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Guitar Month Bonus Pack (Free Downloads)

Guitar month is almost over but we’ve saved the best for last: All customers can now download the Guitar Month Bonus Pack, which includes a selection of Craig Anderton’s AdrenaLinn loops that he sampled using Roger Linn’s famous AdrenaLinn effects pedal.

Download AdrenaLinn guitar loops

Craig has also designed a one-of-a-kind Bass Guitar Instrument for Dimension Pro that samples one of the eight basic sounds obtainable with a real Gibson EB 5-String electric bass, and includes five programs based on these samples.

Download Gibson EB-5 Bass for Dimension Pro

And, in case you missed them, here are two free guitar FX Chains that Craig posted on the blog earlier in Guitar Month. Now go make some music!

CA Power Chord FX Chain

CA Vintage Wah FX Chain

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Guitar Tips: Open Up Your Guitar Tunings

Tuning your guitar differently can produce some incredible new sounds for the creative process. Open tunings in particular produce shimmering and complex overtones when you play with a lot of open strings. Here is a quick rundown on four different tunings for you to experiment with when you’re looking for a bit of inspiration.

Standard Tuning

First you have the good old Standard tuning that everyone uses. This tuning is mostly in fourths and is called “Standard Tuning” because every guitar comes stocked with it’s strings tuned to E A D G B E.

Playing a major shape in this is tuning is rather easy and introduces the use of the “power chord”. To constructively show off the different tunings I’ve used a progression of G, A, Bb, A as a reference for the rest of the tunings. The major shape in this tuning looks and sounds like the following:

DADGAD

DADGAD is my personal favorite alternate tuning due to it’s suspended sound. The stacked 5ths and suspended 4th produce an incredible harmonic series above just about any passages you play.

The easiest way to get your guitar to DADGAD f Continue reading “Guitar Tips: Open Up Your Guitar Tunings”

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The Guitars We love: Cakewalk Staff Show & Tell

You may have noticed that it’s guitar month here at Cakewalk, and we sure do love our guitars!  In fact, about 3/4 of the Cakewalk staff plays and owns at least one guitar.  So we thought we would wrap up the month with a little show and tell of some of our favorites. Share your favorite guitars with us on Facebook.

Adam (IT) with his 2004 Epiphone Joe Perry Boneyard Les Paul Standard & his drummer.

Continue reading “The Guitars We love: Cakewalk Staff Show & Tell”

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Cakewalk at NAMM 2014

NAMM embodies so many different aspects of the music industry that it’s hard to describe it in a few words. As a first time NAMM newbie I for one can say that it is a music geek’s ultimate paradise for poking and prodding different companies about the products they bring to the show. Attending with Cakewalk gave me the freedom to demonstrate world-class software as well as interact face to face with our customers and users.

 

10am Thursday morning started off with a Continue reading “Cakewalk at NAMM 2014”

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TH2 Producer: Not Only Guitars

TH2 Producer amp sim can do more than you might think

By Craig Anderton

Overloud’s TH2 Producer offers amp modeling with multiple amps and cabinets, as well as several effects. So while it’s a perfect subject for guitar month, and hopefully the following will give some inspiration to guitarists, let’s also consider what non-guitarists can do with a processor designed for guitar.

The power of parallel. Parallel processing is one of my favorite techniques. Fortunately TH2 not only accommodates parallel processing (the signal path follows a serial—> parallel—> serial  protocol), it also provides different “flavors” of parallel processing.

The parallel section starts with a crossover, so the parallel split can:

  • Provide “bi-amplification,” and send highs to one path and lows to the other
  • Enable a Bandpass filter mode, where one path has a bandpass-style boost, while the other has a complementary notch. A separate “spread” control determines the notch bandwidth
  • If neither is enabled, both paths are simply a parallel connection with no filtering

For extra flexibility, a “swap” button reverses the outputs (e.g., if one output was highs and the other lows, swap reverses that).

The output mixer sums the parallel paths back together again, with Phase Inverse, Delay, Width, Pan, and Level controls, as well as a Balance slider. The TH2 Producer manual can fill you in on the details.

Bass wah. Let’s start off by not straying too far from guitar, and looking at how to use TH2 Producer with bass. A problem with putting any kind of filtering or distortion on bass it that it thins out the sound. You can solve this problem by using the crossover to separate the low end and keep it clean, while adding wah to the midrange frequencies (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Parallel processing can keep the low end clean, but process the highs (click to see the entire image).

Again, we’ll use the Normal Splitter mode, with 490Hz as the split frequency. The Crying wah pedal handles the higher frequencies. The rest of the controls are straightforward Continue reading “TH2 Producer: Not Only Guitars”

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TH2: Understanding Memory Locations and Variations

Overloud’s TH2 advanced preset saving introduces a great way to store, call-up, and switch presets on the fly. Instead of relying on the internal saving methods of SONAR X3, TH2 uses a series of Banks, Sounds, and Variations to better suit a guitarists setup in a live situation.

 

Banks

When you first open up the program the top of the window displays some number values. The first 3 digits on the left refers to “Banks”. TH2 can hold up to 999 User Banks and 999 Factory (non-writable) Banks. To switch through the Factory Banks simply use the up and down arrow keys next to the 3 digits as seen here Continue reading “TH2: Understanding Memory Locations and Variations”

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DEVELOPER NOTES: SONAR X3 VST3 Internals

Introduction

SONAR X3 has numerous enhancements and updates to the VST engine, including rich support for the VST3 specification. This article is intended primarily for VST plugin developers to gain a better understanding of the features supported by SONAR and to write plugins that integrate better with SONAR. While the VST3 documentation covers typical information for plugin developers, it does not explain plugin to host integration in much detail. This article attempts to bridge that gap and explain some of the VST3 specific features are implemented in SONAR. Please also see this article that is more intended for end users.

Automatic VST2 to VST3 migration in SONAR

For plugin vendors who have a large base of VST2 plugins and wish to provide a smooth migration path to VST3, its recommended to implement support for automatic migration of a VST2 plugin saved in a prior project to its VST3 equivalent.

This capability will allow SONAR X3 to detect a compatible VST3 plugin while loading a project and automatically transition the VST 2.4 plugin to its compatible VST3 counterpart Continue reading “DEVELOPER NOTES: SONAR X3 VST3 Internals”

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Anatomy of an FX Chain: CA Vintage Wah (Free Download)

You know you want it…there’s something irresistible about a greasy wah effect

by Craig Anderton

Some people think all you really need for a wah sound is to set a parametric EQ to bandpass with a fairly high Q, and sweep it back and forth. However, a vintage wah’s bandpass filter has a skirt that rejects high and low frequencies, which doesn’t happen with a parametric EQ’s bandpass response.

I came up with a technique that does the vintage wah effect quite well by copying a guitar track and flipping it 180 degrees out of phase so the signal canceled. Then, I’d set one track’s parametric to bandpass with a fairly high Q and sweep it. Because the only difference between the two channels was the bandpass peak, that’s all you heard—the highs and lows canceled out.

The VC-64 is ideal for this application, because it has two parallel paths and you can throw one of them 180 degrees out of phase. However, it’s a very Continue reading “Anatomy of an FX Chain: CA Vintage Wah (Free Download)”

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CES 2014 – It's a wrap

Walking the halls of CES is like rummaging through a rainforest as a caterpillar.  Things are way farther away than they appear, and you will see a million interesting new things on the way to your destination.  If you read Part 1 of the CES blog, you most likely got a feel for what the (now CES-famous) Gibson Tent was like.  On the last day of CES, I ventured deep into the CES halls of abyss and saw some pretty interesting things.  Here are some of the more interesting sectors that I witnessed:

Robotics

Partly interesting – partly scary; robotics are here in full swing, and all the big players in the industry at CES were making sure they were going to be noticed.  There was an actual “Robotics” section with everything from bots that will clean your floor, to super-bots that will make you dinner.  It was obvious that companies are still trying to figure out where this sub-industry will go, but CES was the place to get a good idea of the direction of mainstream-robots of the future.  I saw everything from human-like robots to ones that look more like something that could dig up your yard. Continue reading “CES 2014 – It's a wrap”

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SONAR User and Composer Jerry Gerber to Give A Power-workshop on MIDI at NAMM 2014

When programming complex orchestrations, getting that authentic “feel” can be a big challenge for any producer or composer regardless of the DAW at hand.  It takes many years of use-case scenarios along with a full bag of MIDI tricks of the trade.  Longtime SONAR user and MIDI-manipulator Jerry Gerber possesses both of these elements, and will be sharing his secrets at the 2014 NAMM show.   Interestingly, the workshop is not targeted for just SONAR users, but rather for anyone who wants to create the most artistic MIDI recordings possible with the technology they have available. Continue reading “SONAR User and Composer Jerry Gerber to Give A Power-workshop on MIDI at NAMM 2014”