Hello People!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Toki987
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I agree with you there about the mackies. they are fabulous, kinda like the old Tapco mixers that expanded on the Shure idea for space saving and performance. If the SB live will patch output to input internally I can chuck the old mixer for now since I could utilize a virtual Mackie in cakewalk to mixdown until I get a decent outboard mixer.
I think.....does that mean I am? hehe
 
Toki987,

You must have been around the farmyard awhile to bring up Tapco mixers. They were the RNC of their day. Low cost, no frills but a very clean mixer. I see them now and then on ebay.
 
well...les see... I got a Moserite semi-hollow walnut bass with dual humbuckers from before the company was sold and then went out of business. Ring a bell?
heheh
 
...back to the topic.

Well, Mr. Toki987, back to the topic, I reviewed your posts in this thread, and seems like your gear ain't doin' that bad. So, why you wanna let the most important link to your PC as one of the weakest point ?:rolleyes: You got a good PC, good software, good mixer, good basses, and still wanna SB to be the card ? Still I recomend better card you can afford. BTW, how much exactly your budget ?
 
for me? enough to pick up anything from a 2496 to a layla, however the loan department manager at my house (the wife) watches the cash flow closely) I have to hide minor expenditures inside the pork barrel appropriations for capital improvement ( "Honey I need to fix up the studio a little in case company stops by, I think I can do it for about $400 to a grand" ) :)
 
James, all kidding aside, I do appreciate and fully understand the suggestion you made on the 2496 sound card. I have researched it well and find that it will more than fit my bill for sonic adc/dac, and is affordable, however it does not have sound fonts and the only audio I input is bass and guitar, either of which I can mix on a virtual mackie inside XL for now for just a few bucks with the live. Adding the 2496 we be a sweet addition as I appropriate more $ over time. For less than 40 bucks the SB live would even be great to put out cigarettes on while Im jammin.
I picked up a 20 gig SCSI drive a few days ago ,free, and will have another Athlon built by weeks end soley for Sonar XL. I`m just spreading my dimes right very conservatively, since it is just a hobby. I put the SVT's in storage in 1979 and have only done funzie stuff since, and a few sessions as favors. The jones has gotten on me really bad in the last few months and I`m fixing it a little at the time with and thanks to Sonar, and all you guys. I started the project casually in May this yr to help stimulate a life long friend with some material ideas, and to get some pent up emotion out of me as well. It gets more lovely daily... As I learn more about Cakewalk it takes less and less time to go from grey matter to disk, appreciatively, as I appreciate your suggestions.
Ken
 
James Argo said:
...You got a good PC, good software, good mixer, good basses, and...
Click to expand...

And a good wife :D

...And a good friends here... :D
 
Middleman said:
Toki987,

You must have been around the farmyard awhile to bring up Tapco mixers. They were the RNC of their day. Low cost, no frills but a very clean mixer. I see them now and then on ebay.
Click to expand...

In the early 70`s I owned a wholesale sound reinforcement company. Tapco was a fast mover for the smaller road bands due to size, cost, you could daisy chain them, and they were nice and clean. Bob Heil had a board of very similar design as well. Tapco had auto-input padding covered early on. When I saw the debut Mackie it seemed to reverberate an ancestry of Tapco in it's layout and signal mapping.
 
I have just read this whole thread with increasing interest, some good points have been made all round.

I used an old SB 64 Gold and then an S/b Live before moving up to a delta 66+ omni. In fact, I still use the Live! for soundfonts. I have never experienced any glitches or conflicts with the s/b, its always done its job fine and I recorded some good stuff on it.

But the difference between the s/b and say, the 2496 is like night and day for audio work, no comparison in terms of noise levels and higher bit rate recording and playback.

The Live was a good stepping stone for me and I still need it for s/fonts so it was not a wasted investment.

Pursuading the wife to let you spend cash on home recording gear is something most of us can relate to;) Sneaking new gear into the house is an artform:D
 
My only outboard midi device is a Korg DW8000. I use it as a controller only, so all my tracks are cut with oncard sounds and dxi synths except for an occasional guitar and bass, which part of the time I actually play the analog instrument. This makes my audio input demand very low, the soundblaster handles this very well.
To over come any latency using the dxi synths I, set up the dxi synth for the track, change the source back to the soundcard instead of the synth, pick a patch that is similar to the synth patch, record the track, change the source back to the dxi synth and save it. No latency problems. You just have to "hear" the synth in your head while the soundcard is playing the soundfont sound while laying the track. There is absolutely NO way to play .5 secs ahead of the mix using DXI with any latency.
 
Hey, I still have a Tapco 6-channel mixer if anyone is interested. Rotary knobs instead of faders. :D

Sneaking new gear into the house is an artform
Click to expand...
Paul, you have to walk in backwards. Makes it look like you're returning the stuff instead of bringing it in.

The other approach is, "This old thing? I lent it to Bob last year, he finally got around to giving it back."
 
Dachay, I can see you've been there, done that, starred in the video and got the 'T' shirt:D

I love learning from pro's.;)
 
Paul881 said:

I love learning from pro's.;)
Click to expand...

Paul, take a hint from your old pro friend Dave:

Buy a nice bottle of perfume, some flowers, and some Outfit for the missus. Then casually mention " Oh, I stopped by the music store on the way from the florist, only bought a little mic, Foreign one too. Just some cheap Neumann U87. That perfume smells so sexy on you, my darling. Have more wine..."
 
Does that explain why neither of you are married then?:D

If thats the case, I'll try your suggestion immediately :D :D
 
Paul881 said:
Does that explain why neither of you are married then?:D
Click to expand...
HEY!! I was married at one point in my life. Oh. . . . . . . . maybe that's your point. :D
 
I've been using a SBlive value now for about three years. It has worked fine for me. The only problem has been finding good soundfonts. Although I have found a few good ones, they all sound like canned intstruments. I recently bought the Audiophile 2496 card and have both cards in the computer. I have not really worked with the Audiophile too much yet, so I cannot personally attest to the difference in sound. If you are recording just as a hobby for now, I see nothing wrong with using the SBLive with sound fonts.
 
well, well, well...., I found the Crash point for the 16 bit pci soudblaster last night. Having 2 DXI synths running with note poly, 8 midi tracks running up to 8 note poly in several, and 2 audio tracks. The chip loses control and starts gettin real freaky, playing the wrong voices, locking for a few milliseconds, cancelling voices for increments, and any realtime edit stops the process. Hopefully the SB Live will help.

I chunk change in the cookie jar daily.. I'm looking forward to a 2496 and a Yamaha sw1000
 
SoundFonts & High-End Audio Cards

Hey Toki,

I have a Terratec EWX 24/96 audio card. It doesn't have wavetable synthesis like the Creative cards do, so I have to use a software synthesiser to play soundfonts. There are plenty of soft synths available if you do a Google search. I think there is a dedicated SoundFont player - but I can't remember who markets it. Seer Systems perhaps?

One advantage with the Terratec is that it has a MIDI adaptor. I don't own a MIDI keyboard, but if ever I buy one, I know the Terratec will happily live along side it.

I used to have an AWE64 Gold. In its day it was, well just awesome I suppose, but compared to my Terratec 24/96 - as another poster has alluded - it's like night and day. Recording guitar overdubs on the AWE was a nightmare - the sound was more horrible than something that's REALLY horrid! :) Playback was 8-bits and recording 16-bits. 8-bits playback is like listening to a crappy transistor radio that's not quite tuned to a radio station. Ugh!

There are some really good SoundFonts available, and I noticed James Argo in another post was asking for people's favourite SFs. James, if you recall my instructions on how to load SFs into VSampler 2.74, it pretty well listed my fave fonts. I also like Garden Bass sometimes in place of FunkyBass.

My audiocard came bundled with GigaSampler LE which had some absolutely fabulous samples: two drum sets, two bass guitars and two electric pianos as well as the well-known GigaPiano. Believe me, there's nothing that comes close to those Giga samples.

Alas, GigaSampler LE is crippled and won't allow recording along side MIDI files. :( So I had some great backing tracks but no way of recording my guitar along side of them.

Oops, sorry, I've rambled on a bit here Toki. I'd better get back to drawing those things that makes my boss wealthy!

--
BluesMeister
 
you got good stuff. Mine sounds fine as long as I don`t get too intense. I bought a sblive for nearly nothing, I got the value version, bad mistake, no way to load and unload the fonts cause it comes without software, only drivers. Every live!ware version of the software I`ve downloaded won`t work. The clarity is great, but it doesn`t have the punch of the SB 16 pci. It seems to satisfy the wife, my Buddies, and the neighborhood kids though. I reference thru an old kenwood 55 watt stereo ic-amp they made for Radio Shack yrs ago and a couple of Jensen 5a monitors out of an old studio. I`m getting familiar enough with Sonar and cut enough jams that I`m itching to go to a more pro card and a module, maybe a 01w/r or something I can afford.
 
I am about to give up on my soundblaster. Love the soundfonts but hate the intermittent crashes when it confilcts with my Audiophile 2496. I am moving all my soundfonts into Vsampler 2.74 and building banks of my favorites. The crashing started when I updated to the latest 2496 drivers. I started getting bluescreens in WinXP.

I have Gigasampler 24 which came with the Audiophile 2496 but find working with two programs at once is kind of a pain. I agree that the sound of Giga samples is great however, they can run a little expensive. The Giga24 bundle, if they are still offering it with the 2496, is a great deal. You don't get all of the effects and features of Giga96 and above, but you do have access to some great sounds.
 
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