Lord Tim

That's definitely phase cancellation. I wouldn't expect it to disappear entirely if it was recorded in mono and didn't have the rest of the track bleeding into the mic, etc. but the room is most definitely playing a big part in how things sound. Tezza has you on the right track. A square room is a nightmare to work in. Imagine your walls as mirrors and you're sitting in the middle of the room trying to take a photo of something but without seeing your reflection. That's how the sound is working - it's bouncing into itself at different times which is making some frequencies sound extra boomy when the waves are hitting you at the same time, or going thin or disappearing entirely if the waves hit you out of time. Listening in that environment is bad enough but imagine what a mic would hear if it's right in the middle of all of those sound waves intersecting... not great. Thick rug on the floor is the first thing. Trying to get the side walls coming out at an angle so they're not parallel to each other is the next, and put absorbers up on them next. Ideally you'd want some big bass absorbers on the back wall, but I'd suggest trying to deaden that as much as possible, perhaps deadening it and putting random things in front (the odd small bookshelf, your guitar rack, etc. - something to diffuse the sound), and right above where you're sitting, stick up some absorbant panels on the ceiling. Now this is just going to get you over the line. Ideally you'd take room measurements and build tuned slat resonators and bass traps and all of that stuff, as people on the John Sayers forum will definitely tell you, but these tips (and the other great advice in this thread) will likely make a huge difference to what you're hearing. The good news is it sounds like a lot of this stuff is already up in your room, you just need to arrange it properly.

I thoroughly endorse what Steve says here. My studio was built in a very small and not particularly great space, but with John's help and some careful planning with another member there, we ended up making a room which has seen a lot of work from mixing to mastering, that's held up internationally. A good lot of stuff I assumed made sense turned out to be wrong, after really getting into how the sound moves around the room, phase cancellations, etc. These guys live and breathe home studio construction and set-up, and I'd say anyone working from a home studio would benefit by even lurking the forum for a couple of days, even without asking questions from the gurus there.

I have long hair. I can be a girl, you know, from the back (for the right amount of money, naturally*) * Hey, what can I say? It's tough to make a living as a rock musician these days

I was doing a bunch of Sidechain stuff with Sonitus about 2 days ago - worked as intended for me.

Just did some testing then. Melodyne on a DI track is pretty spot on for the most part (as with any kind of transient detection, you'll need to do some cleanup work, of course - you can see below the chord at the start of the 3rd bar being a 16th late, and the mute at the start of the 4th bar being slightly late due to the transient being detected early): On already distorted guitars (this is a super-fast thrash song), it's a complete write-off: Audosnap was pretty similar results for both. If you're not playing with a lot of gain and you have very clear definition between each pickstroke for your processed guitars, you migggghhhtt get away with it, but the moment you get past a certain speed and add on distortion... yeah, don't bother. DI guitar and reamp/VST after, or not at all. Now this song was pretty tight already to my ear but I tried a section where I quantized everything. It was marginally tighter sounding, but it lost so much energy from the drums and guitar pushing and pulling against each other, it wasn't worth that extra 5% tightness. There is absolutely a time and place to get things super locked in, but I really recommend being selective about how far it's pushed for sure.

^ this. The Melodyne suggestion is a good one too, it does a pretty good detection job. Be a little mindful not to make it too perfect, though. If you're doing any panning to get the stereo image nice and big with the rhythm guitars, having them super perfect will actually make the track seem smaller rather than bigger. Tight is important, especially in fast and slick modern metal production, but those imperfections are the things that make your mix big and exciting.

I do both. If you don't have a fast enough machine to run at super low latencies or you like to track with plugins that add latencies into your chain, it can be painful trying to get your playing tight. So the trick is to get a good DI box, run the direct out into your interface and record that, and run the passthrough output to your pedals and amp to monitor as you play. Then you have all the flexibility in the world to use sims or re-amp later. I can't tell you the amount of sessions I've been given that's been saved by having a DI track as well as the effected guitar track. Sometimes the tone that feels good to track with absolutely sucks for when it comes to choosing the correct tone for the song - usually too much gain and even effects. You can't un-bake that stuff out of a track once you've commited to it. ?

One other thing you might try is slowing the track down, playing the part, say, 15% slower and then speeding it all up. Elastique Pro gives some pretty good results on DI guitars, and can be surprisingly useful even on processed guitars.

As someone who does power metal guitars for my day job, practice is the #1 thing I'd recommend. ? But as far as getting the parts tighter in-app, I've had OK results using Audiosnap on DI guitars and re-amping/using an amp sim after the fact. You definitely need to play everything cleanly though, because any flubbed note or bumped string will give you bad detections. If you're already running distortion, the results are generally going to be not great. Cutting up the track and either stretching parts or sliding is your best bet. It'll get you over the line but spending the time to actually play short sections dead on and comping together to make the full track will give you the best results by far.

It's definitely possible - it was annoying me too because I was accidentally bumping it a lot, so I remapped it to Play/Pause. Not sure if it can be entirely disabled but that's a good compromise. There's not a lot to say about how to remap it - if you know how to do it in general, I did it exactly the same way. Not sure if that's much help, but at least it confirms that it's not a locked off thing. But yeah, I'd try and map it to something else rather than trying to unlink it.

See what happens when you want to save up to buy Paradigms? You have to sell your pickups! Told you they were expensive! ? Cool stuff, Chuck! Almost a bit of a Tony Iommi kind of vibe to your playing there, and I can definitely see why Cobalts would benefit your playing style!

The Paradigms are sooooo expensive! I've been told by a few people you're not really getting much more advantage out of them to justify the price difference, but I haven't actually tried them myself. Honestly if you're touring a lot and changing strings for every show, even regular Slinkies would be fine. I don't think I'd like to trust any kind of string to last more than a few shows if you're REALLY belting them or doing a lot of Floyd stuff. I reckon the Cobalts are the ideal half way point between affordability and that extra durability and zing you get for a more premium string. The M-Steels are most definitely a special occasion string for me, and definitely worth it.

I definitely rate the Cobalts - they sound fantastic, but for recording I'm loving the M-Steel range. Suuuuuperrr bright tone, which is great for any lead guitar work, and actually also really good for any kind of sparkly clean stuff too. They also tend to last for ages too without losing their integrity, unlike a lot of other brands. Full disclosure, I'm endorsed by Ernie Ball but that was after a lot of searching around after getting let down by my previous string company. Their strings are fantastic but the quality control became an utter joke, so I went off on a huge search to find something I'd feel was at least as good. I was completely happy with everything until the quality started to slip, so it was big shoes to fill. The Cobalts and M-Steels absolutely blew me away and I haven't looked back since.

Absolutely agree with this - the zooming is really idiosyncratic when it comes to lanes, and seeing the lane overview really large isn't helpful at all.

Cheers, guys! Much appreciated!

Nope, I'm that one rock guy that never smoked or did any kind of drugs. I barely even drink these days, now I think about it. And I sit in a small room in front of a bunch of computers... wait... I'm not a rock guy, I'm a NERD! ? *beats myself up and steals my lunch money* Yeah, take that, nerd!

Yeah, if MME isn't working, something is seriously wrong. You know, sometimes just biting the bullet and getting a dedicated and audio optimised machine is the ticket - I'd say you're on the right path.

Actually something occurred to me that might get you back in business: changing the driver model to WASAPI Exclusive in Preferences > Audio > Playback and Recording. Now ordinarily using the hardware's supplied ASIO driver is the best choice in almost every circumstance, but just before Gibson shuttered Cakewalk and it moved over to Bandlab for CbB, a lot of work was being done using the native Windows 10 driver model. This was mostly to let us use in-built soundcards at low latencies (which worked great for me - I was on the road and needed to do some editing but didn't have an interface with me, and my built in rubbish Realtek audio worked amazingly with the WASAPI driver) but I found I got comparable results as far as performance goes on my 16x08 between the native ASIO driver and WASAPI Exclusive. There's also WASAPI Shared mode but I found that gave me a lot more pops and clicks, especially at lower latencies. This isn't fixing the root cause of the problems, of course, but if your goal is to just get on with making music, this might just get you over the line. See how you go!

I feel your pain - up until recently I had half of that speed on a good day, drop-outs included free of charge too. Australian internet hey? Not even once! ? OK, so the steps would be to do this: Grab Macrium Reflect Free: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree Grab a Win10 ISO file: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10 Set those to download overnight or something, shouldn't take more than a few hours on a 12mbps connection. Use Macrium to do a complete disk image of your machine's system drive and make a rescue disk. That system drive should have your Windows installation, CbB, etc. on it. That should be backed up to some external hard drive (if you don't have one, it's a good idea to grab one and do regular backups like this anyway - you never know when you'll have a disk go down on you, and this will get you back and running in minutes once it's replaced). Make the Windows installation media as per the instructions on the download page - you'll need a thumb drive for that. It says you need a license for Win 10 - don't worry about that, it won't be on your machine long enough to worry about activating it, etc. - it's just for this quick test. Assuming you've done your backup first, you now want to boot from your Win10 media drive you just made and do a clean installation of Windows, erasing the system drive. Set up Windows, install drivers, etc. Install your 16x08 drivers, install Bandlab Assistant, use that to install CbB. Test away! As I said, if this all works fine, you can rule out your 16x08 or your machine as the culprits in this problem. Boot up using your Macrium rescue disk and get it to restore your system image - you'll be back exactly to where you were before you started this process. The trick then is to work out where the problem lies if the test showed everything was fine. My first suggestion would be to completely nuke anything Cakewalk - installation folders, registry entries, etc. and do a truly fresh reinstall of everything. There's a few people here who can give you advice for that process. If that doesn't fix it, my next thought is to delete all of the USB devices from the Device manager and get Windows to redetect everything. @Kurre had a good suggestion with disabling the onboard sound in the BIOS - I'd try that first before any of this. @Chuck E Baby also made a good point about USB cables. I remember having a Firewire mixer that was SUPER picky about what cable I could use with it. Some would just stop working entirely with it, but they would work just fine with other devices. It's not out of the question to think that you might have a weird port or the 16x08 could be finicky too. Something to consider. This is all a bit of work to do this kind of troubleshooting, so try what you can that's easy to do with your existing installation first, I'd say. But if you run out of options, starting with a clean baseline is the way to go so you're not just chasing your tail and you can rule out as many variables as possible. Worst case is you need a fresh install of everything to just make it all work, but that's very much a last resort - I'd be surprised if the brains trust here can't help you get it all working.

Cheers, Bob - I appreciate that!

I have a 16x08 and it's generally been pretty good for me, other than the odd pop and click on my woefully outdated laptop I'll be replacing soon. However, another former user from the old SONAR forums also had one and he had no end of trouble with his. From what I've seen around the place, the 16x08 is a bit of a crap-shoot of which unit will work correctly and that seems to be a combination of both the unit and the Windows install - some will work absolutely fine with one install of Windows but not others. Some units are just generally junk for everything. I've been lucky with mine, others... yeah, not so much. If you have an afternoon spare, try doing a complete disk image of your machine, then doing a scorched earth install from scratch of EVERYTHING - Windows, all drivers, CbB and the 16x08 drivers. That shouldn't take more than an hour or so. If THAT all works correctly, then you can start to rule out any hardware issues or compatibility issues between the 16x08, your machine and Windows. Restoring your system image should only take a couple of minutes to get you back to where you were before the testing. If it turns out to be working correctly with vanilla everything, then you can start looking at a full removal of CbB and reinstall, or some registry/driver alterations for your machine to get the ports working. If you don't have a baseline to work from, any testing you do will just be guesses at the moment.

Thanks guys! @emeraldsoul The entire clip was all greenscreen. We were all shot separately and composited into a scene made from elements from the back cover art (which is why a it does look a little "cut out" in places, rather than going full 3D CGI). Hell of job running virtual lights and flying camera rigs in After Effects, and if I never see another shiny drum kit again that I have to manually mask out and remove all of the green reflections, it'll be too soon! ? HAHA! I tell you what, amp sims have come a long way haven't they? This was all freeware VSTs and IRs that I've collected over the years rather than a mic'd up amp. I have access to whatever I like, but the ease of just dropping this stuff as an FX Chain into a session and then going "you know, maybe I could back the gain off a little to get more definition in the pick attack" during mix time was so refreshing!

Here's my control room and a kit in the live room respectively: I get a sunburn every time I turn on all those screens at once... ?

Oh, I should mention also that if anyone would like a copy of the song and previews for the rest of the album, you can get that and a pretty awesome looking shirt here: https://www.lord.net.au/united/ (This post was brought to you by the "Hey idiot, do your job and sell stuff" Marketing Department. A Subsidiary of Musicians Are Really Travelling T-Shirt Salesmen, PTY LTD.)

Cheers, guys! If nothing else, you get your money's worth of notes per second! ?