Last week I was testing a new VST in Cubase. I’d opened it, had a quick scan through the presets and instantly found a great sound to work with. After a few tweaks, I thought, “Ok, lets build on this with some drums…” I added Maschine 2 on a new track and clicked the button

I had an issue over the weekend, whereby Reason (I’m using version 10) was taking an absolute age to open. I had recently installed some new plugins and Reason did appear to be doing a full scan, but after a few hours I gave up and closed it using CTRL-ALT-DELETE (yes, I’m using Windows). I

If you sometimes load a plugin in to your DAW  (I use Cubase, but it may be the same in others) and your DAW software hangs, not crashing but just taking forever and ever to load, then check this before hitting CTR – ALT – DELETE! Is the plugin licenced through the iLok software? If

After I upgraded to Cubase 9 and went “totally 64bit” I had a problem with my DAW not finding the 54 Waves plugins. I also had the same problem with Maschine and Waves. A quick search on the forums showed that this is a common issue but there is lots of disagreement about how to

I’ve had this problem twice now, once when first installing the iLok software and again after running an update. iLok won’t open and a pop up box appears, proclaiming, “Software Component Unavailable A background component required for iLok License Manager seems to be unavailable. If rebooting does not fix this issue, please visit iLok.com and

If you are looking for something different when creating drum tracks then you could do worse than checking out The Loop Loft’ amazing Drum Direktor FNK-4. It runs in NI’s Kontakt or the free Kontakt player and as well as giving you some top one shot hits, it also give you some awesome loop manipulation tools. Check

One of my recent purchases was the enormous Titan2 VSTi from German company Best Service. Billed as “266 Synths In One”, there are so many presets (12,800!!) it will take me all year to go through them! The recordings for the TITAN 1 and 2 libraries have been realized over 15 years accessing one of the

Top musicians’ tech site, MusicRadar, in conjunction with Steinberg have produced an excellent 10 part tutorial series entitled, “How To Record Your Band”. An excellent series that gives some great tips on recording many instruments using Cubase. Part 1 – Preparation: Part 2 – The Setup: Part 3 – Recording Drums: Part 4 – Recording Guitars: