Where can I get my hands on a production tool that will magically take my boring stuck inside the box guitar solo's and turn them into steve Vai....anyone?

I'm not a drummer. I know that. I'm honest about that. I recorded my drums for my album with a MIDI kit and miced a real set of cymbals. I then spent three months fixing the timing errors in my playing. Audiosnap takes a hell of a lot of painstaking handwork to ensure all the off notes are right. Obviously MIDI quantise was also used.

My performance was terrible. I don't have access to a drummer. I was the only option.

I believe it now sounds great. Sounds natural and not over corrected (correction was typically 50-80% quantise).

But I'm not cheating the system because I'm 100% honest to everyone out there about it. They say to me "you recorded all these parts by yourself?" and I say "yes, but I spent 3 months fixing the timing errors in the drums cause I'm not a drummer."

For my music, it's about the arrangement, the composition and the song. Audiosnap can't write me a song. It allows me to deliver my message. That's it. If I were to play live, I'd get a good drummer to play. I can't physically play all of the instruments on my songs at once, so I'd have to get someone anyway!

mattplaysguitar


I'm not a drummer. I know that. I'm honest about that. I recorded my drums for my album with a MIDI kit and miced a real set of cymbals. I then spent three months fixing the timing errors in my playing. Audiosnap takes a hell of a lot of painstaking handwork to ensure all the off notes are right. Obviously MIDI quantise was also used.

My performance was terrible. I don't have access to a drummer. I was the only option.

I believe it now sounds great. Sounds natural and not over corrected (correction was typically 50-80% quantise).

But I'm not cheating the system because I'm 100% honest to everyone out there about it. They say to me "you recorded all these parts by yourself?" and I say "yes, but I spent 3 months fixing the timing errors in the drums cause I'm not a drummer."

For my music, it's about the arrangement, the composition and the song. Audiosnap can't write me a song. It allows me to deliver my message. That's it. If I were to play live, I'd get a good drummer to play. I can't physically play all of the instruments on my songs at once, so I'd have to get someone anyway!

 
 
+1 All the above.  
 
 I have no issue with showing them.  Here is me...live cheese and all FTB live
 
 Now with the DAW and tools like Audio snap, I have access to just about any instrument my twisted mind can think of. I play most of my synths with an old plastic MIDI guitar. Workable but not as responsive as I would like it to be. Much snapping is needed to get the articulations just as I want them. Cheating, OK I guess it is but I really don't play flute, violin, accordion, harp, but I can in the DAW. TAL demo  I still have much'more cheating to do on it. 
 
 
 
 The way I see it, once a musician steps in the role of producer, he/she responsibility changes a bit and ultimate responsibility is the best possible product with the material you have to work with. Having a moral objection to basic tools of the DAW sure could stand in the way of creativity I think. Good luck with your crusade Dean. I plan to go on cheating.  
 

A lot of users get frustrated with AS (and V-Vocal, for similar reasons) because they've been suckered by the marketing hype into assuming it's a one-click automated process.

Amen, brother!!!!  If a marketing department says a computer program is going to do something automatically, you can pretty much be assured that it will automatically do it wrong most of the time.

I personally don't care about who's cheating.  I'm in the music creation business and not performance capturing business.  So I'm going to try to create the best recording and music I can, whether I have to help the performer or not.  Where the rubber meets the road is when they appear in public because they won't get any help there (unless they're Milli Vanilli.)

+1

oops... brb got some cheatin' to do. For some reason I can't get the Hank Williams song "Your cheatin' heart" out of my head now

And everyone just continued with the exact same thing, which is to continue to try to make it into a "if you went an inch, then I can go a hundred miles and it's the same". No one ever seems to get byond this silly position, and it's just not true.

I've pointed out numerous times, if you are have great performances, you save a great performance by fixing one flubbed note, that's a good thing. You are saving 99% of a great take by fixing one small thing with a punch in. You've still put in the work to be able to do great takes and you are capturing magic, and it's better to punch in one or two notes to save a magical take. In the process of really letting it flow you may make the occasional mistake, no matter how good you are.

If you are quantizing and tuning and automating volume and EQ and doing down to the syllable comping, that is NOT the same thing. That's painting by numbers, you are not a painter. If you are honest about not being a painter when you post the song, I have no problem with that. But no one ever is. It's all just thrown up there without any admission of how artificial it is.

When I post a song, I indicate any way in which I processed it, which is usually very minimal. I'm not interested in 'putting out songs', which is what most people seem to be about. I'm interested in getting better. No one gives a crap about your songs, so you might as well spend your time getting better, rather than spending a couple hours recording stuff and a couple days data processing it into a song that you post on a forum where a handful of people say, oh yeh, that's nice.

And that's exactly what seems to be going on most of the time. And it's created a situation in which people who really can do it are just lost in a deluge of artificially created stuff that no one cares about. I have no problem with people expressing themselves with the tools they have at hand. But show us what you really created, not what you were able to do after a couple days of hacking and slashing. If it's not that good, then ok, keep working at it. If you only put up what you actually do, then you have a lot more incentive to get better.

You seem to be assuming that everyone's goal is to put stuff up on the Sonar songs forum.

Tell you something else: I *am* interested in what people can do after a couple of days hacking and slashing. Clever engineering and editing is an interesting thing in its own right.