poserp

Hi! I am somewhat new to Pro Tools (decided I ought to at least try it... Now we're good), but not new to computers -- I've been doing various kinds of programming for 20 years or so. Anyways, at times I get a message that Pro Tools can't do something because there aren't enough resources. I know that this is not true. What makes Pro Tools think it doesn't have enough resources on a Mac? I have yet to really dive into the settings in Pro Tools, because this doesn't happen very often and (thankfully) it's just me doing music in my music hidey-hole so nothing is really lost, usually it'll just shut down an insert effect or something similar. I got the permanent license version of Pro Tools new about six months ago, so it should be (mostly) up-to-date. IIRC, the Mac Mini is a 2016 model, 16 GB RAM and two SSD drives. It's barely doing anything above 10% w.r.t. resource utilization. I don't run a gazillion tracks nor do I use plug-ins all that often, most of the time I'm doing maybe a BF-76 on guitar and bass tracks, and sometimes I use the Waves TG Mastering plug-in on a mix. So, basically, Pro Tools is mostly a glorified tape recorder. I provide these details to demonstrate that, AFAIK, I'm not "stressing" my system in any way, so it seems like I'm missing something that might be obvious to someone else who's worked more with Pro Tools. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Been working, slowly, over the last couple of years to get my guitar stuff up to snuff. Slow blues, everything was tracked in single takes by me:

At least the dude is actually singing. This one is lip-syncing (you can't go "oh oh oh oh" and make it sound like it does while smiling, unless you happen to have some serious ventriloquist chops...): [video:youtube] To me they're both "so bad they're good". Thanks to YouTube, they'll live on for at least the life of Google...

Yes, this up my alley. I really ought to know more about African and African diaspora music, but alas I am not up on it. I imagine there are some killer bands, obscure or otherwise, who see the Bruno Mars thing and are like "and this is what happens when you turn it up to 11..."

I like that funk/soul are making a real comeback, sonically speaking. There was a long dry spell where the rhythms and sounds were just wrong, then people tried too hard to do "throwback". I hear a lot of the dance music I heard in clubs a decade or so ago coming into the fore in modern pop music, so to my ears it's a bit "dated" and watered-down. Adele, Bruno Mars, and a few others (including a couple in this thread) are kool. Learned about Afrikan Boy on some NPR radio show, he's got the goods IMO in lots of ways: [video:youtube]4ovtBmhw3M8 Most of his stuff is nice. While the new JT with Pharrell ain't my thing, he did this bit of heat with Missy Elliot a couple years back. Mix it with that Afrikan Boy track for max party: [video:youtube]PluAF_sxXWY Black Eyed Peas had a time where they didn't do things I liked, then they came with "Street Livin'", which they also performed live with an actual (well, mostly, drummer had a sample or two on pads) band on Colbert [they've pulled the video, alas]. Here's the video version: [video:youtube]1EC8lBwroOc

Maybe this is a "hack", but you could do something like switch the synth to "drone" (so the main envelope is totally out of the picture, unless you mult it and repatch in to the VCA CV input or something), use the keyboard gate out to "kick"/reset the LFO, then use the LFO as another "envelope". If you use the second envelope setting, you can do that and still get the release off of the envelope generator. Run the LFO through the attenuator to make your "envelope" go positive or negative too. In a similar vein, you could use the arpeggiator to essentially turn the envelope generator into another LFO (tempo-synced, even) If you want more than one of those. It would be nice to have a fully-controllable second envelope, but I think there are probably other ways to eek out envelopes that I'm not considering, so you could perhaps get two or three (or more) that may be envelope-y enough for your purposes.

I have new music up. More on the way, this is mostly Yamaha QY70 stuff. Slowly but surely integrating other things (Kurzweil PC3, vocals, guitars, etc) but the idea is keep it simple until I establish a decent workflow:

Research... [video:youtube]

Very cool, some incredible programming there. I love the organ-ish chord in the background, it really anchors all the atmospheric swooshing with the bass. Thank you for listening! All the pad sounds from this were generated with the same Program (which will be released as part of the NXTT series of soundware I'm working on). The glassy FM thing may or may not see the light of day as soundware.

Fabulous! Following you . . . I want to see the sci fi story in your head on the big screen. Thanks! I don't know what the story will end up being (I'm hoping at least some sort of concept album and art, but doing this will take quite some time as I'm a lone gunman with no budget for studio time), but it'd be cool to see it fleshed out and actually be something besides a bunch of semi-interesting ideas (from a historical perspective...).

Intro, so titled because it's the music for the trailer in my head for a scifi story that pretty much took over my brain one morning: What you're "seeing" is essentially a fade-in of a ground-perspective shot, steam and smoke rising from the ground and the feet of a person painted completely in a reflective coating. As the camera rises from the ground and rotates to film what's happening on the ground, you see that this person is holding a bundle with both hands and getting ready to jump into a volcano... There's more, but I'll leave it at that for now. Everything except the bass is custom PC3 programming.