Third Take

Acoustic guitar is one of the most difficult instruments to record. I haven’t come close to mastering the art, but I have figured some things out along the way that I think are worth passing on to other home recorders. Some of these are sure to be controversial, and other people may have had great results with other techniques. However, after reading everything I could find and applying it in my own home studio, this is what has worked for me. Read more

In the last month, Toontrack has not only released a software update for EZ Drummer (now version 1.1.0), but also a couple of weird new EZX drum libraries - a hip-hop library called Claustrophobic and a weird “Twisted” drumkit with trashcans, hubcaps, and other oddities.

If you’ve been thinking about purchasing EZDrummer, now might be a good time - through the end of May, they’re giving you a free EZX (an expansion drum kit) if you buy EZDrummer. The EZXs sell for around $90. That’s a fantastic deal.

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.

Toontrack has released EZplayer Free and you can download it, for free, if you make an account at their website.

What is it? It looks like the MIDI clip organizer from EZ Drummer in a standalone plugin, allowing you to organize MIDI clips and play them back through a variety of samplers - EZ Drummer, Drumkit from Hell, BFD, and more. You still need to have a sampler and a host program, but now I guess you can easily map MIDI clips from one sampler to another.

My guess is that this is Toontrack’s next step in their plan to take over the world. They already have a couple samplers - EZ Drummer and dfh - and are building a formidable sample library with the EZXs they continue to release. With EZplayer, now they can start selling MIDI libraries, not only to EZ Drummer customers, but other sampler users as well. It also makes it easy to sell samples to someone who already has MIDI patterns.

AudioSnap, a new suite of features in Sonar 6, contains several powerful tools for manipulating the timing of audio. There are two main directions you can take with AudioSnap - snapping the global project tempo to existing audio, and quantizing audio, either to the project grid or other audio. It is this last idea, quantizing audio to other audio, that is the most exciting.

A drum part with timing issues forced me to delve into AudioSnap for the first time. At first, I was frustrated because the results sounded terrible; the natural decay of the cymbals was ruined, and the hats were not closing on the right beat. It was then that I discovered the existence, and importance of, the different AudioSnap algorithms. Read more

I had mentioned before that I’d tried to install the Auto-Tune 5 demo in x64 and it refused to install, and that my email query to Antares was never answered. Well, two months later, I finally received an answer when this strange little email drifted into my SPAM folder. Read more

Cakewalk announced another update for Sonar - 6.2.1. Go get it.

Important: If you’re running Sonar in 32-bit mode in x64, the update is not available yet. 64-bit mode for x64 is fine.

I found a wonderful little plugin called GSnap from GVST. It is an auto-tune effect, much like Antares AutoTune, except it is free. It comes with presets for “Subtle” and “Not So,” and is adjustable to all points in between. I have had good results with it so far, and would highly recommend it. Read on for my experiences with it and other pitch-correction plugins. Read more

Cakewalk has released a patch for Sonar with many bugfixes and a few new features. Upgrade to Sonar 6.2.

This came out a few days ago, but I had to finish a project before I upgraded. I couldn’t take a chance that the upgrade would bork the project. I installed it tonight, and so far it seems to be fine. Be sure to read this document before you install, especially if you’re running Windows Vista.

One thing I’m looking forward to is this:

VSTi’s in Synth Rack did not load content data properly unless property page was opened

Hopefully that will solve some of the integration problems between Sonar and EZDrummer.