OT: New kickass DAW and Sonar. First test clip too.

[dogears]

So, I got my new DAW up and running today. She is a beauty. Pentium i7 930 at 3.2GHZ. 12GB of PC1600 ram at CAS 7 latency. 4X1TB fast drives in a RAID 10 array. Plus a 2TB archive drive. 48 sample low latency recording with my Fireface UC. Sonar 8.5 64bit. Huge Zalman CPU cooler....

Here is the clip....First try using Sonar. It is very alien for me! But, it sounds noticeably better I think. Even if this clip is not representative. I just dubbed on one of Windows 7 sample mp3s!!! LOL http://scottlernermusic.com/sonar/SonarTestnoTT.mp3

Carruthers CSA with really dead black strings into Bludo Ojai (I changed the crudded up buggers after recording this). Loop with a touch of 116ms delay. Verb added in mix. Only SM57 here. G1265 speakers.

Here is the DAW. It is fast and quiet! Now I just need to learn Sonar....

[img1066]http://scottlernermusic.com/sonar/DAW.jpg[/img]

[Revolver]

Wow! Cool groove. Very nice. Can't wait to hear more.

[ampdoc1]

That's as good a combination of amp, guitar and talent as I've ever heard.

NICE, Scott!

[Gibsonman63]

Buy the book, Sonar Power. Sonar was not intuitively obvious to me. I was able to make recordings, but I struggled.

[stelligan]

Sounds great. Congrats on the new DAW! Sounds very good indeed. I've been using Cubase forever. Do you notice a sonic difference? I know nothing about Sonar but, have a woodwind playing friend that has been using it for years. Migrated into it from Cakewalk. He does an amalgam of midi, saxes, flute, clarinet. He loves it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egsnnvZ8atY

[Structo]

Looks like a great PC Scott.
I used to build a new one every year when I was gaming.

There used to be this little freeware doodad that you could adjust the latencies of all the different interfaces with so that recording was much better.
But that was quite a few years ago so I'm sure they have fixed all that by now.
Sounds great.
That is some serious fire power!

[Guitarman18]

Scott,

6TB of HD!!!!! So it would be safe to assume that you are planning a couple more clips in the near future.

Sounds awesome as always.

Cheers,

Paul.

[dogears]

Hi Paul,

The RAID 10 array is 4 1 TB drives. Striped and mirrored for fault redundancy. So, 2TB total with 2TB in automatic mirrored backup. Easy to swap a replacement drive in if one fails btw.

So, 2 TB main drive space and a seperate single 2TB archive drive.

4 total.

Scott,

6TB of HD!!!!! So it would be safe to assume that you are planning a couple more clips in the near future.

Sounds awesome as always.

Cheers,

Paul.

[stevlech]

Sounds good, as usual. So, when are we gonna see a thread on modding Sonar code? j/k

[Structo]

I was going to mention that about RAID.
I had my RAID drives fail twice, I did not mirror them.

So I lost everything. After the second time I gave up on RAID.

Or should I say I gave up on Maxtor.

I have a couple Western Digital Raptor's in my PC now and they are very fast.

[paulster]

I was going to mention that about RAID.
I had my RAID drives fail twice, I did not mirror them.

So I lost everything. After the second time I gave up on RAID.

Or should I say I gave up on Maxtor.

I have a couple Western Digital Raptor's in my PC now and they are very fast.

That sounds like RAID 0 (striping) on its own which offers increased performance (parallel reads/writes across the drives) but technically reduced fault tolerance since you now have more than one drive that can fail that knocks out your whole array.

RAID 1 (mirroring) increases the fault tolerance since a drive can fail and the array carries on, but offers no performance increase.

Scott's solution, RAID 0+1 (striping and mirroring) offers fault-tolerance and improved performance through parallel reads/writes, and is probably the best configuration for a high-write environment.

If it were occasional writes and mostly reads (e.g. for a web server) then RAID 5 or 6 would probably be better for this scenario.

But the one thing to consider is that any RAID level is specifically NOT a backup whatsoever. It's just a means of improving performance and/or keeping the array running without data loss whilst you replace a disk. And once you've lost a disk you really have to consider how quickly you can get another disk in there and rebuilt and whether you actually want to run the array in this configuration lest another disk go south.

Consider also that if you get some corruption of your array. Even in a mirrored environment the RAID controller will merrily spread this across your disks and you'll end up with the same problem on them all.

That's why you need backups as well, whether or not you use a RAID solution.

Sorry for the diversion - great looking spec there Scott!

[dogears]

So, the clip in this thread has an issue. I replaced my bridge humbucker volume pot in the CSA from a 250K CTS (scraped up to 380K or so) to a sealed MightyMite 500Ka. The CTS had an occasional dropout at max volume.

The CTS pot grounded on the cavities foil shield. The MightyMite has an insulated body of the shaft side. So, the volume pot was not grounding. As a result the pot was acting like a reverse taper. So, I swapped the leads not realizing the cause. The guitar seemed a bit gainier and brighter as a result since there was no AC reference below the breakpoint of the tone cap (the pickup was grounding through the tone pot)! I discovered it yesterday since it was bugging me why the taper reversed. Now that it is fixed, the tone is much fatter and warmer.

Can't wait to do a proper clip. Maybe later today.

[Structo]

Thanks for the info Paul.
Things have changed quite a bit since I was into "state of the art" systems.

When I was into gaming, after two failures of my RAID system, I bought two WD Raptor drives.
One for my OS and system files and the other for programs.
These were only 74 GB back then but they seemed to equal the performance of my RAID drives because they spin at 10,000 rpm and have very fast seek times.

I have a Raptor in my PC now that has lasted almost 5 years.

I know they have higher capacity ones now but I am very pleased with the Raptor drives.

[vibratoking]

Nice system.

I have used Sonar for quite a while. It's really very easy to use once you get over the learning curve. I just 'hacked' on it without benefit of instructional material and it took about a week to become proficient. I really like Sonar, although it gets badmouthed quite often. There are tricks to play with plugins to make the system throughput more efficient. Like bussing tracks together and using one instance of a plugin instead of multiple instances.

I had latency issues that I tried to resolved myself. That was probably the hardest part of getting the system up and running properly. I ended up recording a single track of a very fast transient signal - a handclap if i remember correctly. I then looped the track out and back in to another track. I could then measure the latency by zooming in on the fast edge and measuring the delay between in samples. It's a very effective way to 'see' and quantify your system performance. My particular system had a small delay when optimized that I just wasn't happy with.

In the end I did not choose to record directly to the DAW. I ended up with an Alesis HD24 which is a hardrive based machine. I have a USB hard drive adapter that allows me to remove the HD from the HD24, insert it into the DAW and transfer the data over USB. I found this to be the best solution for my purposes. I can take the HD24 anywhere, record and just bring the HD back to my DAW. It allows me to have fully portable recording capabilities and data that I can transfer into my DAW with no loss of quality. I'm really happy with it, the quality is excellent, and my DAW stays in my studio full-time.

Enjoy

[topbrent]

I love that backing track with the distorted wurly intro!

Is that backing track available?