Nowarezman

Are you getting out to see live music? You'd think, living in Austin, I would see live shows at least once a month. But it's that old thing, there's always something to go see, so if I wait there will always be something later. My last five: Israel Nash mini-festival on his acreage out in the hills. That was a lot of fun. Carrying the Neil Young torch. Last time I went to the huge ACL festival was...I think...2011? Wow, time flies. The highlight was Stevie Wonder by far, me being a huge fan since I Was Made To Love Her was new on the radio. Each year we go to a local church to hear the Texas Lutheran Univ. choirs put on their Christmas program. Beautiful church - modern architecture - and the choirs are generally quite good ('tho the brass section usually has someone pretty far out of tune at some point.) Baroque program by local chamber music ensemble playing at the Blanton Museum of Art on the edge of the UT campus. It was all good, but hearing a host of Baroque composers, ending with Bach, made it so clear how Bach was a man among boys in his era. Home concert venue called Wyldwood in South Austin is super laid back, home-grown, and fun. Matt the Electrician was the last act we saw there. I need to get out more!! How much do you guys see live shows? nat

Is this similar to Waves NX software? As an aside, I just bought Waves Abbey Road Studio 3 kinda just for fun (at the low intro price). But I'm thinking it might be a lot more useful than I was expecting. I might start a thread on it once I drive it around the block a few more times. nat

You're right, of course, in making the distinction between the award shows and the awards themselves. I think you are unusual in that you make that distinction - "the Grammys" or "the Oscars" are how these phenomenon are almost always denominated in the press and in conversation. So I'm reacting to the unnuanced, one lump (negative) conception that seems the more common response. I think most people both don't care for the shows, and don't care who wins as a package deal. And in vogue these days are pronouncements like "music is not a competitive sport" or "I don't like these self-appointed experts telling me what is good art". And a free-floating resentment of the very idea of "winners" in the arts which implies "loser" status for the other 99.99999% of the creative community. Pessimistic idealism is what I call all this (and a host of related current cultural tendencies.) Meaning, we have a clear idea of some sort of perfection that we ceaselessly insist on, while at the same time we think so little of our fellow humans that we are totally convinced that such perfection is totally impossible to our wretched species. Makes for a lot of grumpy-pants! nat

If I had to, I could make music the rest of my life with just Reaktor and a midi-only DAW. nat

Reaper NI Komplete - I use mostly Kontakt, Guitar Rig, Battery, Abysnth, Reaktor (including Monark) East-West Quantum Leap Pianos East-West Fab Four All the Waves stuff - I own about 20 of their plugins, and use at least a dozen of them every project. VST synths - Diva, Oddity2, Repro-1, Repro-5. These are so good I'm considering selling my analog synths. Amplitude, MODO Bass, VB3 BFD3, Addictive Drums Melodyne nat

The NPR podcast "Hidden Brain" devoted an episode to the effect that awards have on creatives. Turns out, according to the podcast, that awards have a big impact. Most people assess the awards for their entertainment value to the viewers. They could do better along those lines, no question. But it's so rarely mentioned that the awards do fire up people to put out the effort to win them. The award shows are really for the creatives, imagine that! The public is so very, very negative on this topic and in general in this era. Ready to believe just about anything and everything is a load of crap, rigged, dishonest, self-serving, run from the smoke-filled back rooms, etc. etc. The social critics have done too thorough a job. If some group honors some creatives with awards, and makes some attempt to award outstanding work, I'm very ok with that. For the sake of the winners and the sake of the people inspired to attempt such things. So what if my favorites never win - or they've ignored this or that underrated, deserving artist - well I'm not looking to award shows to solve the world's problem with fairness. They do what they do and I think on balance what they do is a good thing. How about the radical idea that maybe things should be criticized in order to improve them, rather than bury them under piles of abuse and contempt? nat

So very true - that closed vs. open thing is the old Apple vs. PC paradigm at least from back in the day. I've always preferred the open approach to a certain point...don't mind spending saturday afternoon under the hood. I read electronics textbooks, I build my PCs, I program my synths, I actually read manuals, and I find the etymologies of words endlessly interesting. My geekness is apparent to all who know me for better or worse. But the computer world is gradually moving away from this old-school geekistic approach. Not that there are not a lot of people who don't want to be deep into the details of some pursuit or other - but, for example, an acoustic guitar player would typically rather deep dive into chords and modes and right-hand technique rather than adjusting truss rods, filing frets, and fixing cracked tops. So with computers - people want tools that get stuff done. No problem if the tools are complex or even fiddly, but it's a problem if they are simply breaking down and halting production all the time. A bug here and there is too be expected. But there's a point... I almost opted for Ableton Live, but it's a bit too pricey for the regular package. I might DL the $99 version with the 16-track limit just to play with it and see what makes it squeek and spin. So far, Reaper is impressive. And so very tweakable! And it could just be my imagination, but I could almost say it sounds better. [video:youtube] nat

Finally I'm going to bail on Cakewalk. Jeez, I was a Cakewalk user when it was MIDI-only....but I'm just too tired of crashing over and over and over. This is not an entirely rational decision - it's rather like deciding you've finally had enough in a 25-year long relationship. All I can see is for the future is all I've seen in the past over and over. My latest miseries are just more of the same - all of a sudden, I crash in a project that I've been working on crash-free for weeks. I go through the motions - freeze the VSTs one by one, eventually get running again until WHAM out of nowhere - do the whole bit over again. Problems with Sonar/Cakewalk have persisted computer to computer, OS to OS, year to year, release to release. I love the program or I wouldn't have stayed with it so long. But I can't remember the last time I worked on a project start to finish without a whole series of crashes. I think it's a geriatric dinosaur of a program after all these decades of development. It needs re-writing from the ground up. Too many patches on patches on patches keeping old inefficient routines going. Oh, it's full of great stuff, no question. But I'm cooking hard in my music kitchen with serious time limitations and I just can't have my stove blowing up at these frequent intervals. So I downloaded Reaper. I can't believe the code is so tiny! Microscopic! Up and running in 30. Cakewalk, in the bin in the alley I plan to never revisit. nat

That's a good point. A lot of music-makers (and other artist types) testify to some level, often quite a deep level, of a therapeutic effect to art creation. When I said music I might make "just for myself" would be a rather pathetic thing, I did mean the actual objective musical creation aside from the persona, subjective side of the process. I don't have it in me to polish and perfect tracks that I know have no chance of going anywhere into the world at large. The "for myself" stuff tends just to be improvising on guitar just for the love of playing. But even then, if I come up with something particularly interesting (to me) I'll record it on my phone, save it for later, hopefully for use in a "real" song later - a real song I hope to share at some point. It seems to be built into me and is fundamental to my musical motivation, this desire to perform, to bring forth into the world. But everyone's different to some extent - this is just me. It's interesting, which art forms seem to foster "just for myself" creations versus those that don't. There seem to be a fair number of private poets. But I've yet to hear of a private novelist. It's an old well-known thing that a lot of people paint for the therapeutic effect. But surely the number of people who write screenplays "just for themselves" is pretty small. But then I'm speculating about what people do as private activities, so the margin of error has to be pretty significant. One thing I do believe in pretty strongly is that any concentrated, ongoing mental activity that involves increasing skill, mastery, critical assessment, and rigorous synapse exercises is worth it in terms of general quality of life. nat

It's pretty obvious that the market for music has undergone a sea change. Most music is so devalued in the marketplace that, by default, most music has to be produced with little or no profit motive. I think I'd quibble with saying that music in ages past was "personal". I'd say it's better characterized historically as social. Related to church, or to community events, or family entertainment, or aristocratic patronage, holidays, etc. It's only our current era that could conceive an idea along the lines that "every child is an artist", or somesuch. I know a lot of songwriter types - but they still are a minority among the usual bass, drums, guitar, keys, vocalists crowd. The players do try to develop some sort of style more or less, but 19 out of 20 are very derivative in their playing. I don't see that as a bad thing - music as a craft is a fine, fine thing. Too many "artists" make for way too much bad art. Maybe I'm sounding more negative here than I mean to - I'm all for everyone having some sort of music chops. The "shame" of being a newbie or amateur is only the result of a sort of communal bullying by the "chops" crowd. More newbies and amateurs means a larger pool from which geniuses can spring. Everyone in the music pool, I say. I do think that the bedroom-studio can be a fine place to carry on a hobby. But music that is "just for me" is I think a rather pathetic thing. I'd much rather be a fan of someone else other than myself. Isn't that where real life begins? What profit is there looking in the mirror to admire that fine-looking dude looking back at me? nat

[video:youtube]https://youtu.be/hdCH7ZewAfY nat

AT&T tops our bad list. Time Warner next bad. And over time, various health providers have gotten harder and harder to deal with - canceled appointments, forgetting to send in Rx, sending bills that make no sense or are flat-out wrong, labwork gone missing, lack of response to calls or portal contact, etc etc. Some health providers are stellar so it's a very mixed bag. Topping the good list - Sweetwater as ever. Local retailers tend to outperform big box outfits on average - Target is a real mess when it comes to customer service. Home Depot is usually great, 'tho. In Austin, the City provides most of utilities and their attitude towards customers is abysmal. The IRS is doing better, just. They still have to hire aged programmers to keep their systems written in Cobol going. Cobol!! Serious - I know a guy who does this work, keeping the dinosaur systems going - sort of. Of course let's not talk about Congress who starves and whips the IRS alternately. No wonder they can be so mean.... nat

AT&T tops our bad list. Time Warner next bad. And over time, various health providers have gotten harder and harder to deal with - canceled appointments, forgetting to send in Rx, sending bills that make no sense or are flat-out wrong, labwork gone missing, lack of response to calls or portal contact, etc etc. Some health providers are stellar so it's a very mixed bag. Topping the good list - Sweetwater as ever. Local retailers tend to outperform big box outfits on average - Target is a real mess when it comes to customer service. Home Depot is usually great, 'tho. In Austin, the City provides most of utilities and their attitude towards customers is abysmal. The IRS is doing better, just. They still have to hire aged programmers to keep their systems written in Cobol going. Cobol!! Serious - I know a guy who does this work, keeping the dinosaur systems going - sort of. Of course let's not talk about Congress who starves and whips the IRS alternately. No wonder they can be so mean.... nat

Why not just ReWire Live into Cakewalk? Then you don't have to port anything...create in Reason while you mix in Cakewalk Thanks for the tip - ReWire/Reason is something I've never looked into. nat

Cakewalk by Bandlab is giving me fits. Crashes a couple of times a week. And another problem - at times, working on a project with multiple VST instruments going, all the VST instruments will become unresponsive. It's like they all just freeze up - if I bring up the instrument interface, even the virtual keyboard at the bottom of the interface will not work - the virtual keys won't even virtually press. The only way to salvage the tracks with VST instruments is to launch another instance of each instrument in a new track and copy/paste the MIDI from the frozen instance into the new one. Very tedious....I can easily have 7-10 VST instruments on any given project. I've seen others bring this up in the user forum, with no solutions on offer. So....I think I'll pick up Live 10 for $99. My son uses it, so we can compare notes and help each other. I'll probably compose and track on Live, then port the audio files only back over to Cakewalk for mixing. The effects VSTs have no issues on Cakewalk - just the instruments. And I'm totally addicted to Cakewalk's Pro Channel for one thing. And just used to it since I've been using Cakewalk since before it even did audio. Maybe I'll eventually leave Cakewalk for something like Reaper. But one new DAW at a time.... nat

Hey Ken - this is actually me, nat whilk. My Musicplayer id Nowarezman I had almost totally forgotten 'till Craig moved back over here. I was 9 in Jan 1964 when the radio played She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand. Life was never the same....I grew up while they grew musically. I've probably got a separate section in my brain for each song, chord, line, tone. Not like it's all great stuff - not at all - it's more like cheering for your team through the good and the bad, and all the players are my cousins. nat

The oddest rankings to my mind: Good Day Sunshine the very worst of all?? Surely it's at least rhythmically interesting - people sing along and tap their feet...no way it's the worst, c'mon. Has to be a pet peeve. She's Leaving Home #204?? Ok, the lyrics are middling, so just listen to the very unusual, lovely melody. Real Love and Free As A Bird are dissed as "grave-robbing" and "dishonest". Sheesh - in this day and age?? No Reply #173? It's one of the two powerful songs on a weak album (I'm A Loser being the other.) Because gets knocked way down to #140 because it's a "fragment"? And Maggie May scores 40 notches higher??? Money is way up there at #14 while Twist and Shout sits at #43?? And both of them scoring better than Julia at #50 just one notch better than There's A Place??? I won't bore everyone with my own rankings...but She's A Woman would get a really big promotion out of the bottom feeders.