starise

I dunno. Just trying to communicate with members, but no I'm not 22 and cute...so there's that. There are other places for that. You can think of me as a facilitator that seldom facilitates anything., but Lord knows I tried. I was in hyperspace from here for awhile due to things beyond my contriol and I think I arrived back in another dimension. Sometimes trying is not the thing to do. Not trying doesn't seem as much fun though. Maybe tell us what you are into and why or why not or maybe why you aren't into anything, or maybe why you don't want to comment either way. Oh wait, technically that would be commenting. Sorry. I was playing one of my newer guitars last night trying to build callus back up since I had been off of it for a week or so. I had some new ideas. Taking Japanese lessons because I'm going there in May with a team of musicians. This has tended to rob me of music time. Like English, Japanese has some quirky things such as verbs being swapped and then when you think you know it, they have other situations where it doesn't apply. Hopefully by then I will be able to ask for food and the location of the bathroom. I also hear that knowing how to say "excuse me" comes in helpful on the trains when you bump someone accidentally of course. It'll be like 88F in May there. That's really my next big thing, but I have been asked to maybe assist in some other music things. One in two weeks. What about you?

OK . Might as well. I mean, we don't have anyone who is silly here do we. This is for serious people who never joke around. * crickets chirping *

Well ok please tell me this site isn't this dead. Wow. I mean, we can't even be silly? I think that's just silly. I kinda knew that but I was trying to keep it clean. Why can't you keep women here? For the record I keep it clean and respectful to all, so women by all means the carpet is rolled for you too. You can trust me at least. Not sure about the rest I'm a happily married man, so no hitting from me.

You may have interest in EZD3 upgrade. I bought it but haven't had the time to try it out. I especially like that it supposedly can follow something like a bass track and add a suggested drums track. This is an older thread. My how things change. So I've gotten better at adding beats to my music instead of catering my music to the beats. I'll admit the 'EZ' name didn't give me a lot of confidence in the product originally. EZD2 sat on my hard drive mostly unused because the kits in Addictive Drummer 2 really seems to fit or the nice sounds in BFD 3 and neither of those is anything to sneeze at. I am excited to try out EZD3. That whole concept reminds me of the way loops are dragged in Garage band or Acid. Another thing I have found is that a kit might sound wonderful all by itself, but when put in a mix it sounds terrible. Most of the time I'm looking for powerfu drums and bass on rock, prog rock and pop. Not a hip hopper. A lot of that is mixing chops to carve it into the mix, but sometime I find myself using plug ins to get that maximum benefit from mainly the bass drum. It's almost a shame really when a kit sounds so good and has that perfect sheen but the mix eats it up, other than the in between spaces for fills. Electronic musicians really have it better in that regard because there are some POWERFUL bass loops that need little in the way of mixing to make them pop.

Gotcha.

Sausage fest? Is that something German?

I guess I just didn’t look in the right places. Thanks. I managed to get to her page but decided I’m not gonna bother her. I know she is quite busy from what I hear. Thanks for looking it up.

No silly I guess. That just leaves me. Hey what happened to all of our old posters like Akazia? She doesn't even show up on the members list. And I scrapped with a few of the others on a free for all thread. I don't see them around either. My hunch with akazia is she found too much interest and pulled away. I can't say as I blamed her really, and making music with others online can potentially be very time consuming. Her music really drew me in but I tried not to bug her. I might have weirded her out too. I reached out to her on SC to touch bases, but no response and I guess i don't expect one really. I never made music with anyone else here that I can remember. I think some of them actually hated me. One of those guys is still on my Facebook page and I harbor no ill will towards anyone. It seems to me we are into a new run of members. A younger crowd, which is fine. It seems the marketing of the web page is looking for that age group, once again just making an observation. The site doesn't seem as active as it once was, but those who are here are a tight nit group. I think we need some jovial sometimes. Not all the time.

That's funny! I guess with a little tweaking a bagpipe could be set into a loop or become a loop. I mean, no telling what it would sound like, but hey.

Well everyone on the violin forum I once frequented would agree with you and disagree with me, so your response is predictable. As I see it there are some advantages to being a woman on that instrument. Generally smaller hands/fingers which makes it much easier for them to reach difficult fingering in the higher ranges. The good ones generally are less abstract and much more analytical in their approaches to music, at least the classical ones. The good ones would blow through an Irish jig at double tempo in a session and assert their dominance that way leaving the rest of us to try and catch up. They were always classically trained. With men, yes I see exceptions to my rules but not many I can do a very decent job of many tunes on the violin although I had a health issue that made two of the fingers on my left hand numb for months. Just now getting that back to almost 100%. Lately my fav instrument has been guitars. I can't duplicate the tactile feel of a decent acoustic or electric guitar with synths. I mean I still love synths. I have an old vid of me trying to be Rick Wakeman which I hesitate to post here What do you play?

Well? There's plenty of silly out there. What do you see as silly?

I think of my music as one long music experiment The violin? I still have them around but haven't played in awhile. It almost seemed to me that something or someone was seeing to it I would never want to play one. I was told I played ok in the sessions, but ok in a session isn't really that good. Never realized I should have started out a 3 years old. I had this sequence that would repeat itself for 7-8 years. I went to the teacher made noises and came home. I am pretty convinced it is a woman's instrument mainly. I know you'll probably disagree with me on that.

Not sure who is here, maybe you'll get lucky there. I mean in finding someone to play those instruments. I seriously thought about getting a mandolin for the same reasons. Seems it would be much easier to play than the violin. I am convinced when they invented it the inventor was trying to discourage anyone from enjoying playing music.

Sorry to hear of your experiences with NI controllers. Having never used one myself your experiences are helpful. I had to return my first arturia controller because it didn't work. The second one is ok. It's a 61 key only because my present situation doesn't allow more room for an 88. Soon as I get the space I'll be looking to go 88. In a way though it's like having a turbo charger. Never really a need for it but nice to have 'just in case' . I started on keys and sometimes miss the weighted action the 61 lacks. It has synth action which is still ok. With the 61 and some key mappings, I have to shift down an octave to get to the control keys. Over all happy with it though. Works great with Arturia synths. I also like that they use tech similar to pianoteq in that the synths are physically modeled instead of streamed as samples.Lighter on the drive. I have the IK B-3 and I don't think it sits as well in my mixes as the arturia version. I am overall happier with Arturia on everything .vs IK. I almost don't even use my NI stuff any more at all. I can't really explain why. It just hasn't been in my workflow. I thought all of those guitar instruments would be helpful and never used even one of them because none of the loops remotely fit what I do. Same with Ableton instrument loops. More trouble to hook up a guitar and play it but just works better. All except for things I am unable to play like very fast metal. In that I have no choice. I agree. Something about getting the fresh beans and roasting them is just all around better. The only thing close here is buying unground beans and grinding them which is really all I can do right now. Starbucks over roasts their coffee IMO.

Just a tidbit about my coffee roasting. I had it down to a science using a bread maker and a heat gun. I had everything timed and monitored the temps all through the roast. I could tell exactly how long it would take after second crack. I was roasting Ehtiopian Yirgacheff which is my favorite, but I tried other beans. Espresso was too much of a hit for me so my espresso machine hasn't been used in awhile. I seen a nice chinese roaster on ebay and was poised to buy it to take my hobby to the next level. I bid on it fairly but the seller decided to take the ioption to sell to another local buyer. It would have been overkill for a home roaster so maybe it was a blessing in disguise. I made plans to gut a bread maker and put bearings in it so I could tilt it on a stand like the bigger roasters, but life happend and unfortunately I had to stall those plans. Now I have to make do with bought coffee. At least for the time being. I'm begining to get lazy just buying coffee 🙂 The one thing I liked about Komplete was the ability to search meta data on their controller. Although I never bought the controller and decided on an Arturia controller instead, I could still make use of the NI program made for that purpose. As luck would have it I found I wasn't very often in the NI universe so a dedicated controller would have been lost on me. The Arturia controllers work really well with their package. For electronic music I like UNIFY as it lets me combine a bunch of things and it wasn't very expensive. But yeah, I would be lost without meta data search engines both in my DAW and in the other stuff. My process is probably different. If I envision a certain synth I'll just pull up something fast that seems to work well intending to maybe replace it later. That almost never happens. When it comes to drums I'm not a drummer, but I'ver managed to navigate those programs pretty well and get my mixes using mostly the drum programs and not in the DAW. Then once recorded I can pump it up with the tools in the DAW. Reminds me of the funny pics I seen describing the different instruments. A violin was called a squeak board. It reminded me of the way I think when I'm looking for a sound. Like a lowish bellish sort of DX thingy, or a big assed bass drum. The last thing I did I used my own rock bass and that was fun to put a busy bass into a progish sort of thing and then add waves submarine to it. It was perfect for that. I could have gone to less trouble and grabbed MODO bass but there's no way keys could have produced that sound.

Hey I recently roasted my own coffee too! Cool hobby but I think I'm going to need to cut back my consumption. Anyways.......to this topic. I almost hated to write what I did because it sounds like I'm knocking them and John is showing their beginning free product. I have been buying music stuff for entirely too long and I guess after awhile I realized that good music was mostly up to me if it was made, and had very little to do with the plugins, instruments etcs. Yes, it figures in to some extent and we need the tools that will help us to get the job done the best it can be done, however it seems to be much less important than I once thought it was. I once said, If I only had **** I could make that track rock. So maybe you're similar in that we just have what we need and probably way more than that. The large sample libraries had me hooked for a long time. The last one I bought is an old one I had always wanted, Omnisphere which can take up a decent sized hard drive all by itself. I imagine any of us who have been at this for awhile could say I never use **** any more. TBH for awhile there it was just fun to buy stuff, like an addiction. So for someone like "us" if I may take that liberty, those huge packages with small additions yearly for rather large prices , like you, don't trip my trigger as much any more.

I like free! I have had Komplete for some time now. The way they market their packages, the upgrade path adds a few new instruments or efx each time. Similar to Sampletank 4 by IK multimedia, once you get on top with the full collection upgrades seem less interesting to me unless it's a knock out home run instrument. I don't say this to discourage anyone because this is really a great way to get started with this free download. The full version of this takes up so much disk space, that even my outboard disks are too full to accomidate any upgrades at this time. NI in buying Izotope has added some truly amazng plugins. I just purchased Guitar Rig 7 and it's pretty sweet. I especially like that it comes fully loaded, unlike the IK competition, which makes you buy the amp you want after you buy the product. Hypha looks like a take on Arturia's "Augmented Strings" which was at one time free for the base version. Maybe 49.00 now. So let's be frank, they are trying to get you hooked into their ecosystem which isn't a bad thing. In fact it's a nice way to get some decent kit in software. There are other ecosystems as well but NI is one of the best and most supported. Kontakt is really the one to have because it can load many instruments. Komplete should have at least the beginner version of Kontakt. Not sure.

Zzzzzz. Man that was a long nap. Just a tidbit. If you have a DAW that disourages a plugin type you can buy UNIFY which generally accepts anything and then load UNIFY into your DAW. That way you can not only have a great tool at you disposal which also accepts the plug ins your DAW doesn't.

Good topic. I just like making music and if I think if it can somehow serve a higher purpose, why not? I don't force agendas, but if they fit, they fit. Making music is simply a part of who i am, so I engage in the activity as my time permits. It's something that feeds me in an unseen way, It fulfills me and gives me great satisfaction.

I made a lot of stuff in the past. A lot of it is jazz, but this year I'm not going there.

I also frequent that site, even though I have fallen off with Cakewalk some time ago. I was a prolific poster of deals and now since I pretty much have everything, I don't do that as much lol. The same handful seem to emerge. I was once all about the tools and they are important no doubt to have good ones, but I've realized the tools often have little to do with anything if what you have is decent already. I play guitars and other stringed things. I have found just recording them is better than a VST copy, although since my rock bass has been making noises I have used MODO bass a lot and I add waves submarine which works well in the sub bass ranges. We tend to fall in and out of things over time. I like this site, but other priorities took over these last few years. Interacting tells me things about both myself and others. Many of those I made music with have gone to who knows where? I went through a growing process myself, so I'm not exactly the same person I was. The Cakewalk site has a colorful interesting past, but I think I've outgrown it in terms of usefulness unless I look at the deals. Sometimes putting something out to a forum where you suspect others might be similar has it's merits even if it isn't agreed with, as it helps to analyze things to see if it might in some way help. It may even be helpful to put something controversial out to see what radical views on it exist. In recording lot's of people are online making their how to videos, but I think just doing it counts for a lot since there are multiple ways of doing just about anything. Take the subject of bass for instance, probably ten different ways to get a track to slot and have the effect you want all the way from simple to complex. Confidence counts for a lot. Someone somewhere will always find a problem with what you're doing, especially if you ask for it. If it sounds good it is good. If it sounds good to you who cares what anyone else thinks. Plenty of "sloppy" songs made it to the top. That's where I am right now. Not that I don't accept advice, but really I mostly know what I'm doing by now.

Well, I don't claim to have arrived . As an aside I've been tracking acoustic instruments , so I make good use of microphones. It seems like it should be obvious that the more cluttered a mix is, especially if they are amped guitars, loud drums and bass, the harder it can be to carve a vocal space. Admittedly I sometimes prefer my voice to be further back in a mix because even though I want the vocal to be heard, I want the guitars over it to be apparent. That's really a mix decision. An acoustic guitarist who sings won't run into these kids of issues. With a rock mix there is so much going on, so here are a few things I have done that help. -EQ carving. Maybe pan guitars L/R to 'miss' the vocal. Putting the vocal in a slightly different space. Rock/pop mixes need to be loud and there is competition among instruments, so the carving necessary applies to all of it. -Parallel compression, or running the vocal through a buss channel with a compressor. -Double tracking a vocal. Not the same as copying the vocal track to have two tracks. No. Track two vocal parts singing the same thing. - Use the right mic. This can be different depending on a person's voice. I have found recently that one of the matched pair of small diaphram condensers with the wind filter attached works really well for me. Small diaphram reduces boom. The wind screen generally negates the need for a pop filter if I'm careful. - My present recording space, which is temporary, is just this large dining room full of stuff. It seems to work well for me because there are no reflections in there. Better to go in slightly 'dead' with respect to reflections, than going in live. I would take the first one any day because reverb is generally added in the mix. - Tools. I use a Universal Audio interface that has a 476 compressor built into the circuitry, so it's pretty sweet for recording vocals and guitars. "My sound" is varied with the material I'm recording, so for me it changes.

I need to be careful I don't make this overly complex. Like, if you asked me, how do you fly a jet liner, that's the sort of complexiity this can get into. Where do I even start? You say you've been procuding music for some time. Can you give me an overview of where you're at in terms of technical mixing production? Tools used. Results and so forth. Otherwise we might be opening the jim dandy of all worm cans. Sure on the surface it seems easy, and on one level it isn't especially difficult, however, on the deeper levels it can be fairly complex. Advice? We all seem to interface with the world a bit differently. No matter how you decide to accumulate the information, I think it's always healthy to gain a good understanding of the concepts in addition to what the tools do. Once you have that part down, you can learn the tools. Make sense?

As a classic over thinker I try not to overthink aging. If I can take it with ease I'm sure it's possible with almost everyone else. While I see my music as being important to me as something I like to do, I also recognize it's just a spoke in the wheel for me. I don't lean into it as a be all end all. I didn't when I was 25 either. Music and music creation has a place that I have become fond of coming to. I have learned to like it in the pocket it's in. Take it for what it is, and not quibble over the little stuff. I believe it has been this outlook that has allowed me to keep the 'magic' if making music real and interesting into my later years. If anything I feel I'm beginning to come into my own more as a composer and a musician in later times. Before that I didn't know who I was or where I was as a person. I tried to jump into many molds that really were not a good fit. I work with the 20 somethings, many are gifted and very competent musicians. I'm not really sure how they see me. I haven't asked. When you get older you can relate to the ages that you are better. So far as audience goes, it goes both ways. The older people don't want to listen to a 'kid' any more and the younger people don't want to hear grandpa. One thing that doesn't lie though- Good music. I don't feel my mind is old. It still works pretty well, even the creative part of it.

The biggest single thing I'm concentrating on are timing and cues. I watch everyone on and off throughout a performance. We use IEMs on stage. I play on worship teams playing different instruments every time. This week I play keys, last week I played bass, sometimes I'm a vocalist. It varies. All of that helps me to see things from their perspective when I'm not playing those instruments. Working the live stream helps to translate what's happening on stage to a format others can see online. Those two worlds are different between FOH and streaming. In playing live everyone needs to hear the other players and I think this is important to a good outcome. I try to stay as much in tune to everything as I can. If something unanticipated comes up we need to learn to deal with it fast and keep the music going in a way the audience seldom notices. Different venues have different expectations. My venue ( worship) has special conditions attached to those players. A bar venue or any other place where large crowds gather for entertainment will have different conditions. The players usually know what they are. I say this not directed to anyone specifically here, those people seldom show up for YOU whoever you are. They are there for a good time or in the case of church, they are there for worship. Now maybe they heard you before or heard about you and they liked the experience they got from the performance if they attended one of your events. They are there for an experience not a person. In a 'performance' I try to keep this in mind. The bigger picture. We are really servants dishing out musical medicine. Who you serve is up to you.