Thick Black Lines And A Red Herring?, Cubase SX and Reason make song go sxhxsh Options

[G-Rat]

Ten o'clock, eastern standard time, and I had finally found the perfect combination of piano sound and digital reverb. Maybe this song wouldn't be the end of me, after all. I had been working on it for three weeks, my first step beyond "wow, this stuff sure is neat, listen to all the sounds, they sure are purrty," into the realm of "I want it to sound like this, and I THINK I know how to do it." It was all VST instruments and recorded vocals, but then I got Reason (best friend, worst enemy? I may never know). I knew I wasn't happy with the VB-1 Bassic Bass I had running through the whole song, it made it so... synthesized. So I fired up Rewire for the first time, replaced the VB-1 with a nice, slightly reverbed piano in the nn-xt sampler, and had the song at a point I could ask my in house vocalist (girlfriend) to replace the scratch vocs she had done when it was just a bassline and some bongos with a real performance. I talked up what kind of mood I was looking for, and how great I thought the song could be, set up the Mic, checked the levels, everything was nice, monitoring was fine, hit record, listened to (and watched) a great first run performance, looked back at my screen and saw to my horror, not a nicely flowing audio image mirroring the vocals I had just heard, but a pure black block. Maybe it's just building the image I thought, hopefully. I'll just play it back quick and se---owww! holy crap! what the hell is that shrieking static- must...hit--stop--before brain melts--- <click> uhhh, what was that?
Forty-five minutes and one lost vocalist (not lost girlfriend, at least) later, I gave up. Every time I tried to record, the Black Block of Evil showed up and I had nothing. Other song files recorded fine, an early version of the same song recorded fine, but an intermediate version of the same song gave me the BB of E, and I had not ever used reWire/Reason, which was my first and main suspect, in that version. Can anyone help? Please?

G-Rat

[rickenbacker]

Hmm, maybe you need to go to the Cubase forums (http://forum.cubase.net) and seek specific ReWire guidance there. In the meantime, I'll have a go...

I've never used ReWire with SX even though I can, beause my Mac can't really handle running both at the same time. I export my Reason files as audio and drop them into SX instead.

However, I have had the BB of E before. Once I got it, I could not record anything in that version of the song again. Luckily, I save versions regularly.

Did you open the ReWire connection in the correct sequence - ie SX, then Reason? Did you do this mid-song? Maybe your sample rates are mismatched? Do you have TrueTape on? Did you switch TrueTape on midway through the session? That's why I got the BB of E.

I'm pretty sure it's a bug - once it happens, you can't record on that track again. Simple solution? Start a project from the very beginning the way you intend to finish it - if you're going to introduce ReWire, do it from the start. It's a workaround, but better safe than sorry.

Good luck

[G-Rat]

I think it is the True Tape. that makes sense, I remember being like "I wonder what this does?" for about thirty seconds a few days ago. Thank you. Wish I was at home so I could check.

[rickenbacker]

Yep, as much as I like the idea of TrueTape, that experience really put me off using it again. So I haven't.

It would probably be OK if you started a project as a TrueTape setup - you know, in the "Start new project" option, there's a "24-track TrueTape audio" option. Introducing it halfway through a project, dear lord no, you don't want to do that. Funny, the manual doesn't mention that.