite. A multiband compressor or dynamic EQ can be amazing on a track or bus too. I pretty much always have one on my guitar bus to tame the woofiness in my rhythm guitar tracks because that really builds up once you layer them, but if you just EQ'd it out, all of the guts would fall out of the sound. Doing a dynamic EQ sidechained to the bass to drop the lows on the guitars is another great trick because your ears trick you into thinking the guitars are super fat when it's actually the bass filling out the frequencies, but when it stops you still have the full thud of the guitars in the mix.

Ha, busted - I actually record everything in Notepad! I write in every data bit manually in binary and then export to a CD image at the end ? ... but actually being a bit serious (probably for the first time in my life ?), yeah exclusively in Cakewalk for anything done in my studio. Our other guitarist does his parts in ProTools on an ancient Mac that is held together with bits of string and sticky tape and emails them over, and I'll do the odd process here and there in other apps (eg: tops and tails in Adobe Audition, DDP masters in an older version of Studio One, maybe some VariSpeed stuff in REAPER) but yeah, otherwise all in the box using CbB. @Bapu is right though, it's not the app, it's the process. I use CbB because for me, it's stable and feature rich enough to not get in my way, and familiar enough so it just fades into the background while I work. I don't want to think about my DAW, I'm thinking about my music. By contrast,I trip over REAPER whenever I use it because it doesn't gel for me, but it's certainly not lacking in features to get you to a pro sounding final product - if I can't make it work, that's on me. All decent modern DAWs are more than capable of amazing results.

Ha, I dunno... listening back to my recent demos, I'm not sure if I'd agree with the professional voice thing! Ugh! HAHA! But I'll get there by the time we do the actual takes, if experience has taught me anything. Can't say I'm a fan of the "I suck, why do I keep doing this to myself?" part of the process. however... ? That said, I think you can still get some exceptional results from someone who isn't a great singer. I mean, look at, say, Dee Snider or Lemmy - both absolutely iconic, but Freddie Mercury or 1988-era Geoff Tate they are not. So long as you can work within the bounds of their range and know how to process it properly (tuning, compression, doing MANY takes and comping, etc.) and arranging harmonies, you'd be surprised at what you can end up with. I've recorded some AWFUL singers over the last couple of decades and I'll admit it was a hell of a lot of work getting them to sound good but we got there in the end. We just had to work to their strengths. A great example is when Blaze replaced Bruce in Iron Maiden - what monstrous shoes to fill, and frankly, he didn't. It was pretty bad. But then he went off and did his own thing with Andy Sneap producing, and his solo stuff was fantastic. MUCH more suited to his voice because he wasn't trying to emulate Bruce Dickinson (which is hard on ANY singer - I know that first-hand!) and had a producer that knew how to work with his more limited range. I worked on a few recordings with Blaze doing guest vocals on them and honestly what I was delivered wasn't great, but again, it was all about understanding his limitations and working with that, and we ended up with a great product in the end. I mean, the other option is to not throw a dream away because some other guy isn't doing the job. There's nothing stopping anyone from getting a vocal guest in just to knock over a couple of songs to get your confidence back - I'm sure there's a heap of great singers in the Songs forum here that would be willing to hop in for nothing. Or look on Fiverr or somewhere like that. Like I mentioned earlier, sometimes a great production or final mix can make you go "oh wow, OK, maybe I'm not complete crap after all" and really give you that kick along. But also like I said, if you're sure it's time, it's time. Take a break if you need to get away from it. There's nothing more soul-destroying than sitting down in front of the DAW when your tank is empty. But if you're not really done, you'll know about it sooner or later when you can't stop yourself from diving back in again.

Arrangement plays a huge part in this too, especially for heavy genres. If you're doing speed metal, your goal is clarity so it's all about carving space for everything using EQ and automation, since it's usually everything all in your face at once all song. If it's more melodic rock, this is where you can really make a mix shine by leaving space for other elements to poke through, and think about what serves each part the best. This is kind of what I was getting as with the "steal the bits you love" comment in my epic novel post above - once you have the basics down of the song, arranged into a coherent structure, have a listen to something you love the sound of. Do they have guitars all the way through with the bass following the root notes? Are there parts where the rhythms pause to let the drums shine more? Is there a single crunch guitar playing across keyboards that gives way to huge layers of heavy guitars and vocal choirs in a chorus? That's still super fiddly to mix but stealing the arrangement ideas from bands where you know this worked can really make your own material shine.

That's a great suggestion, but I do often help a few people with CbB so I'd rather have all of the options available so I can refer them to the correct place. But yes, otherwise, good advice!

Yep, I often invoke the Help panel by accident and it's annoying having to undock it just to close it.

I think the answer to this question is in two parts, really. Long post, sorry! If it's just getting the production of your stuff up to the level of the glossy releases coming out of Frontiers, then I'll refer back to my reply to the OP in the Production Techniques forum. It's definitely able to be done on pretty modest gear, so long as you go about it the right way. I think the biggest issues is what Jim and Mark mentioned - your brain is tired of it all. I've been doing this stuff for 3 decades now, and had some pretty good success, especially of late. But despite all of that, I sometimes sit down at my workstation and go "What the hell am I even doing? I *hate* recording!" HAHA! But it's true - the process of doing what my main band does takes AGES and is a significant investment of time, and is incredibly draining emotionally when you're the guy doing the demos, pre-prod, recording, performance of vocals, guitars, keyboards, then editing, then mixing, then mastering, then delivery, and then usually the video/graphic side... and then we have to take it out live. Argh. Every new project I start I wonder if this is the one that finally will be the one that makes me pull the plug - and it's come close a few times by the end of it, let me tell you. But a few months on, when you can bear to listen to what you put yourself through, you can look at the big picture and go "you know, this is actually pretty damn good" ... and that's what keeps me coming back again and again. There's a couple of steps that gets me past wanting to set fire to the studio and go off to become a potato farmer. The first is what a couple of people have mentioned: don't be scared to be crap. I'm currently listening back to demo ideas for our next release and they're super rough and actually a little bit soul destroying, listening to the performances. But experience of being a producer for so long has taught me that's entirely not the point of this stuff. Get the ideas down first, no matter how bad they sound. Arrange the good bits into a good structure. Don't be scared to shelve parts that aren't working for this particular project, you never know when they might come in handy later (we have stuff on our last album that was from demos originally done in 2006 that just didn't work until now). Don't let the voice in your brain that tells you "that doesn't sound as good as the final mastered and polished output from X band or label" make you look at what you've done as an inferior product - at this stage it IS an inferior product, but you're getting the framework together, nothing more. Getting the basics working is 80% of the battle. Once you can start to see this stuff as the big picture, refine, refine, refine. What do you love about X band? Taking production out of it for the moment, what thing about the bands you like make you go "oh yeah, THAT is what makes me love those guys" ? Can you apply that to your music? Find the thing that makes the hairs go up on your arms and mercilessly steal the idea. I'm not saying rip off another band, but I'm saying try to recreate what they did to give you that "oh yeahhh" moment, which will make you see your own music a little differently. You can always refine that "theft" further to make it more into your own thing. Alternatively, do a cover. Sometimes recording music you love just for kicks can help kick start your creativity. We just released a covers album, in fact, and it was heaps of fun. Then step the hell away from it all for a bit. At this point, your brain is all about the minutiae of the process. And this is where it'll start to lie to you. This is where I think better gear can actually help you. Anything that can potentially be a roadblock at this point WILL BE a roadblock. If your DAW is constantly BSOD'ing or you're struggling to get things to play back in real time, it sucks all of the joy out of it all. You can certainly make great music on crappy hardware, but it's so much harder, and when you're already halfway out the door, there's nothing making you stay if you're fighting with it rather than just getting the job done. Sometimes a new instrument can inspire you to really rip on it - a different perspective, or sometimes it's "man, I just spent $5000 on this custom guitar, I'm gonna play the damn thing and get my money's worth!" I think once you can get past that point, and start seeing the songs themselves as decent. and you're able to get OK performances down, if you're stuck at the last "this doesn't sound as good as X label's bands", get in fresh ears. Either as a producer, co-producer, or just someone to offer advice - and advice you'll actually listen to. If you're going "yeah I know you said it was good but I think it's crappy" then it's not helpful. A third-party producer can work wonders there. Now where this is good is that if you get something amazing sounding back from a good producer, that really makes you look at your songs and the journey you took to get to those amazing songs in a different way. You went through the doubt, you went through the "I'll never get this to sound as good as I want" and now you're sitting there in front of these finished songs going "well, after all of that, look at what I have!" and eventually it can re-train you into thinking about stuff the right way, and can actually get you doing your own productions that sound as good because you're not sabotaging the process before it's done. Honestly, if it's time, it's time - if you really have your heart set on it being over, then I get it. But if there's a doubt there, let me say age doesn't have a lot to do with it. The industry isn't anything like what it used to be. The Frontiers' roster is a great example - those dudes are OLD! HAHA! But they sound great. There's no reason someone in their 50s can't do amazing material and release it independently and do well. At least I hope so, because that's me. ? HAHA!

That sounds like a plugin acting up. I'd start by opening in Safe Mode and eliminating half of your plugins to see if it plays, then if that plays OK, it's in the other half, so then start by deleting half of those plugins until you can narrow down which one it is. Obviously don't save anything when you do this or it'll overwrite your project with a version with missing plugins. Sometimes it's just a crappy plugin that's gone weird, other times I've had it happen randomly on otherwise well working plugins shipped with CbB (rarely though), but I usually have solved that by deleting the misbehaving plugin, saving, then inserting it back again once you open it up fresh again.

Session Drummer can be great but man, I wanted to stab it after one mix I was sent. The band "helpfully" programmed everything up in Superior Drummer, but also it was to be compatible with the velocity mapping and note mapping on SD3. For some bizarre reason, they couldn't send me rendered audio stems of each kit piece, only the MIDI (also their programming sucked so I had to do a bit of work on it anyway, so I would have probably have had to throw away any stems). Remapping notes to my instruments wasn't a huge deal but just how each drum responded was RADICALLY different to what I use here, so I grabbed SD3 as a stop-gap and somehow wrangled it all in to make it work. I do like a lot of the sounds on it, although I'm really not sold on the toms at all. Needless to say the band got a hefty bill for this ridiculous tangle I had to sort out. ?

Yep, confirmed here too. Some plugins don't particularly like double precision being enabled, but it's worth giving a heads-up to a Baker to see if it's something not playing nice in Cakewalk too.

Ehh, I wouldn't worry too much about phase issues if the sample set has been prepped correctly, but any decent instrument should give you the option to route each element to its own discrete track in the DAW and you can invert the phase and check it if so. For your own overlaid samples, yeah - that's a fair point but I think you need to be a little careful how loud you have your own stuff anyway - those really good drum instruments have heaps of multisampling per kit piece, usually some logic in there for detecting rolls and that kind of thing, so when you plop on your neato drum hit, it's not going to compete with all of that stuff going on; it should really just be there as an accentuation to the sound. If you're approaching it that way, you'll be blending it in quietly and kind of doing a virtual "3 foot rule" which really minimises the phase issues, if there happens to be any. I have experimented a little bit with mic'ing top and bottom toms on live kits over the years and I have to say it really doesn't add too much to the sound for rock/metal, and in fact just causes more headaches with bleed and more mics to manage/check phase on. Maybe more open styles like folk or jazz might get some use out of it? In those cases I'd be more inclined to throw a couple of nice LDCs up over the kit and keep the close mics minimal anyway.

MEqualizer doesn't expose sidechains from what I can see - no settings or documentation mention that, unless I'm missing something? On the other hand, Tokyo Dawn Nova *does* definitely expose the Sidechain input, which you can access from the Insert Send menu. You have to make sure the Ext Sidechain is activated to it can hear the source track, and then set the threshold to taste. Works great. So insert TDR Nova on the track you want to EQ. Then on the track you want to feed to the sidechain, right click the track header area and choose Insert Send and look for TDR Nova in the list: Then on the plugin itself, select Ext SC and adjust your threshold to taste:

Not for the toms, but as an example, for the snare, it has a built-in mixer that exposes top mic, bottom mic, a "dir mic" (which I would guess is either a sample or an alt close mic), as well as the mic being picked up by the overheads and room mic, plus you can layer in about 20 of your own samples too, so it's very flexible. The bottom mic is great for ghost notes and adding a nice brightness to the snare sound, but can sound fairly papery if you go too far with it. The toms still have the overheads and room mics applied to them, like the snare, and you can control bleed level into the other mics, so the snare bottom could have sympathetic rattles whenever you hit a tom, which adds a nice live vibe. You *could* layer in your own samples for the toms if you really want to, but I reckon they sound great out of the box, so long as you're either sending them to their own outputs and processing them properly, or being careful with the built-in mixer effects.

SSD5.x is excellent with a few caveats, especially for hard rock / metal styles. The first gotcha is that out of the box, this is super processed and pretty much every modern metal production is likely using the kick and snare samples from that particular preset pack. They sound great, but a LOT of other people think so too, obviously (Deluxe Metal > Slate Metal 05 is freakin' *everywhere*). I'd be more inclined to mix and match kit pieces and load in your own custom samples to layer with their ones to get something unique. The toms, however, are by far the most realistic sounding toms I've used for fast styles of music. Once you learn where the sweet spot is for velocity and program in some realistic accents (rather than doing "ehhh 127 everything") they sound ridiculously real. The overheads are a mixed bag. I'm not overly fond of anything other than the ride bell or maybe the china for anything other than single hits. The moment you start doing a groove or a cymbal wash, it all sounds pretty triggered. I usually run Addictive Drums 2 as my overheads, and SSD + my own samples as shells. That all said, if you're doing more stripped back styles, I'd probably favour AD2 over SSD for those. I'd recommend taking the processing off and running each drum into its own discrete track to process it more like real drums (which I also do for SSD), but it sounds more natural than SSD for that kind of thing. EDIT: HERE is a good example, this was recorded with e-drums and sent over to me as MIDI, and was processed like I mentioned above. Obviously, being speedy metal, this is much more overhyped than more "natural" styles but you should be able to get any idea of how it works in a metal style mix. THIS one is purely AD2, meant to sound like "a small kit in a club" kind of thing.

My main work machine uses a 1050 and one of my others uses a 1060 and they look no different to running on integrated graphics. I'd say the switch from card to card would be negligible as far as freeing up power goes, unless you're driving quite a lot of pixels (FYI my 1050 is running a 5120x1440 monitor, as well as a laptop panel and not breaking a sweat, and I'm sending 1080p out of a different out via the integrated graphics.)

Ah, very good point there! That's stuff I always add after I've done any Melodyne work, but that's an important caveat.

Bounce to Clip does the same thing, and I have that bound to CTRL+B (or you could add that as a button in the Custom Module too if you prefer clicks to keyboard shortcuts).

Make a registry backup and do a system restore point before you do it. If you do anything stupid (which is unlikely if you follow the instructions closely), returning your system to the state it was in before the edit is at most a couple of clicks away.

You know it's a funny story - there's another band called LORD from Hungary that we often get lumped in with on streaming sites. If we don't specify that we want to target English speaking countries, and between the ages of 18 and 65, we'll find more often than not that it'll just default to Hungary as our primary audience. It's mostly annoying but the weird, and actually kind of hilarious, thing is that we've actually made a fair wad of Hungarian fans by accident because of that. Swings and roundabouts, hey?

There's no real shortcuts to getting marketing working well for an indie release. If you haven't put in the legwork first, it's going to be a really hard sell for anyone to give a crap, considering the amount of music that gets pumped out every day. What I'd recommend first is this: 1. Don't suck. Make sure your video and EP sounds like it could compete with the market that you're aiming for. What I mean by this is if you're a brutal death metal band, aiming to make your mix or video compete with the K-pop market is probably not going to do you many favours. Don't skimp on artwork - people ignore the "don't judge a book by its cover" thing all the time. 2. Get your ducks in a row. Make sure your EP is back from the pressing plant, you've sorted out any rights involved, you've set up your digital distro, you have a professional bio with professional photos, etc. and you have an electronic press kit up on a site somewhere. It's worth putting together a basic website for your band, even if it's just a portal to link to your social media sites and your online sales portals (Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, etc.) There's a lot of website builders out there like Wix or Squarespace or whatever that are basically drag and drop, and have a lot of marketing and sales tools already built in. 3. This is the most contentious one here that I'll offer an alternative to in a bit - find a PR company to push you around to 'zines, shows, playlists, etc. If you're new and starting out, you just won't have the inside connections that a dedicated PR team has. They can get your foot in the door all over the place and maximise your exposure. Is it cheap? No, not really. But going with a PR team may mean the difference between selling 7 copies of your EP to family and friends to getting good exposure across the board and moving the entire batch. I run a label, and while we're really savvy with doing promo and have a pretty great following for our main acts, we still often hire PR teams to find new places we haven't explored yet, or even just to take the pressure off of us doing everything ourselves. "But I don't have the money to pay for a PR team!" Yep, fair comment! OK, so if you can't go in that direction, this is all an upwards hike that may pay off over several releases. First, that website you made? Make sure you have a mailing list sign-up on there. Direct marketing really makes a difference. Use a service like Mailchimp to set up campaigns and track your marketing. It may not pay off for this first EP but if this makes a bit of a buzz and gets people interested enough to sign up for your mailing list, the next one will sell MUCH better because you have an audience you can talk to directly and tell them about your new release. Facebook is utter rubbish but it's still a decent place to start promoting. Start your dialogue with your fans now - if you sell *at* them, nobody will care. Post a lot of content, make a lot of posts that elicit a response, and this both boosts your relevancy ranking and also makes you much more personable to potential fans. Upload your video directly to Facebook first (they hate linking to external sites), pay for a boost, and make sure you target your audience. If you don't, expect all of your money to go to a click farm in Uzbekistan. "Wow I had no idea most of our fans were 72 - 80 year old women in central Asia! Huh, who knew?" And then a few weeks later, link your YouTube video and boost that as well and use that as another talking point. The more you can talk about yourselves without actually making it look like you're selling stuff at people, the better. One thing to keep in mind is that your music is essentially worthless. Worthless as music that you want your money back on anyway. The actual product itself is super valuable but don't hope you'll get back the money and time you spent making it because you likely won't. Approach this as a paid advertisement for your brand. You made an album full of jingles to sell your merch, basically. Be prepared to write everything off as advertising costs for your *next* release. Doing this right is all about playing the long game. Think 2 releases ahead when you do anything and plan your goals and budget around that. But the absolute key is fan building and audience interaction and keeping at least a consistent dialogue going with your audience, if not a good stream of consistent content. Even with all of that I'd *still* recommend a PR company to augment anything you do, but that will get you on the right path. Good luck! It's a pretty rough landscape out there!

Great solution by Mark there Interesting you mention Bluecat's Patchwork being CPU heavy for you, I'm not really seeing that here on my system.