@Alain Hebert or use Reaper as your DAW, and set it to Loopback 🙂. Don’t forget to turn off channel monitoring before you press record 🫨

@Alain Hebert The option in Reaper is called “WASAPI (Windows Audio Session API) Shared Loopback mode.” WASAPI is Windows built in audio driver, so it bypasses the interface. In fact Reaper takes exclusive control of ASIO audio and nothing else plays through my interface when it’s engaged. If you enable channel monitoring during recording you very quickly get intolerable, speaker threatening feedback, so it warns you, “use with caution.” I haven’t used many other DAWs since I found Reaper. If there’s a list of outputs in your DAW settings where you chose FocusRite as the default, there might be an option to use Windows system sound, whatever they label it. I confess to having recorded some references this way, but paying a dollar or so probably gets more consistent results, in addition to likely being the more honourable route 🙂. Between Windows, Spotify and other sources and the DAW itself it can be hard to get it the same twice, and who knows what that means to the reference quality? 🤷🏼‍♂️

@Klaus Baedorf I love the “waltz” in 5/4 and the string lines at the end can make me cry.

Sonic and lyrical. I was admittedly very privileged. Pianos, guitars, mandolins, ukuleles, horns with keys, valves or slides, percussion instruments of all types have been part of my consciousness since before I could speak in sentences. My dad’s side exposed me to opera and the Western classics, my mother’s to pop, folk, world and even electronic music. My grandfather on one side was a writer and a poet before he was a banker; I heard Burns, Tennyson and Coleridge, Frost, cummings Poe, Emerson, Thoreau before I went to grade school … my aunts brought in Adrienne Rich, Erica Jong, and other feminists. I listened to Yes, Tull and Gentle Giant, jazz-rock fusion and pestered Larry Coryell at shows across North America until he gave me a lesson in San Francisco. I still prefer less repetitive music with complexities, improvisation and deep, original lyrics exploring topics less travelled, aspiring to social, historical and political significance. Good one, Berlin! I think I just revealed the roots of my self-defeating perfectionism. Maybe one of these days I’ll try to write some simple, silly love songs. Yup, imma do that. As soon as I grow up!

I have a song with the word “wavicle” in the title, it’s from physics, suggesting the nature of light is both wave and particle. I like to do double meanings, so “feet a-kicking inside the womb,” alliteration, and metaphors that I don’t hear regularly in other lyrics. There’s a line in my song currently in progress that I’m especially proud of because it came from real life. “Seize the day” is as cliche as it gets, but my stepdaughter, 9 at the time, signed herself up for a baking class where she was half the age of the next youngest person. She nailed it and when I went to pick her up they’d given her the keys to the kitchen. “Like the kid with the keys to the kitchen at the cake shop, we seize each day in hand.” (c) ;-) And I’ve said this before: I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me humanity or kill me now: AI has no role in my songwriting. I don’t care how long it takes me to get it right. When it’s right, I write it down and never doubt it’s mine.

@Monroe Neese thanks, and I should add that I don’t rule out using AI in other roles. If I know what I want and ask AI to do it for me I feel differently than using something that seems more randomly generated. The more I think about this I see how, for me, getting the “right,” cohesive lines together for the thing we call a song is like solving a puzzle, and the satisfaction I personally get from solving the puzzles I set for myself is a big part of what compels me to keep doing it. Full disclosure: I’m still very much wrestling with whether “my” songs are different from jingles, library pieces I might do simply to attract clients, or collaborations with others who might have different opinions about AI. So far I think they are! But… have I placed “my songs” on a pedestal? Do we start keeping separate stage names for our “art” and pen names for work? I don’t have answers but these questions seem to be floating around in an ever increasing number of conversations I’m having, not just my own ruminations! Cheers!

I still haven’t tried even half the goodies in my T-RackS cupboard.

@Yehudi Matthew Reaper displays GR on the track meter, which is pretty cool. Much of the time I want it bouncing back to zero in time with the music, but there are times, or instruments, or musical decisions where I want to crush the dynamic range completely.

@Yehudi Matthew I saved the setup shown in the video as default in all the compressors I got when I was studying it (except where the names of the knobs differ) and changed it from there the way he demonstrated. I’m saying it was a great way to learn, but I feel I can skip it a lot now, and I like starting with several of the other presets, with the same goal in mind. “My mind’s ear,” to be precise! There are other times I’ve skipped things out of impatience – or worse, cockiness 😝 – and I think that’s what prompted the question. Cheers!