Today was another day of making progress on one of my 2017 goals which is to learn Cubase DAW backwards and forwards. I spent the last 2 summers getting to know Cubase Elements 6, only to stop all progress when my son came home from his summer stay with his Mom. Since I had to combine parental duties, running my business with learning a DAW system, I declared my inability to get things done his fault. Even though I have preached to him for years that if you want to get anything done in this life there is no excuse, but here I was using this kid as my excuse.

Well beginging 2017 I made a promise to myself that I would do something everyday to reach all of my 2017 goals which I will disclose in a few days.

I spent a great part of the day trying to get soundcloud to play in my WordPress blog with no luck. I tried everything and I’m concluding that this company will be out of business soon. In my attempt to solve this problems I found that others have been complaining about the same problem since last year, and when I visited their websites they still didn’t have their soundcloud files working, so no more soundcloud for this website. 🙁
EDIT (1-19-2017): Upon further review I found out that the problem is not with soundcloud, the problem is with my Browser which is Firefox Mozilla and 2 plugins that seem to be clashing. I have shockwave flash and silverlight plugins loaded. When I disable shockwave flash soundcloud works, but when I disable silverlight and enable flash it doesn’t work. In summary if I want soundcloud to work I have to keep shockwave flash disabled and that is not practical right now because there are still websites out there that still use flash. On Google Chrome this is not a problem.

As far as my journey to understand VST plugins, I was able to locate the plugings that were added to cubase when I upgraded to Cubase Elements 9 from 6. They were audio VST’s that I had to access when I made an audio track.  When you make that audio track you then open up the insert tab which is located in the inspector section at the left hand side, and you should see your VST’s from the drop down menu. I still have more to learn about VST’s, but that is part of the journey

As far as the weather is concerned. We were suppose to have a massive snow snow storm, but it didn’t happen. It was just cold as hell.

I finally figured out how to set up my Midi Controller from scratch, all you do is go to the project tab, then add track. After you do that you need to setup your input and outputs and you are there. Seems simple but it’s not for a lot of us. Since I am using Cubase Daw, I made a decision to get a Steinberg audio interface. It may be a mental thing but since I made that move stuff is coming together.

You have to familiarize yourself with your midi inputs, they all mean something. Then select the input that corresponds to the controller or midi input on your audio interface and you are getting there.

My biggest accomplishment was hooking up my Korg Triton Studio to an Audio input and getting it to play. I’m all for midi controllers, but I just love a full keyboard, makes me feel like a real musician. For the life of me I couldn’t get it to work when I was using Mbox and Pro Tools. It was very frustrating.

I also figured out how to hook up my guitar through my audio interface, it almost felt like I just met a beautiful female it was so exciting.

That’s enough for today. I’m going to spend the weekend getting my Georgia State taxes together  so I can get these folks off my ass, then I’m going to install some VST’s and see if I can get them to work. Life is good. 🙂

OK I feel good about instrument tracks in Cubase, my mission for today is to understand how to use Instrument tracks and Midi tracks as it pertains to the add track function from the project menu. I’ve seen a few videos that explain this, I’ll post them up later. VP

Today my mission is to learn how to enable my Midi Controller. I’ve looked at several youtube videos and when I complete the video the Midi Controller is working, but I don’t feel like I can do it from scratch with no help. Today that is my mission.

I know it seems like it’s simple, but not for me. When I first started out I used a Tascam 246 4 Track recorder. There wasn’t a big learning curve with that equipment. Just plug in the keyboard and you were ready to go. It’s not so simple these days to me.

Well today is the first official working day of 2017 for most folks. I actually work every day of the year. If I don’t work I don’t eat. Having said that let’s get started.

For years I’ve been trying to figure out what is the perfect DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) for me. I’ve heard for years that Pro Tools was the standard. A friend of mine suggested a few DAWS that he liked and at the end of the day all I was is confused. So what I did is just use the one that came with my Audio Interface. I had the MBOX and it came with a trimmed down version of PC Tools. So I fired it up and I’m just going to keep it real, I couldn’t figure it out. I think my confusion had a lot to do with the fact some of my equipment was old and I just couldn’t get all of my equipment to talk to each other. So what I did is just say fuck Pro Tools. I remembered I had purchased a copy of Cubase Elements 6, I loaded it up and I’m starting to get the hang of it. I have a long way to go, I’ll keep you up to date on my journey. During the past 2-3 days I upgraded to Cubase Elements 9, I’m all in. 🙂