Author: Steve

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This has been the bane of my existence, but I came across a post that showed how to do it. I am capturing it here for any poor lost intrepid souls.

If you have a tempo map that you spent hours, yea, days to perfect, you can move it to a new project. I wanted to do this so that I could update an old project to a new template. Here’s what I found out:

Load the MIDI file containing your source tempo map into Sonar as a new project.  Then open up the tempo map to make sure it’s actually in there.

Then Select All and then hit ALT-CTRL-C (Copy Special) and make sure that only “tempo changes” is ticked. Hit OK.  Now the clipboard should now contain the tempo map

Then open up the project that you wish to merge this tempo map with.  Move the NOW to the start of the project.  Hit ALT-CTRL-V (Paste Special).  Make sure that the Tempo Changes is the only event type ticked.  (All other event types should be greyed out as the clipboard should only contain tempo change events)

Note, you may need to open  up the tempo view before doing the Paste to make sure there are no existing tempo changes that would confuse the project.

Hit OK

Open up the tempo view and your tempo map should be present there as pasted.

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Here is a write up of how to interpret sample rate and beats per minute. An example involving 5/4 time is also included to demonstrate the concept.

You should be able to see the document below, but if you can’t, here is a link.

Here is an audio sample. It starts with 4 beats, then plays 5/4 for 4 measures then ends with 4 beats.

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2019 is coming to an end. I put together two CDs of my collaborations with some very talented Bandlab musicians and also some solo efforts. I’m making them available to whoever wants them. The links below to Disk One and Disk Two will take you to pages that have a player that shows all of the songs on the CD. It allows you to download individual songs if you want. The player will cycle through all songs if you let it run.

I use a program called imgburn to create these images, and if you need it, you can use it to extract and burn the images to CD. It is free.

So, the process will be like this. Go to the DISK ONE and DISK TWO links. Download and UNZIP the image files. Take note of where they are saved. Normally it will be your DOWNLOADS folder. Then, if you need the software to create the CDs, go to the link about imgburn and download and install that program. Using either your own burner software, or the imgburn program, you will create your CDs from the two image files.

To download Disk One which you can burn to your own CD, click here.

To download Disk Two which you can burn to your own CD, click here.

To download imgburn and also get more information on how to install and use it, click here.

The two disk images are about 650MB each, so on a slow system it will take a while. There is a button on each disk page to download the CD images to your computer.

Unless you already have something to extract the CD images, you should install imgburn from the download link provided above. Once you have imgburn installed and the two CD images downloaded and unzipped you are ready to create your CDs.

If you see any errors or omissions on this site, please let me know.

Here are the contents for both disks.

Here is some information I have about each musician on the CD

@eipi – Dave is a Guitarist, Vocalist, Songwriter from the UK who wrote ‘Bend’, ‘This One’s for Her’ and ‘Band of Brothers’. He plays and sings on those songs, and also on ‘Norwegian Wood’, ‘Imagine’ and ‘Wild World’.

@rabbitwithmachinegun (Robert Foy) from Georgia, primarily a keyboard player, he prefers creating or collaborating on original works. He utilizes synth arps (kinda like a loop), and drum loops on occasion but mostly creates from scratch. He is a member of Without Focus and plays on ‘Bend’, ‘This One’s for Her’ and ‘Band of Brothers’.

@dawningday Guitar – Klint was part of the band Without Focus who worked on ‘Bend’ and ‘This One’s for Her’

@elizabethdarcel is a singer/songwriter from Kansas City, Missouri. She started singing at 4 years old in church choir then moved on to school performances. In 2017 she started focusing heavily on writing and producing her own music. Her influences are widespread across all genres – influences include John Mayer, Maggie Rogers & Fleetwood Mac. Her style varies from song to song easily switching between a folksy Americana feel while other tunes provide R&B, Country, Pop & Jazz feels. Most recently, Elizabeth was featured on Phat Talk Radio and the November Featured Artist for the Bandlab Blog as well as being regularly streamed on several internet radio stations. Elizabeth did the vocals on ‘Killing Me Softly’, ‘I’ll Be Around’, and ‘Walking in Memphis’ on this CD Set.

@eungang – Bill Farr is a songwriter and guitarist, formerly from the Boston area who now resides in the Land of the Morning Calm, S. Korea. Bill wrote ‘Night From Day’, ‘The Other Day’ and ‘The Nameless Heights’ and produces his own music. Along with his songs here, he also played on ‘Killing Me Softly’, ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘Wild World’, ‘San Tropez’ and ‘Lucky Man’.

@darrengarrett is a guitarist, bass player, keyboardist, drummer, vocalist and songwriter from the Winnipeg area. He sings on ‘Walking in Memphis’ and ‘Use Me’ on this CD set.

@thelonewulfproject Doug is a guitarist, vocalist and songwriter from the Des Moines area. He plays guitar on ‘Tupelo Honey’, ‘Well Wishes’, ‘Ruby’ and does vocals on ‘Here Comes the Sun’, ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters’ and ‘From the Beginning’.

@kiwichrys is a songwriter, performer, vocalist, guitarist, music teacher, and songwriter from Auckland New Zealand. She wrote ‘Well Wishes’ and provided lyrics for ‘Words’ and performed on ‘Words’, ‘Well Wishes’, ‘Every Night’, Harvest Moon’, ‘Always Remember Us This Way’, ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’.

@textured_grooves is a professional drummer from Manchester UK with over 30 years experience who does session work (both live or programmed). He played on ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’, ‘The Other Day’ and ‘The Nameless Heights’.

@azzronika Aaron is a guitarist, keyboardist, drummer, vocalist, songwriter, and bass player who provided vocals and some instrumentation on ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ and ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters’. His musical influences include Queen, The Beach Boys, Vocal harmony groups, Beatles, Muse, ELO, EJ and Film OSTs. He writes and has a large portfolio of original material. A pianist by trade, he loves arranging lots of instruments and sounds. Visit and subscribe to his YouTube page, won’t you?

@mojoespage Joe is a Guitarist, Keyboardist, Drummer, Vocalist, Songwriter, Bass Player from Florida. He likes to produce good music for singers. He produces all his tracks but prefers to have others perform the vocals. Check out his album, MoJoe & The Indispensables for his best collabs. Joe played guitar on ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters’.

@cocobark – Cocobark is an Americana artist from Houston, Texas. She’s been compared to Natalie Merchant and Neko Case, but Coco’s distinct style is one of a kind. You can find her recent work on Spotify under “cocobark”. Coco sings and performs on ‘Tupelo Honey’, ‘Bad Moon Rising’, ‘You Don’t Know Me’ and ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’.

@therealmadamez is from California, Madame Z is a singer/songwriter and multi-faceted creative talent whose music has been described as jazzy neo soul with a rock edge. www.madamezmusic.com – She wrote and sings on ‘Choose Happiness’.

@michelefortunato is a professional trombone player from Italy – he plays and records around the world. Michele played trombone on ‘Fall Apart Blues’.

@doesdwars From the Netherlands, Walter is a songwriting who is adept at composing, arranging and mixing all kinds of music. He plays guitar, bass, drums and is a vocalist. With kiwichrys , he wrote and produced the song ‘Words’ for this release.

@the_mooney_blues from West Virginia has been playing guitar and singing since the 90’s, and is also a vocalist. He is an in demand collaborator on Bandlab, and played and sang here on ‘Lucky Man’.

@paranoidcitizen – Veena is a Guitarist, Vocalist and Songwriter – She wrote and sang on ‘Dance Class’ for this release. She always enjoys playing around with novel and unique sounds. She grew up learning Indian classical singing and aspires to bring elements from her roots into her music. She also hopes to record her first EP of acoustic songs next year.

@gbailey Gerald Bailey is from Arkansas and has been playing guitar since he was 10.  He has played on Bandlab with the Global Remotes and contributes his lead and rhythm guitar to many tracks on Bandlab. He plays here on ‘Dance Class’.

@jannasyn Kai Hale is a keyboardist, vocalist, songwriter and plays ukulele – She wrote and performs on ‘We’ll Get By’.

@steve2k2 A&M Recording Artist, Private Lightning Band, Home Recording, Cakewalk Sonar Platinum user, Love Izotope and Waves products. Based in Massachusetts, I provide whatever was not mentioned in these previous bios. Very thankful for all of the contributions from the many talented artists on these CDs.

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Back in the early 2000’s I had an evaluation copy of Wolfram Mathematica, which, don’t get me wrong, was great, but too clunky for me. I’m a hobbyist – love math, but easily confused. Also, the full featured product was like thousands of dollars, so – no way.

Fast forward a few years and I got an iPad and came across Wolfram Alpha and an app!! I think it was $2.99 – that’s my range 🙂

Well it has been just great, highly recommended. But I really didn’t go much past the obvious formulas, even though the integration was spectacular, with the ‘show me how you did that’ feature.

Recently I started reviewing my calculus. My son’s old books were just sitting around. Paying hundreds of dollars for his books, I figure I might as well get some use out of them, right?

So I am at the point in his calculus book where they are showing how volumes are computed. It’s fairly straightforward so far. This problem I am going to detail here gives you two functions (just based on x and y) and asks you to rotate the enclosed area around an axis and determine the volume that the structure holds. See the charts, it will be clearer.

I’ll include the problem here and some images, along with the solution in the book.

So my first thought was to calculate the area in the R region and then just revolve it around the x axis. I was able to get the area (1/6) – but revolving it doesn’t really work. (Multiply by 2*pi*R) I think the problem there is that the radius changes, but I have to think about it some more. Wolfram Alpha was easily able to tell me that 1/6 was the right answer for the area.

The point here is not the solution, but it is the fantastic ability for the Wolfram Alpha program to understand input. So let’s get on to that.

Just for the heck of it (and based on the instructions from Wolfram to just enter what you think will work), I entered the following, and the freaking app knew exactly what I meant:

As you can see it showed the method of integration needed. We are talking about a washer type shape – a larger circle of rotation with a smaller section cut out. (based on circular area formula pi*r^2)

If I had this back in the day, I probably would have graduated a grade point higher than I did! Stupid Slide Rule.

Not only does the app give you that solution, but a plethora of other information AND a graph:

Totally radical, dude.

Here’s another example. Two pages from the book and two images from Wolfram Alpha on my iPad.

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Here’s a cool new song, written by @doesdwars from the Netherlands (on Bandlab) who does most of the instruments and the mix. @kiwichrys from New Zealand (naturally) wrote the lyrics and did the vocals beautifully. @koenfu #sax and Frans #trombone.  I played the bass guitar and one of the electric guitars for a couple of licks in the middle.

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The glade is dangerous and fraught with peril, but we have our warrior with us darling, so let’s dance into the night and pray to the gods for safe passage through the monsters. 

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This is a new song by @chrysalynn on Bandlab. She’s a great vocalist and plays acoustic guitar as well. On this version, @thelonewulfproject plays acoustic and lead guitar as well, and I added bass and drums.

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I found this fascinating, but I don’t know everything in detail. Here’s what I just did.

I downloaded a music track of a guitar playing from Bandlab. When I imported into my DAW, I noticed that the waveform was not centered. It appeared to be above the mid-line, leading me to think there was a DC component. It was present through the whole track.

I exported it from the DAW and then reimported it as an additional track. It was centered. It looks like the DAW export might have done some processing.

The differences brought me back to my EE days. The top image with the ‘DC’ component shows a step function. The image in the bottom has eliminated that DC component. Looking at the point where the step was, it looks like a little pulse remains, with some ringing afterwards.

I noticed in my DAW, I did have some other processing going on. By process of elimination, I found out that the ‘console emulator’ was what had cleaned up the signal. Here is a link to more information about the console emulator. https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR%20X2&language=3&help=ProChannel.8.html

With only the console emulator in the processing path, here is what the difference looks like on the stereo signal.

It looks like another component added some additional processing in the first image because there appears to be more of the ‘ringing’ activity after the pulse.

I guess the takeaway is that the console emulator, which I usually have on each track, contains some sort of brick wall high pass activity, and will remove the DC component for you.

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Another great collaboration from Bandlab. @cocobark on vocals, @LoneWulfProject on Acoustic guitars. I added the other parts and did the mix/master.

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I thank the Lord there’s people out there like you. A Good Friday release of this Elton John cover. Some great performances from

@thelonewulfproject vocals, @azzronika vocals and @mojoespage guitar – These guys are some of Bandlab’s best, it was a privilege to work with them.  I added bass, piano and mandolin. Wav Version [@thelonewulfproject vocals, @azzronika vocals and @mojoespage guitar – These guys are some of Bandlab’s best, it was a privilege to work with them.  I added bass, piano and mandolin. Download]

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An a capella vocal passage was uploaded to Bandlab by @therealmadamez – it was in bad shape so I used Izotope RX7 to restore it. Then I added Indian drums, bass and a strummed crescendo guitar.

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An old Kenny Rogers song. Always loved it. Vocals and Rhythm acoustic guitar by @thelonewulf on Bandlab – check him out! I did bass, drums, picking guitar, keys and backup harmonies on this one.