No pictures today, just words.

Currently I'm still going back and forth about switching from DP 9 to Cubase 8.5. I really enjoy Cubase so far, however there's a few things that have me reconsidering.

It's already been over a month now and soon I will be making a decision. Will I switch from Digital Performer to Cubase? A few more posts first...

Over time I've discovered some things about Cubase that are particularly annoying. A couple of them are nearly dealbreakers. Particularly the lack of Polar. In this post I will cover a handful of things that I've found to be bothersome.

Some hand-carved combs I made out of Peruvian Walnut and Kauri.

I've been slack with the Cubase posts. I was planning on writing a post about the things that bother me, but there's basically nothing so far! The only exception is the lack of multi-track freewarping.

So I'm going to once again go over some features that I like.

If you don't know, I have Panic Disorder. I quite randomly, and frequently, have awful panic attacks. I was offered a device called the emWave 2 which is a biofeedback device.

I've been using it for a few months and in this post I'm going to cover my experiences.

One of the best things in Cubase 8.5 so far has been the mixer. There's a lot of people that complain about the mixer in 8/8.5, but for me it's an amazing.

Let's go over some of my favorite things in it.

Here's a quick pictorial on making your own drum sticks.

So far I'm really enjoying Cubase 8.5. My experience has been totally positive. Here's a very quick rundown of what I've been pleasantly surprised with...

My 1 month (total) venture with Studio One 3 has come to a close. I didn't write about some basics such as audio editing and midi editing, but I certainly did experience them.

Studio One 3 is not my preference. There's a variety of reasons, but for me it comes down to 2 main things.

• Drag and Drop paradigm is way too heavily enforced.
• Lack of features geared towards refining things.

Let me explain why these are an issue for me, and relay my overall experience (the poison).

Automation is an extremely important tool. In Studio One it's even more important than some other DAWs since S1 does not have any modulation capabilities; automation is the only way to move controls around 'automatically'.

Studio One excels largely in editing and 'penning in' automation, but is seriously lacking in some areas. Let's investigate

The manual. I love reading manuals, and referring to them instead of being frustrated.

Studio One's manual is a more frustrating experience than just closing your eyes and randomly clicking until what you want happens.

The instruments of Studio One. I don't use softsynths much anymore, however I have quite a lot in the past. So let's go over my impressions of what is included in Studio One.

Stage 3 of evaluation. What have we learned so far?

In this post I will go over some of the more unique, or less common, features in Studio One 3.2.2. There are some neat features at least, but there are some that I find quite questionable.

In this post I'm going to evaluate all of the included effects and instruments in Studio One. I won't be covering the presets, samples or loops, since I never use those.

As the scale you see indicates, this is what the ratings mean:

• 1-3: I would never use this in a project. There's something better regardless of your platform that is cheap or free.

• 4-6: This is probably replaceable by something relatively expensive or it is marginally useful because of some unique feature or integration.

• 7-9: I would use this at any reasonable opportunity.

• 10: I would find reasons to use this.

So here's how I feel about all of the built in effects in Studio One