Third Take

There is a wealth of information hidden away on Cakewalk’s website. The latest find is the Desktop Music Handbook which is a kind of textbook for making music on computers. It has sections for MIDI and audio, and covers a lot of the theory behind digital music.

Cakewalk has a blog. Who knew?

Right now it looks like a bunch of “Artist Spotlight” entries where famous people talk about their love of Cake. There is also a contest.

Cakewalk DAW Labs looks like a good resource for building or buying a new PC. They have links to pre-built PCs that have been “tested and approved by Cakewalk Tech Support” as well as tips for those of us who build our own. The list of supported audio interfaces makes it easy to compare different sounds cards’ capabilities, and identifies which ones have 64-bit drivers available.

Don’t let it stop you - a great post over at the IG Blog about playing guitar that easily applies to all music makers. How much time has been wasted in front of the TV or on the net because we were too lazy to practice our craft? What would our music be like today if we had practiced instead?

I found a great article on parallel compression at a blog called Hometracked. It looks like a great blog and I plan on keeping up with it.

Parallel compression is the process of mixing an uncompressed signal with a compressed copy of it. The article at Hometracked shows how to do this in Sonar and includes audio examples.

I’m still experimenting with this technique, but getting good results.