Dad3353

Get some tips and/or help from @Happy Jack, maybe..?

I upgraded to A5, but have gone back to using only A3, as the 'new' stuff in A5 doesn't recognise the extras I'd bought for A3 any more, and my A4 brought me nothing special. If you are only interested in the free stuff, there's probably no problem, but I'm not going to buy again the amps and Fx I'd already bought (and was satisfied with...) for A3. I'm not best pleased with their backward compatibility, nor the 'half-truths' whereby they 'gift' part of a package, but you have to buy more to use it. IK Multimedia..? I'm out.

PM sent...

Good evening, Andrew , and ... Plenty to read and amuse you here, and lots to learn and share.

Yes, Dave, I'm the chubby one behind the drums. It's Our Youngest on bass, in hyperactive mode, Our Eldest with the Explorer stage left, Vince being unusually expressive stage right (now gone to the Antilles, 'replaced by Nico...) and Steph 'performing' in his inimitable 'put all you've got into it, or don't do it at all' style. Our repertoire is varied; we have one or two 'up-beat' numbers, followed by a cooling-off spate so that I may continue without medical assistance. Another belter, then another low-key one. This RATM was our closing piece, after which I discreetly slip backstage to lie out flat on the ground for a while, to recover. Happy daze..!

Yes, yes; now go and lie down, you'll feel better in the morning. (... but thanks for watching, just the same... )

This is (or rather, was...) our hypnotically mesmerising band, playing at a local mini-festival a few years ago now. You'll understand from the insane antics of all of us the magnetic attraction we emanate, which explains why we get called upon so often. The choreography is meticulously rehearsed, perhaps even more so than the research for the best sound, and pays off handsomely (although it's hard on the knees, and the stunts are dangerous for the untrained. Do not try this at home...). I'll let those that get to the end judge the (modest...) popularity of our 'performance'. So, with no further ado, I'll leave the stage and welcome... The Daubs..! (sporadic applause...)

Not worth the ink needed to reply.

Indeed... Cherry-picking..? Just being ornery, or obtuse..? All performers must get up to antics..? You're just being contrary for the sake of it.

Dongle..? Dongle..? What's a 'dongle'..? ...

There was nothing from you to quote, and I didn't want to encourage any delicate ears to set in motion the video clip. Some oriental girls messing about, making a din; nothing of note, so no loss.

Here's a screenshot of one of my orchestral templates. There a re 106 tracks in all; I may well add a few for Fx buses. All of these can be whatever they are, it seems simple enough to me, and I'm dumb... Click to enlarge; the individual tracks are all folded here, but can, of course, expand, individually as required, to show the audio, or MIDI, or sample etc. Yes, the colour coding helps..!

Now you're confusing Fodera and fedora again. We've warned you before about that. ...

The clue is in the OP's title, and opening video. Being on stage doesn't have to mean acting the clown, or acting at all. For some, and some circumstances, that's the deal, but at other times, for other performers and audiences, it's not. Simple, really.

We're not going to agree. I've listened (often...) to concert pianists, and others, on the radio, so expression..? It's all in the fingers, mate. Bass face..? Nah, 's'for the birds. 'Perform' has many more connotations than that, to me at least.

Cynical codswallop, in my opinion.

When you've played that so many times, for weddings, village fêtes, dance parties, over the decades... At the moment, my eyes are open; they might just as well be closed.

I have 2002's, but these are my Sound Edge 602's. Re-issues, of course; my originals didn't stand up to the rigours of variety band touring back in the '70s. I should have used the 2002's that I replaced them with a lot earlier.

But some music is to be listened to, even better with one's eyes closed. There are occasion when jiving is 'la raison d'être' of the event, and others where passivity is appreciated. I seem to remember a concert performed by Ravi Shankar, way back then, at which he introduced the evening with a request that the audience restrain their appreciation; the music he and his colleagues were to play was not played for reactions of the sort. The band Kiss have a different perspective, but some bands prefer the sober approach. Just sayin'.

You see, that, in itself, confuses me. Reaper doesn't have 'x-tracks', they are all 'tracks'. Audio, samples, MIDI, whatever... I've some compositions with fifty or so tracks, half of which are the elements of my drum Vst. I can add Fx to directly to each track, or send one or more tracks to an Fx bus, and dose the amount sent for each. A couple of dozen tracks for woodwinds, a few more tracks with audio, either imported or internally rendered ('frozen'...), some samples tracks... All of these are just tracks, when I'm mixing, I'm not concerned with 'em being such-and-such a 'type', I just mix 'em. Any limitation would be the memory of my PC (rather modest HP8200, i5 proc, 12G memory...); I'm far from saturating the machine, even with IR reverbs in there. I don't know what a 'rack instrument' is. I'll have another look at Cubase, Protools and such, to see. I had another bash with Harrison a few moments ago, and this time could set up the Vst paths, so there's another to try, but it tells me that the plug-ins I selected are 'demo only', so I don't know how far I'll get with that. Fascinating stuff, with so many ways to skin a cat..!

Maybe I should just download the trial versions of some of these DAWs, just to see, as, for the moment, I just don't understand exactly what the difference is. I've looked at the spec for Elements, and its cost, and can't see anything in there that makes it more attractive, to me. It says, for instance, that Elements allows three Vst instruments at a time in a project. I couldn't do a fifth of what I do with such a limitation; sometimes I have more than three drum kits, let alone the orchestral parts..! I've looked at the screen screenshots, for the layout, and see only similitude with Reaper (or maybe it's the other way around..?). I see tracks, plug-in windows, mixing faders, transport buttons... Nothing radically different involving organic lifeforms or spreadsheet columns. I don't doubt that everyone picks up a certain familiarity with keyboard short-cuts, or has a more or less need for sophistication in the rendering quality, or even the need to share projects, real-time, over t'web, but without something radical of the sort, I really can't see the fuss. My ignorance, certainly, but I'll try to educate myself and give some of these others a chance to shine. I've tried Harrison, for instance, but, for reasons I've not yet understood, it crashes when trying to direct it to a Vst folder, so I haven't been able to 'give it a whirl' (yet...). Maybe I'd be better at guidance if, from experience, I had wider vision of these things. We'll see...

As above ^^. The test is easy : listen again the next day to what has been recorded. The 'freshness' will have returned. There's nothing in your signal chain that could cause such an effect; it's not faulty equipment. Give it a rest.

It depends not a little on exactly what you're doing, and how. If you're recording onto a track or two, using a bit of treatment, then mixing and rendering to a stereo WAV, OGG or MP3, then you probably won't see much of a difference, once you've done a tour of the screen and a few keyboard shortcuts. The Vst plugins will work in similar fashion, unless you have particular compressors or console strips that are specific to Protools, with no equivalent. I don't use Protools, but from what I've seen of others using it, and the screenshots and videos on the subject, I can't see much difference. For cost reasons, there's no chance I'll be doing it, but if I was considering doing the opposite (going from Reaper to Protools...), I wouldn't sweat it; they're not that far apart. The simple way forward would be to install Reaper and use in on a typical task, whilst maintaining current 'production' on Protools until proficiency is obtained. I don't reckon that that would take long. In truth, of course, the answer's a lemon : suck it and see.