That's awesome. I think that's kind of where I want to get to, but I think I'm a step or two behind you on equipment. I appreciate all the insight, especially on the headphones. Thanks!

Fair enough, I guess I'm not frequenting all too many sites that focus on her - my main source for all things Taylor is the wife, so I'm never going to escape it completely. I do find it pretty easy to let the social life aspects leak out of my ear once they've come in, because that part doesn't interest me. I am quite fascinated by her monumental popularity, but I can't tell you who Matty and the other dude are beyond the very surface level of "Taylor's exes".

I guess I was more trying to say that I personally find it pretty easy to just skip over the articles and click-bait titles that focus on the parts of the Taylor discussion that don't interest me. I may have an advantage here that many don't, though, as I'm fully aware that any Taylor news will find me (through the wife) and will be pre-filtered to be the more interesting bits.

I've also been pretty successful in the past of avoiding Royal family drama, too, so maybe my defenses are just solid on that front. :-D

I don't actually have answers for the first two, aside from Taylor's exes, but for the last point on your list, you don't need to if you don't want to.

I feel like Taylor is a lot like the Royal family in England - there are people who follow every move and want to know every detail about their lives, but then there are also a lot of people who don't particularly care and it's very easy to simply not engage if you don't have interest.

I would also argue that not knowing all the details of Taylor's personal life doesn't really detract from listening to the music. Sure, there's a deeper rabbit hole there if you do learn all the back story, but I still feel like "So High School" is a catchy song even if you don't know anything about Taylor's romantic history (lots of other good Taylor songs too, "So High School" is just the first one that popped into my mind - perhaps because it is the wifey's new favorite :-D).

Yup, it was my own naivety. In Ableton, I CAN multi-arm tracks, I just have to hold down the CTRL button while clicking on the arm icons. Boy, I felt like a dummy finding that one, but thanks to you and /u/North-Beautiful7417 I had enough info to fumble my way into a solution! Thanks for the guidance, both of you!

Ok, yeah, I mean that makes sense to me logically. And I was a bit surprised when Ableton didn't seem to let me do it, so I started making assumptions. I guess my real answer is to learn LOL. I think I might look into how to do this with Reaper since you seem to have accomplished what I'm looking for using it. Thanks!

Thank you, I appreciate that :-)

Oh damn, that's smart thinking. I think I can get that working. I have a little audio mixer that might be able to handle that. I'll give it a shot!

Yeah, I figure that might be a part of my issue. I currently have an Arturia Minifuse 2 that has 2 studio/XLR channels - I plan on using that for either the 2 guitars or 1 guitar and the bass. I also have a PreSonus AudioBox GO which looks like it also has 2 channels, but I haven't really used it much. I also have several RockSmith cables, which show up in Ableton as their own interface. The keyboard is connected by USB.

All of the instruments are hooked up and I can use them in Ableton, but I can only arm one instrument at a time, so I haven't been able to find a way to monitor more than one instrument at the same time. It's entirely possible that I'm just missing a button that is pretty obvious, but I'm just getting started learning how to use DAWs and there's a lot to learn! LOL

If you enjoy video games or were ever a fan of Rock Band or Guitar Hero, I'd highly recommend checking out Rocksmith+. It essentially lets you play Guitar Hero, only you use a real guitar (or bass, or piano) plugged into the computer. It's a bit on the spendy side at ~$150/year, but it did a lot to help me get past some of the bigger boredom slumps that would probably have had me quit years ago.

If you're not into video games, I will second the Justin's Guitar recommendation from /u/aeropagitica and I'll also throw Rob Scallon's Guitar Quest: https://www.guitareo.com/shop/guitar-quest

Yes, there's certainly at least some truth there. The only time I've REALLY noticed it myself is when one person has a battery-powered pre-amp in the guitar and the other person does not (you know, that 9V battery that you always forget to change until you pick up your guitar and you think it's dead before you remember to check the ol' battery compartment).

That scenario can definitely illustrate the difference between a "loud" guitar and a "quiet" guitar. It is also easily overcome with an amp elsewhere in your chain (like most guitar amps have one on the speaker end of the chain, so you can just pump the volume there instead of at the guitar).

Have you looked into Balanced Tension strings?

Most normal strings have different tensions between the strings (and often the lower strings are much higher tension than the higher strings - thicker metal and all). Balanced Tension strings aim to maintain the tension equally across all strings, so that plucking your low E string should feel like it takes the same amount of pressure as plucking the B or high E string.

I've not used them myself, so please take this all with a grain of salt, but I believe these strings exist as an attempt to solve the problem you're talking about.

Here's a link to one random set that I spotted on Sweet Water (there's a million others if you want to search further): https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/NYXL0940BT--daddario-nyxl0940bt-super-light-balanced-tension-nickel-wound-electric-strings-009-040

YouTube vids is a great resource, don't discount how much free info is out there.

That being said, for finger style studies, I'd recommend checking out Brandon Acker. He's a YouTuber, but his focus is more on historical guitars (and other stringed instruments) as opposed to most of the more rock-focused folks out there. He's also got an online school that seems pretty good. I think the main course is right around $200, but he's also got a "Guitar Tips" playlist that might have some interesting stuff for you: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqjziYes6yPKCYRIh9WNmcUkHrtii_3d7

Got a DAW question for y'all: I want to be able to plug my guitar, my bass, and a MIDI piano all into the same computer. The main goal here is simply to use the computer speakers as a combined output for all of the instruments so that I can jam with my band mates without anyone having to schlep around amps and all that.

It seems like most DAWs are kind of setup more with the mindset of record one track from one instrument then switch to a different instrument to record the next track. Is there a simple way to use Ableton or Reaper to achieve more of a jam hub than a recoding studio? If not with either of those two pieces of software, I'm open to other suggestions too, those are just the ones I already own.

Sure, you can send a DM here. I'm always happy to have a chat, but I make no promises that I can answer any questions you have. There's a lot of interest on this subreddit on some topics that I'm probably not going to be able to speak about, but there's never any harm in asking a question. :-)

Hot Damn! Grand Buffet!

I picked up their Scrooge McRock CD from the bargain bin at Amoeba Music in Berkely, CA in probably 1998 or 1999. I loved that album.

Shortly after getting the CD, I discovered that one of my very good friends in High School was the cousin of one of these fellows (I think M-Dog, but memory is hard). I always thought that was a pretty amazing coincidence since we lived in California and they were from Pittsburgh.

I still have 12 Drops and Headballs on a playlist I listen to fairly regularly.

I'm going to leave a couple of other albums below, simply because they fit together in my head because they were also Amoeba Music bargain discoveries that I made around the same time and I continue to love decades later:

• Gruvis Malt - Sound Soldiers
• Kidneythieves - Trickster
• 2wo - Voyeurs (this is Trent Reznor and Rob Halford collab band)
• Full on the Mouth - Collide (they also appeared on the Road Rash 3D sound track)
• VAST - Visual Audio Sensory Theater
• DollsHead - Frozen Charolette

I'm going to throw a few artists your way to try out, I'm not sure they're a perfect fit for JPEGMafia and Danny Brown, but those two sometimes show up on radio stations when I start them using some of the following songs (fair warning, some of this may be a darker vibe than you're looking for):

• Ho99o9 - United States of Ho99o9
• Dropout Kings - I Ain't Depressed
• City Morgue, ZillaKami, & SosMula - DRAINO (feat. Denzel Curry)
• 7xvn - PSYCHO
• Lit Lords - Sowing Seeds
• Pranav.Wav - Hit Kids Not Juuls
• Sxmpra & ISVVC - just another rap song
• Whipped Cream & Jesiah - DUMB SH!T (UBUR Remix)

I got to see The Deftones at a tiny little hole-in-the-wall venue that usually sees audiences of ~50. The Deftones had multiple trucks of gear and they set up just like every light they had on a frame that they leaned up against the back wall. Most of the concert was punctuated by blinding lights blasting into the audience. Not the greatest scenario for a show, but teenage me sure had a lot of fun anyway.

Same to you!

Edit: Oh, haha... same to me too. Sorry, reading comprehension fail :-)

What if you combined the two of them? Have the static faces of your characters semi-translucent over the dynamic background. That way you get the cool-factor from the dynamic, but you're still communicating something about the characters/story to the player too. Seems like a win-win to me. Good luck!

Actually, I do think I have an answer for you. Fred Ford and Dan Gerstein are running an indie studio together called Pistol Shrimp games. They're pretty active on all the socials (especially Discord and Patreon) and they definitely engage with curious people. Their focus is definitely on the new project(s) and the new company, but I would imagine they would probably be receptive to thoughtful questions about Skylanders or the TFB Tool.

I think some of the specific questions about things like characters in the lookup table might be covered in NDAs that would prevent any of the folks who worked on the games to really speak in depth about any of that, but that's just my layman's understanding, so I suppose it wouldn't hurt to ask - just be prepared for a "we can't really talk about that". On the flip side of that coin, however, one of the projects they are working on is Simple Tool, which is the spiritual successor to the TFB Tool, so I'm sure they'd be excited to talk about how they've accomplished similar goals in the new tool in comparison to how they accomplished things in ye olden days (although, maybe don't phrase it that way, I can feel parts of me crumbling to dust reading back over that sentence).

And please do not take this as an endorsement from either of them. This is just me saying "a lot of people who worked on Skylanders really loved it and many of them still love to talk about it, and these Skylanders folks are talking to their audience quite actively." :-)

You work for selfish morons who are only looking after their own self interests and believe that they know better than anyone else about everything. They are wrong. You are right. Either keep trying to fight the good fight and don't compromise your passion or go find another place to work. Just remember, they won't change, so you have to decide if it is worth the never-ending fight.

Sorry I don't - I only remember the DEBUG Core one. That one had the 1-hit-kill death beam that made it really easy to run through the level when you had to check for a bug or something like that :-)

Yeah! I was a level designer on Trap Team and Imaginators. If there are any Villain Zones or Sensei Realms that you love or hate, it was probably me. :-)

Oh, haha, well color me corrected :-D

Give the WipE'ouT" Omega Collection VR experience a go. It's not quite pod racing, but it is really fast and quite a rush in VR. It's a bit old by VR standards, so you might be able to track down a used copy pretty cheap.