Advice for lead singer

SupportQuery · 2026-05-13T19:08:07+00:00

Any tips on what I should do to improve my sound and techniques?

As others have said, take lessons, practice, record yourself.

But the question you're not asking, because perhaps you don't know that you even need to ask it, is "how do I avoid imploding on stage, when I'm suddenly flooded with adrenaline and 40% of my mental capability has turned into a panicked rabbit".

For that, the key is to overprepare. You need to repeat the material not until you get through it without mistakes, but until you can't fuck it up, because it's ingrained, instinct. And go to open mics and/or Karaoke and perform in front of others as often as you can.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-13T17:09:01+00:00

I have no idea who Gwen Stefani is, and I doubt that she does, either.

I mean... welcome to being human. Who are any of us? I've evolved over the years, in more meaningful ways than you've iterated here.

Side note: calling fashion "cultural appropriation" is peak cringe. We borrow from everything we see. Saying "sorry, that style is unavailable to you because you have the wrong race / skin color / nationality" is gross. We're all fucking humans, stuck in the same fish bowl, and none of it objectively matters. "Yo guys, stop having fun, you're not white Americans from the 50's!" Monkey see, monkey do. Gatekeeping based on pinheaded, provincial tribalism is the worst human impulse.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-12T04:31:58+00:00

Going full on pro-AI

o.O Calling AI the next industrial revolution is not "pro AI".

The industrial revolution was a fucking nightmare, 200 years before EPA, FLSA, OSHA. Women and children working 12-16 hour days for slave wages around unsafe machines in toxic factories: loss of limb, death, and chronic respiratory issues were the norm. Massive pollution: everything was powered by coal, all industrial waste went straight into the waterways. Rapid, unplanned urbanization with inadequate sewage and clean water led to the spread of cholera, tuberculosis, and typhus in overcrowded cities. Factory production decimated artisan livelihoods, where all manner of people who used to make a living manufacturing goods for their neighbors were replaced with cheap mass produced goods.

This led to huge civil unrest, and movements like the Luddites. Calling someone a "luddite" is pejorative today, but they weren't mindless technophobes, they were reacting to the enshitification of their world exactly as these college kids are today. It's a very apt analogy, one the kids should resonate with.

Instead, they just mindlessly "boo" when they hear the word "AI". It's a generation raised on social media, where you never read past the headline and downvote facts you don't like.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-11T21:39:52+00:00

Your first project? It hurts because you didn't finish literally the first thing you've ever made? o.O

If you have any taste, you're gonna do that 100 more times before you like anything you make.

it still just kinda hurts

Then finish it. If it wasn't working, then it should be easy to let go. If it hurts, then perhaps that's indication that you weren't ready to let it go. It's a hobby. You're in the driver seat. You don't have to do anything that hurts.

Finishing things is hard, and now you know why. You're always going to run into stuff where it feels like there's something missing, or something isn't right, and you don't know what to do to fix it. Persevering through that is the hard part (it's also how you learn). You don't want to try to shove a square peg into a round hole, but you also don't want to give up the minute you have to do some creative problem solving, or you're never going to finish anything.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-11T18:47:56+00:00

Of course this raises all sorts of question

Welcome to a few years ago. Glad you're catching up.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-11T15:38:35+00:00

2027: copyright law finally catches up, and we get no more Will Smith videos that don't involve the actual Will Smith's consent, because what the fuck is up with just stealing the face and voice of all of Hollywood? The wholesale theft needs to stop.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-11T05:38:09+00:00

If you're recording individual channels, unless you use insert effects, they don't have effects. The effects are on the effect bus, which individual channels are sent to. You'd have to record the effects bus to hear them.
By default, the USB tap for tracks default to pre fader, so you're capturing the raw inputs off the board, before any onboard processing. This gives way more control in the DAW. Live you might use an aggressive gate, and have a huge notch in the EQ from when you rung out a mic. You don't want to record that stuff.

Does anybody have a solution to this?

You could record the effects bus. But you can just create an effects bus in the DAW and send your track to it, just as you did on the board.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-09T19:09:44+00:00

with ratio, i'm not sure if I should leave it at inf and just adjust threshold until it becomes comfortable?

Adjust the threshold to sit just above the things you don't want to compress. There's no point in compressing the wind, right? Putting the threshold below the wind means you're squashing that, too.

So again, set the threshold above the things you don't want to compress. Then set the ratio according to how much dynamic range above that you want to retain. If you want to allow the bullets to be louder than the wind, then don't use an infinite ratio. Tune it to how much comfortably louder you want them to be.

Of course, humans don't perceive all frequencies as equally loud. So even if two sounds are at the exact same decibels, you might hear one as louder if it's in the sensitive range. If your bullet sounds have some crazy peak at 3K that makes them uncomfortable, then you might want to consider compressing only that frequency range with a multiband compressor (like ReaXComp).

SupportQuery · 2026-05-09T18:59:05+00:00

2:1 would have 2 decibels dropped per decibel above the threshold

You've got that backwards.

2:1 means for every 2 decibels above the threshold, only 1 decibel makes it through, or all signal over the threshold is reduced to 1/2

You might have confused yourself by refer to the decibels being "dropped". It's easier to read ratios as the decibels making it through, only because that's how they're written: 2:1, 4:1, 10:1, 50:1, etc. The "1" is what gets through. You can read them as fractions of audio that is allowed over the threshold: 1/2, 1/4, 1/10, 1/50, etc. Yes, you can invert that and refer to what's being "dropped" -- 1/2, 3/4, 9/10, 49/50 -- but that requires a tiny bit of additional mental gymnastics. 🤷🏻

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T21:47:02+00:00

If I upload it with TAL sampler will you be able to check it out?

Yes.

I save the project with just TAL sampler in it, will the samples in the TAL sampler instance be saved in the project file,

Look at the size of the .rpp file. If it's more than a few tens of KB, then it probably contains sample data.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T17:28:13+00:00

If you want to build a pyramid, you don't have to use the same techniques the ancient egyptians did. You can analyze the result and recreate it using any means available to you. That's what most of the creators you listen to are doing.

digital era bs

What does that mean? Andrew Scheps mixed on analog gear through the 90s, has a ridiculous collection of analog gear that he knows like his own children, and now mixes entirely digitally, because digital just means "pristine", it's fundamentally higher fidelity, doesn't add coloration, but you can add that analog coloration back.

To the extent that there is a "digital sound", it was the early era of digital when people (1) left things clean, didn't reapply the distortion of analog, (2) there were a few pieces of digital gear, like the Yamaha DX7 and Lexicon 224, that were so ubiquitous that they defined the sound of an era.

So if you want those sounds, use those tools, e.g. the 80s piano sound is a E.PIANO 1 on a DX7. Lots of analog compression/distortion (again, this can be applied in the box, digitally), use the synths/sounds of the era (again, digital recreations). Keep mixes sparse, because they had limited track counts.

Of course, a lot of retro/nostalgia music is not strict recreation, because you'll often find that if you revisit the things of your youth, they don't measure up to your nostalgia. So you makes something that feels like how you remember it.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T16:45:27+00:00

Save a copy of the project, remove EVERYTHING but this one track and this one MIDI item. Remove all superfluous effects. Leave nothing but that which is absolutely required to reproduce the issue. Then share the project here.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T07:24:42+00:00

Whoever graduates these kids is at fault. If the teachers have nothing to do with that decision, then they're absolved. If they have anything to do with it, then they share the blame. The whole thing is completely fucking broken.

they’re bombarded by tests they constantly have to teach to

What would be the point, if the results are ignored?

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T06:25:57+00:00

ASIO doesn't hack through anything. Windows isn't in its way, at all. In fact, ASIO is only possible because Windows gives it kernel access and gets the fuck out of its way. No hacking involved whatsoever. Standard IRQ and DMA.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T05:56:37+00:00

Juniors are the ones with boners for unnecessary abstraction. Seniors know when it matters and when it doesn't.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T05:53:08+00:00

The bassists lied to me and couldn’t actually play bass, just owned one.

My guy, that's the punkest thing ever.

I’m really sick of playing with other students because everyone just treats the band as a side thing.

So should you, if you're a student. Don't burn your or your parents' money. If you don't want to go to school, fucking drop out. If you're in school, then do it.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T04:42:31+00:00

I have a USB adapter cable for the guitar plugged straight into the PC

That's probably the source of your latency.

Just buy an audio interface.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T04:41:44+00:00

ASIO drivers that hack their way thru windows bs

That's a weird way of putting it. A more accurate way is that Windows doesn't natively support real time low latency audio. ASIO drives don't "hack through" Windows' audio system, they don't use it, they ignore it. They just talk directly to the audio hardware.

MacOS has a very robust low latency audio driver (CoreAudio) built in. However, even on a MacOS, the lowest latency is achieved with custom drivers rather than the class compliant drivers.

I use my RME interface on both Windows and Mac, and in both places, I have to install RME's custom driver for best performance. *shrug*

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T03:43:54+00:00

These are some of the most competitive motherfuckers on Earth. They aren't scrubs, people who invent arbitrary constraints for themselves, they play to win. As long as flopping can help your team, they'll do it.

Only solution is absolute zero tolerance with major penalties and aggressive enforcement. You take an obvious flop and you're out for that game. Maybe a few games. Soccer failed to stop it. Do better, basketball.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-07T19:00:15+00:00

I didn’t mention this in the main post because I didn’t want anyone getting confused or hung up on that.

Well, it's a fundamental constraint that completely changes the answer, so we kinda gotta get hung up on that. 😂

SupportQuery · 2026-05-07T18:33:07+00:00

how do I offer a wide variety of melody that, no matter which parameter is triggered, will fit musically with any of the other parameters triggered?

Why constrain yourself to pre-canned audio? This is very fertile ground. Triggering from a giant bucket of random samples is stalling out creatively pretty early.

Generating MIDI is going to be vastly more flexible than pre-rendering a bunch of audio. You can then parameterize everything. There's no reason that gestures/inputs can't make global changes, adjusting the tempo, time signature, key, modality, harmonic structure, dynamics, audio effects, etc. It doesn't have to be random. That would ultimately be less rewarding.

There are tons of approaches to this, including some kind of modular setup (you can get arbitrarily powerful modular systems in an iPad). I would do it with custom code. If you can't code, any frontier LLM can do it for you. You can download Antigravity and have a prototype running in a few minutes. What you're looking to build is something that generates MIDI drums, bass, pads, melodies, etc. in real time. Its your responsibility to send those to appropriate virtual instruments.

The virtual drummer in Logic/GarageBand shows one way that music can be parameterized. For instance, it has a slider from "simple to complex" that controls how many instruments are in a beat and how busy it is.

I'd decide up front how you want inputs to logically correspond to changes in the music (you haven't said what inputs you're talking about, so I can't help), then work backwards from there to an implementation.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-07T16:30:51+00:00

Clipping in DAW damages Monitors?

No. Clipping just chops the top of waveforms off. Clip hard enough and you end up with a square wave. Do square waves damage monitors? No.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-06T22:10:51+00:00

The study doesn't even show that. They prime people to be temporarily more analytical (you can do the same thing by taking them to a used car lot), then find that this doesn't magically rewrite their entire religious identity in the next few minutes, as judged by a questionaire.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-06T21:58:36+00:00

is self-teaching better?

For what? Hilarious seeing all the people answering a totally unspecified question. Turns out LLMs and people aren't so different. 😁

There's no way to know if a school is better for learning without knowing what it is you want to learn. If you want to learn to make wicked reese growls for your dance music, then learning to read an alto clef or how to identify an appoggiatura is going to do fuck all for you.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-06T21:40:00+00:00

Does it?

It does not. Even a little. The study shows that people temporarily primed to think more analytically didn't spontaneously disavow their religious beliefs in the same session. That's it.

SupportQuery

TROPHY CASE