Over at Soundcloud, I can't figure out how to associate the tracks into an album the way I did years ago with my earlier two CDs. Maybe it's only a feature with "Pro" accounts now?

Anyway if you go here:
https://soundcloud.com/michaelmcbroom/tracks

You'll see a list of all 31 of my tracks on Soundcloud. The top twelve are the latest tunes, on my just released Smooth Jazz CD, Leaving Sargasso (copyright Michael McBroom, 2018). These tunes are arranged from last to first, in opposite direction from the way I uploaded them, and in the way they appear on the CD. In other words, "Wildly Beautiful" is the last song on the CD, whereas "Leaving Sargasso" is the first.

Now that I've gotten that taken care of, a few words about my music. This is one of three CDs I've just finished. Leaving Sargasso is mostly Smooth Jazz with hints of other genres -- there's always gonna be inevitable crossover.

I'll have to upgrade to a Pro account over at Soundcloud before I can post links to the tunes on my other two CDs, so I'll let you know when that happens.

Every tune on this CD was initially authored using Band in the Box (2017). In several cases, I elected to go with Realtracks in my rhythm sections because the instrumentation was just so good, how could I not use it? In a few cases, the MIDI instruments I selected sounded so good, that I recorded them to .wav using the "Save Special" feature. Once I had assembled the pieces approximately how I wanted them to sound, I began the long and sometimes tedious task of converting all the music over so I could load it into Cakewalk's Sonar. If all the voices were MIDI and I didn't feel it was essential that I keep the audio sounds of any of the MIDI voices, I just converted the BiaB working file to a MIDI file and was able to load it into Sonar that way. Most of my files have Realtracks for the rhythm sections, though. So in those cases, I had to save the rhythm sections to .wav files and the melody instruments to .mid files, then I had to blend them together in Sonar. For the most part, I ran into few difficulties during this process. Mixdowns generally went smoothly. It wasn't unusual that I had to go back to BiaB and load the original BiaB file, make an edit to it, re-save it to .mid or .wav and bring the edited file back into Sonar.

There were a couple of tunes that I recorded to .wav entirely within BiaB. These tunes still required mixdown adjustments in Sonar, however. Where Sonar really shone was in this capability. I had complete control of the instrumentation and a variety of specialized tools for the mixdown process that really put the final shine on the product.

As always your comments and constructive criticisms are welcome.

Last edited by cooltouch; 05/23/18 11:53 AM.
Best,
Michael

My Music:
https://soundcloud.com/michaelmcbroom/albums