Moseph

Garret, check the tempo on the individual drum tracks. They run too slow and are out of sync with the guitars, bass, and mixed-down drums. EDIT: Actually it's not the tempo. The guitars/bass/mixed-down drums are 32-bit and the individual drums are 16-bit which is (maybe?) making Sonar screw up when I import them all into the same project. I'll see if I can figure it out and hopefully you won't have to re-upload things. EDIT 2: Mmmkay, never mind. The problem was that Sonar randomly decided to turn on groove-clip looping for the drum tracks which messes with the speed that the audio files play.

Not necessarily. I think at this point, the hardware requirement for Pro Tools is basically a holdover from the days when you used to need a lot of high-end external equipment to run a recording studio. Digidesign has been constantly scaling the hardware down for prosumer use -- I think they're down to a single-input interface as the cheapest one (it's been a while since I checked). At least in theory, having to use a specific piece of hardware should make the program more stable and easier to trouble-shoot, but I'm not sure if that's true in practice, and I think the downside of being tied to hardware that you may not like outweighs any potential benefit. The hardware bundled with Pro Tools isn't any better than hardware you can buy independently at a comparable price.

Sweet. I'll see if I can pull something together in the next few days.

I tend to like studio recordings simply because I love listening to how things are mixed. I frequently get as much enjoyment from the production aspects as I do from the strictly musical aspects.

You definitely should keep the drums separated. Mixing the drums down to a single track before putting effects on them may actually be one of the reasons that you're having trouble getting a good overall mix. The issue is that when the drums are all on one track, you can't apply effects to specific elements of the drums; for example, you can't use separate compression on the snare and the kick, you can't apply more reverb to the cymbals than to the kick, etc. Any effect you put on the drum track affects all of the the drums, and that means that you can't fine-tune the sound of the drums to the extent you ought to be able to. It's best to think of the kick, the snare, the toms, and the cymbals as being four completely separate instruments and to deal with each separately instead of mixing them down to one track. Separating the drums before putting effects on them should also make it easier to control the waveform spikes that are messing up the loudness of your mix because it will let you compress each type of sound individually -- it will let you, for example, reign in the snare drum spikes without affecting the way the other drums sound.

Demos, demos, demos. Most DAWs have some sort of demo or trial version, so look around and give some of them a try. Try to find one that fits your workflow, and be willing to invest a little time in whichever ones you look at, since you'll need some time to figure out how everything is supposed to work before you can really judge whether it's right for you. (I always find when trying to use a new DAW that everything is just familiar enough to make it really, really frustrating when I can't figure out how to do what I want to do.)

I can attempt a mix with the single-track drums, but it may not turn out well and I won't be able to give any meaningful commentary on drum mixing. I need multi-track drums to do a proper mix. When you mix, do you do the compression and such on the individual drum tracks in FL before mixing them down to one track and bringing them into Audition? Because if you're doing the compression etc. in Audition after the drums have been mixed down to a single track, the drums will be really, really difficult to deal with. You need to be able to get at the individual parts of the drumkit and put effects on them separately, so you really need individual tracks to do a good mix. Things don't necessarily need to be entirely split up -- you can usually get away with having all the toms on one track (or two tracks divided between high and low toms), all the cymbals/hats on one track (or maybe the hi-hat on its own track), the snare on its own track, and the kick on its own track.

Any chance that you could zip the unmixed audio files for the individual tracks and upload the zip file to Mediafire or some similar host for me to download? I'd kind of like to take a shot at mixing/mastering it, and if I can come up with something high-loudness that works well, I can screencap my plugin parameters and write a few paragraphs about what I did to make the mix sound like that.

Did you install any hardware or software that you can remember at about the same time the crashes started?

Did it just randomly start happening one day or has it always been this way?

On the first one (garretmetal1), I'd say make sure your drums aren't peaking too high. It looks like a lot of the spikes on the waveform are coming from the drums, so you want to try to bring those down if you can. The snare drum and toms in particular sound to me like they could stand to be compressed (or be compressed more if you're already compressing them). I'm not sure if this will help the overall loudness issue, but I think the lower frequencies (~20 Hz-800 Hz) are too dominant (as you've noticed). I'd say roll off everything below ~80 Hz, cut everything below ~800 Hz by at least 4 dB, and see if that lets you pull the overall level up a bit.

http://ocremix.org/forums/member.php?u=38025 All three posts advertise a website. EDIT: n/m, Rozo already covered this one.

Looks like a problem with the Realtek audio drivers? Do you have the most recent version of the drivers installed?

I'd say it's more a situation where you just need to know what to listen for. Like Zircon said, depending on the bass sound, you may want some mid-/high-end to catch the pick/finger noise. Same may be true of the kick -- you might want mid-/high-end to catch the noise of the beater. All of this is situational, though. A spectrum analyzer might help you balance the frequencies, but it'll tell you neither which parts of the spectrum to emphasize in which instruments nor whether the balance you've achieved "on paper" is actually compelling as a mix. I don't generally use a spectrum analyzer to mix, although I'll sometimes check mostly finished mixes with one to get a different look at how my mix which already sounds pretty good at that point sits in the total frequency spectrum and may make minor tweaks depending on what I see. EDIT: The point I'm trying to make is that ideally you shouldn't need to consult a spectrum analyzer to tell whether the frequency spectrum is balanced. If you have decent monitors/headphones and are very familiar with how things sound on them, you should be able to hear spectrum balance issues just by listening to the mix. (Obviously, this is something that comes only with practice, and consulting an analyzer may help you to develop an ear for frequency balance and to catch things that you didn't notice or that were masked by deficiencies in your monitoring setup.) EDIT 2: Also, just to be clear, I have something of an anti- visual mixing bias, so don't let me dissuade you from using a spectrum analyzer if you think it will be helpful to you.

Sweet. Now mine will be polished and awesome instead of unpolished but still awesome.

On the keyboards we've linked, the 88 weighted keys are the main reason why they cost $400+. You can get semi-weighted keys for less, but they won't feel quite like a piano. It's hard to find inexpensive dedicated controllers with fully-weighted keys -- since the weighted action is one of the most expensive elements of the keyboard, that's what gets cut out to reduce the price. I'd recommend not writing off digital pianos just because they aren't solely controllers. Any digital piano with MIDI connections can do as much as a basic controller, and with the lower-priced digital pianos, it's the number of keys and the action that are bringing the price up, not the internal sounds. If you're okay with semi-weighted instead of fully-weighted and want to risk buying M-Audio, the Keystation 88es, which is solely a controller, is about $200. I've never used it, so I can't say if it's any good.

Oh yes, I went there.

When it's used sparingly and tastefully, I think it actually sounds good (e.g. Cher's "Believe"). When it's constantly applied to entire vocal passages, it's annoying (e.g. most hip-hop uses I've heard, Daft Punk, etc.)

It's great for correcting wrong notes (like it was originally intended for). The Cher effect, which is what everyone now thinks of when they hear the term autotune, is, however, over-used and obnoxious.

I have a Casio CDP-100 that I've been pretty satisfied with. The downsides are that the internal speakers are lousy and there are no true speaker outs, only a headphone out, but if you're going to primarily use it as a MIDI controller, that wouldn't be an issue at all. I really like the action on the keys. No pitch bend, mod wheel, or aftertouch, though. It's also not USB. You'd have to use a MIDI interface, which you can get for around $30-$40. I second what Snapple said about M-Audio. I have a Radium 49 -- the build quality is cheap, a few of the keys stick, and I had to disconnect the pitch wheel because it went out of alignment and was sending pitch bend signals in the zeroed position. Only go with M-Audio if you're on a really tight budget; you'll get what you pay for.

♥♥♥ Melodyne Editor Pretty sure there are freeware pitch correction plug-ins as well, although I don't know them off the top of my head.

Do you have to upgrade to 7 to maintain upgrade pricing eligibility for when Komplete 8 is released, or can you just sit this one out?

Also, if you haven't done so already, learn to differentiate the different parts of a drum kit. Learn the difference in sound between a ride cymbal and a crash cymbal, etc. If you're going to listen to existing music to find things to imitate (and you should), knowing what type of percussion hits you're hearing is important, because it will make reproducing the sound on your own much easier, and you'll have labels to put on the sounds you remember (e.g "open hi-hat off the beat" instead of "some kind of cymbal off the beat").

This is about the same as my experience, also with a Core 2 Duo laptop. I usually run into CPU overload, filled RAM, and hard drive bandwidth issues at about the same point. As a result, when Sonar goes down, it goes down hard.

If you're doing rock 'n roll style drums, you usually have some variation on this pattern (other genres use their own conventions): Kick on beats 1 and 3 Snare on beats 2 and 4 Possibly ride cymbal/hi-hat playing eighth- or sixteenth-notes throughout Fills at the ends of phrases (e.g. a roll on the toms, a crash cymbal) Listen to some rock with this in mind and pay attention to how the drummer embellishes the basic formula. The drum and bass lines don't necessarily have to have any particular relation to each other, but keep in mind that the kick drum compliments the bass's attack very well, so if you find that your bass line isn't coming through very well, you might rework the kick pattern to emphasize the rhythms the bass is playing or something like that.