BigRedX

Thanks. I'm down to 5 from about 40 ten years ago. I use the red Gus G3 with In Isolation, and have a very similar one in all black (including the metal work), as a back-up. For Hurtsfall I have the Eastwood Hooky and a Burns Barracuda, as a spare, which I'm hoping to replace with another Hooky. I've also got a Squier Bass VI that I need to get around to selling.

The next In Isolation gig is at Ye Olde Salutation Inn in Nottingham on Friday 8th December. Support form Discord and Rhyme who are Last July playing 80s synth pop covers and Ombudsmen. In Isolation will be on at 10.00pm and since the gig partly clashes with NMA at Rock City we'll be allowing anyone with a NMA ticket who comes after their gig half-price entry.

A long trek through the semi-snow from Nottingham to Gateshead on Sunday to play at The Black Bull with In Isolation, for a final night of the Dark Side of the Tyne "festival". It looked pretty grim in the morning, but it turned out that the worst snow was in Nottingham and once we were on the M1 it was fine. Unfortunately because of the weather it was a smaller turn out that the promotor and we had hoped, and hadn't been helped by Westenra having pull out of the opening night gig due to being snowed in at Whitby. However we played pretty well including all the new songs and to an audience who had mostly never seen us before and more importantly stayed to end when we sold a few CDs. Here's a couple of photos from the gig: Next one is on Friday at the Sal in Nottingham.

Stupid click-bate video where someone is deliberately doing it wrong in order to preach to his sycophantic audience. If he had a proper interest in showing how quantisation should be used, he would be demonstrating the right method, which is to create a "groove template" from the drumming as it is and then use that to tighten up the placing of any other parts that actually require it. Of course this method is far less interesting, and less noticeable on the finished track and doesn't pander to his audience's prejudices.

The simple answer is "it depends". On the whole trying to correct tempo problems after the recording has been made is normally far too difficult and unless the variations are very slight, in which case it's probably not worth bothering with, it will nearly always introduce other less desirable artefacts into the recording. I think also that you will find that most old tracks that would have benefited from a constant tempo are already pretty close simply because the drummer was good enough to be able to stick to the beat otherwise they would have been replaced in the studio by someone who could play to a constant tempo. These days the best way is to try it out before you go into the studio. That's what I have always done. Some songs benefit from playing to a click and some need those tempo variations. Remember that a lot of drummers have always been the one in the band who sets the tempo and consequently have never had to play in time to something else. I've played with a couple of otherwise excellent drummers who simply couldn't play in time with a click because it put them off. It may be a difficult concept for the rest of us to get because we are so used to playing in time with the drums, that as musicians we are almost always following someone else for timing, so it seems easy when if you've never done it before it most definitely is not. The trick is to make sure you have practiced before you go into the studio and don't try something unexpected and time consuming once you get there unless someone else is picking up the studio bill, in which case take as long as you like.

There's quantisation and quantisation. Dismissing it out of hand just shows your ignorance. After all the whole band are all trying to play on the same beats at the same time. It doesn't have to mean setting everything to an equally spaced grid. All decent modern DAWs will allow you to create a quantisation template from one of the recorded parts, usually the drums but anything rhythmic with the correct feel for the piece will do. When you do it this way because to are using an actual performance to set the quantisation points they are highly unlikely to fall exactly on the regular 1/8 or 1/16 note intervals. The rest of the instruments are then "quantised" to this template which will have the effect of just tightening up the whole performance without making the actual timing rigid. In conjunction with beat detection for tempo changes it just gives a tight performance with just enough "human" feel. I've also used this method with recordings that have been created entirely from sequenced/programmed sources except for the vocals by finding a drum pattern on a record that has the feel I want and using that to create my quantisation template.

I think it depends on what you are doing in the studio. If I've paid for a proper producer to turn my recording into a potential hit single (or at least make it sound loads better than I could manage myself) I'll will be happy to accommodate any changes they might want to make, including changing my sound or even removing me from the recording entirely.

Depends on the song and the musicians and also the skill of the engineer. The Terrortones would always try out any song we intended to record with and without a click. Some benefited from a constant tempo, and were recorded with the drummer plating to the click and the rest of the band playing to the drummer, others needed more push and pull between the different sections than playing around the click could achieve and they were done without. As has been said you need to practice playing to a click first, I've also worked with some otherwise great drummers who simply couldn't play when they were no longer dictating the tempo. And while having a bar structure on the recorded tracks can make life easier for locating drop in points for overdubs a good engineer shouldn't have to have them. It was all done by ear (and tape counter numbers) in the days of analogue tape. And besides all decent modern DAWs will be able to work out flexible bars and tempo from the recorded tracks to follow a "musical" structure.

The only way you are going to get a decent Moog sound is to use a Moog synthesiser.

In that case I'd remove Windows from the laptop install a version of Linux that you are familiar with and supports both your chosen DAW and the XR18.

"Iconic" and "great" are subjective terms. The song also comes from a time when the costs involved in recording and distributing "popular" music were an effective barrier to just anything getting released. So either the artist had to believe enough in a song to "put their money were their mouth was" or persuade someone else (a record label) to do it. Also the familiarity of time helps to make a song more popular. Are there any new songs recorded recorded in the last 10 years that you consider to be on a par with Hotel California? I think a better test of whether any of these songs are greatly objectively "great" will be if people still think so in another 50 years time.

And there's the problem. £1.00-£1.50 isn't really a lot, but if it was offered on a regular basis day it would soon add up. However if reducing your energy usage regularly also meant that your payments reduced over time, I can see there coming a point where the additional income become so negligible it is hardly worth the inconvenience. Of course if you simply wanted to save money on your energy bills you could turn off the gas and electricity at the main switches every time the house was empty.

I suppose you need to have smart meter take tac advantage of this offer? Is your payment in proportion to your reduction in electricity usage, or is it a fixed payment for just using less than normal? Also will the fact that you have reduced your electricity usage during this period affect the threshold for the next time you get this offer?

On serious note what does this actually entail? Not using any electricity at all? Other than turning everything off at the consumer unit how would you know you have successfully done this?

So please, for those of us who don't "get it" please explain exactly what makes Hotel California great in purely objective terms.

Getting back to the OP, other than the fact that GarageBand does not exist for Windows there is no correct answer to what is best. Different DAWs suit different people simply because of the way they work. These days nearly all DAWs have all the essential features required for recording and manipulating audio and MIDI and it is the workflow and fine details that set them apart. There are a couple a caveats to this: 1. If you collaborate with others there are definite advantages to everyone using the same DAW. While there are file transfer protocols that in theory allow you to move a project from one DAW to another none of them work as seamlessly as everyone having the same version of the same program. I'm a Logic user simply because when I bought my first DAW I was in a band with someone who already was using Logic. Not only was transferring song ideas and recordings between us easy, but I was able to get technical advice from his experience until I was fully up to speed with the process. On a couple of occasions I've done recording on other people's systems, and have struggled - not because there is anything bad about them but simply because the functions and features I am used to are either located in a different menu or work in a slightly different way to Logic. After 30 years of using one DAW there is no point for me to try and learn something else. 2. Free isn't always the best VfM. While there is no need to ever pay for Reaper, unless you intend to only ever use it to record audio, you'll soon find yourself wanting to buy extra plug-in instruments and effects. If you are not careful you can find that you have spent the kind of money that would have bought you something like Logic, Cubase or Performer all of which come with all the plug-in effects and instruments that you will ever need. To this end it may make sense for the OP to look at buying a second-hand Mac simply so they can run GarageBand (and maybe move on to Logic should they ever need something even more powerful).

If GarageBand does what you want, especially from a recording PoV stick with it. If you want more control at mixdown you can load your GarageBand project into Logic with all the tracks and regions maintained.

Ridiculous price. Also IIRC the green tinge to the colour is purely down to ageing, they were originally silver. These instruments are almost 50 years old now.

I get the point of genres, they have done wonders for attracting listeners to my most recent bands, but the more "specific" they become the less useful they are, and a lot of the time the subdivisions are fairly subjective anyway.

But I'm sure you know that's there's a massive difference between the kinds of low band-width data that 60s "computers" used which was written and retrieved by devices designed specifically for the purpose, and trying to cram 8 tracks of 16bit 48kHz digital audio onto a video cassette.

None of the "What Makes This Song Great" videos I have seen spend any significant time on the production. If they did I might still be watching them.

It had never occurred before because I was using Logic as the time code source and had set 0:0:0:00 as the first beat of the first bar which meant it was impossible to go "earlier" than that. Even when I was striping tape at home the code started at 0:0:0:00 and before that there would be no code to sync to. And the words "Digital" and "Tape" should never go together. All the disadvantages of tape with few of the benefits of digital.

I once spent half an hour in the Rough Trade shop in Ladbroke Grove trying to work out which micro-genres the CDs I wanted to buy would be in. In the end it was quicker to hand the person behind the counter a list of what I was after and let them look. It turned out they only had one out of the 10 CDs I wanted to buy and it was categorised in such a way I don't think I would have found it on my own. I really don't care about genre. AFAIAC there is just music I like and music I don't like. In the shop it's much easier to find it everything is simply arranged alphabetically by artist.

The only time I've ever recorded bass separately to (real) drums was when I was asked to replace a bass part that had been recorded by my predecessor in the band as the singer and guitarist preferred my less busy part. The reason it was less busy was because I had had time to learn all the intricacies of the original, but I never told them that!

How long did you spend mixing them?