Charisma Transplant – 090309
Sponsored by the letter L.
Started to arrange my ethnic Opium loops in CE4. Believe it or not, there is a bit of a tune in there somewhere. Hopefully it will come together fairly quickly.
There’s definitely room for bass and beats of some sort, but I’m not sure about guitar at this stage. Who knows?
Fun, fun fun…
Regards,
djp
Been meaning to ask this…why all of the different versions and software packages (i.e. CE4, VST, CoolEdit, the Tascam, etc.) Why not just do it all in one? (or did I miss something early on…)
Submitted on 2009/03/10 at 9:29am
Glad you asked me that, J…:-)
The first thing to say is that everything I have brings something to the party, but nothing “does it all” for me.
I use the Tascam because I got fed up using bad interfaces on bad PCs for recording purposes. Perfectly fine takes would break down for no apparent reason, and out of frustration, subsequent takes would invariably be crap. I decided that PCs were never designed to record music, so I thought I’d buy me something that was. The Tascam is fine, if rather slow to save and transfer data, but hey, there’s always coffee to be made…:-). I had originally planned to use the Tascam to mix RAW MESH, as physical faders are much nicer to use than virtual ones, but since my average Cubase working file might have up to 100 “tracks”, I’d have had to bounce down to 24 tracks. I tried that for a while, but found it to be way more trouble than it’s worth. To add to the insanity, I actually bought a second s/h Tascam, partly because there was a suggestion at some stage that I might be involved in recording a live band (that suggestion is still here in the background) and the idea would be to run the two Tascams together. This would also give me 48 tracks to play with at mixdown time. Truth to tell, I have never taken the second Tascam out of the box after two years of ownership, so I have no idea if syncing is easy, or even possible. Hell, I don’t even know if the fucker works…:-). When I move house, I’ll have a lot more room to experiment with stuff like that.
Cool Edit Pro and the various versions of Adobe Audition are all very similar to each other. Cool Edit/Adobe Audition was always more stable for recording on a PC than Cubase, but I never really liked the interfaces. Things have improved significantly in that regard over the last few years. Of all the variants, Cool Edit Pro is the best for running noise reduction and mastering, but won’t allow saving as MP3, which Adobe Audition will. Adobe Audition introduced me to Loopology loops, which are .cel files (variants of MP3). As far as I know, they only work in Adobe Audution. Where Cool Edit/Adobe Audition really falls down is that it’s never been great at running “live” effects, unlike Cubase.
I have used Cubase since 1999, and when I eventually found out how it worked (took a while), I found it to be incredibly useful and flexible. But very heavy on a PC’s resources, unlike Cool Edit/Adobe Audition. I have now moved on to Cubase Essential, which is a huge advance feature-wise on Cubase 3.7. Over the last few weeks, I have gotten stuck into Cubase Essential and it’s all starting to make a lot of sense to me, but there are certain features in Cubase 3.7 that make a lot more sense to me, so I will keep it in my arsenal (oo er, missus) until I have found a better way to do things in Cubase Essential.
One feature in Cubase 3.7 that I prefer over Cubase Essential is the on-board compressor/limiter – it makes a lot more sense to me than that to be found in Essential, so I will probably use the former when it comes to mixing and mastering.
Having said that, the VST plug-ins in Essential are rather wonderful and I like much of what is to be found in the HALion One soft synth. But I don’t like everything on it, which is why I have other synths…:-).
At the end of the day, though, I have more than enough kit right now, and I won’t be buying any more stuff unless it is to replace damaged/worn-out hardware or obsolete software. Certainly not after buying a nice Roland module off Peter Fitzpatrick yesterday.
When WILL the madness end…?:-)
Regards,
djp
Wow
There IS method in the madness, or so my therapist tells me…
Regards,
djp