Category: Music-Making
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AstroLab: Arturia’s Puzzling Beauty
Background and context I’ve always enjoyed trying out new hardware synthesizers. Quite a few hours at a local Long & McQuade music store here in Canada. Or when I was still travelling a lot for work, it was stores in other cities or even different countries. You know you’re a synth nerd when visiting synthesizer…
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The King is dead – long live the King!
This post is about the Access Virus TI synthesizer – possibly my all-time favourite hardware synthesizer. The premonition There was a 2017 blog post speculating about the (lack of a) future for the Access Virus TI at synthmorph.com (archive.org link)- partly, because the mastermind behind that legendary synthesizer, Christoph Kemper had reoriented his company into…
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Cubase MIDI Remote Motorized Fader Problem – My Fix
As of this writing, (Cubase 13.0.41) there’s still a major flaw when using motorized faders with the MIDI Remote. So I’ve created my own work-around, that involves temporarily muting the problematic MIDI message types via inserting a MIDI utility script between the hardware controller and Cubase.
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What’s New in Cubase 8.5 to 13
Around mid April of this year, Steinberg announced, that they will close down their eLicenser service in early 2025. This creates a potential stress and decision point for users of older versions of Cubase (versions 11 and older). Affected users may want to read the official Steinberg announcement just to be sure they have the…
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My 6 favourite New Features from Cubase Pro 10 to 13
Not sponsored I’ve bought every Cubase release and upgrade from Cubase VST 5 on to the current Cubase 13 Pro with my own money, skipping only Cubase SX 2 in 2003. So there’s no sponsored content here. And I’m also not opining on, if Cubase updates are worth their money, since that’s very subjective, depending…
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Building a new “boring” Windows DAW (2023)
Why “boring”? Because I wasn’t looking to get to the very bleeding edge of current possibilities, not only because things get disproportionately expensive when you buy at the very top end, but also because I wanted to achieve high operational stability with minimal hardware and software incompatibility issues.
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Cubase MIDI Remote Templates for NI Maschine
Cubase MIDI Remote templates for several Native Instruments Maschine Controllers originally inspired and created by Jef Gibbons for a YouTube video in the spring of 2022.
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VST Automation vs. MIDI
Interacting with the plugins via VST automation allows for a generally superior experience. A couple of advantages that stand out: Especially the bi-directional communication matters for automated faders and displaying current plugin settings on the hardware controller. Many great plugins only receive midi control messages, but do not send them. But they will receive AND…
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Novation Nocturn with Standalone PluginGuru Unify on Win10
The Novation Nocturn is one of quite a few discontinued midi controllers, that still work fine on my Windows 10 system (x64 version 20H2) – and it can be made to work just fine with the Unify standalone software. — I’ve created this post in response to a question by a fellow Unify user in…
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Recording my guitar tracks in surround sound?
I really like how my current guitar amplifier setup sounds. Now I want to simultaneously record from that setup at different stages of the audio chain.
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PluginGuru Unify with NI Komplete Kontrol Mk2
Unify is a very interesting software instrument (it can act as a host and as a plugin) developed by Shane Dunne in partnership with John “Skippy” Lehmkuhl (PluginGuru). One of the newer features (still labeled as “advanced and experimental”) makes it easier to configure a midi hardware controller’s knobs and buttons to remotely control the…
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Trim Silence from Audio Sample Files in Bulk or Batch Mode
I found it surprisingly difficult to find a quick and easy way to trim silence in bulk or batch mode from a large number of audio files. While there’s some GUI software that facilitates trimming, a superb option for manipulating video and sound files is called FFmpeg. It’s free, open source and cross platform. However,…