YouTube is one of the most widely used social media platforms in the world for musicians and artists. Why edit and arrange your loops when you can play them instead? Use it for easy arranging of song sections or for complex sets of multiple grooves, one-shots, drops, and breakdowns - all playable in real-time.
And the entire performance can be captured onto discrete tracks in SONAR's Track View where it can be freely edited and mixed until it's exactly what you want. The new per-cell trigger resolution and enhanced routing with support for external MIDI hardware make it a formidable creative force.
What are you waiting for? Free your mind. Cakewalk by BandLab is free. Get the award-winning DAW now. Learn More. Sonar includes support for both Direct X and VST plug-ins, although the approach to the latter represents one of the modifications to the current release. Rewire is also supported and, again, there have been some minor improvements in this support in the new release.
Sonar provides good facilities for media or film composers — it can work with digitised video, it can produce scores, and it provides surround sound capability. As with most sequencers, the video can be displayed as thumbnails within its own track in Track View and as a floating and re-sizeable Video window.
With appropriate hardware, it is also possible to output the video to an external monitor screen via Firewire. And while the notation features might not compare with those on offer in a dedicated score-writing application, with practice it is perfectly possible to produce a decent printed score with Sonar, for use with, for example, groups of orchestral players. Sonar also provides a Lyric view that can be used as a visual cue during recording or playback of a project.
In terms of surround sound support, the Producer Edition of Sonar also has all the key bases covered, and includes templates for working in all the common surround configurations. Surround mixing, panning and downmixing are all supported, and surround mixes can be both imported and exported to and from Sonar in a variety of formats — although Dolby AC3 encoding output is not included. Producer Edition also includes the Surround Bridge, which allows multiple instances of mono or stereo VST effects that do not themselves support multi-channel outputs to be used within a Sonar surround project.
A welcome inclusion in the box is the page printed User's Guide. These documents include an excellent series of tutorials on Sonar 's key features why don't all sequencer manufacturers provide this kind of material?
Installation takes just a couple of minutes and is best followed by registration. This is most easily achieved on-line and requires the serial number and some personal details to be entered. Again, this process proved painless on my test system, and an email response from Cakewalk appeared in my inbox moments later, containing the registration code needed to fully unlock the application.
Access to updates is dependent upon registration and, during the course of the review, I downloaded the 34MB v6. So, acknowledging that Sonar is already a well-established and full-featured sequencer, what have Cakewalk done to move the Producer Edition forward with this new release?
However, there are many other changes, both large and small, some of which are worth a mention. Sonar's Console view is well specified but does require a lot of screen real-estate if you want all the features displayed at once while mixing.
For example, the new-look Synth Rack is intended to improve virtual instrument management. Aside from the usual mute, solo and freeze options relating to the Rack, it is also possible to specify an icon for each instrument, for easier identification.
However, perhaps the best bit is the ability to add a row of Assignable Controls for each instrument within the Synth Rack. A series of slots for these is displayed immediately beneath the instruments themselves, and right-clicking on a particular slot brings up a menu of the instrument's various controls available for selection. This is a very neat feature. As the controls can be automated from within the Synth Rack, if you just need to tweak a few parameters in real time it can save some screen real-estate, since the full instrument window does not need to be opened.
The display of this row of Assignable Controls can be toggled on or off as required and, in addition, if a further instance of the instrument is opened within the Rack, the user is given the option of assigning the same set of controls to the new instance.
Some redesign work has gone into the Console View. These and other cosmetic changes aside, while the Console is well specified and many aspects of it are customisable by the user, it is still a pretty busy environment in which to work, particularly when you have the controls for all four EQ bands displayed — a large-format monitor capable of high resolution would be an obvious advantage! The floating Transport strip has also been redesigned, and here the approach is quite a simple one.
This makes it very easy to remove some sections when they are not required. Cakewalk have taken this effective streamlining theme further by allowing both the menus and the toolbars to be customised. The user can hide functions that he or she rarely uses, and re-order those that are regularly used, for easier access.
This is the kind of feature that sounds rather bland when written about, but can bring considerable efficiency gains for regular users.
For some further background on the more established features, the following would be worth revisiting:. So what of the more high-profile new features mentioned earlier? In essence, this provides automatic mapping of the controls of any connected hardware controller or MIDI keyboard controller, so that it can be used to drive whatever element of the application is currently selected, whether that's a channel in the mixer, an effect or an instrument plug-in.
The Transport strip has been redesigned into six modular panels. I'm sure the ACT idea is something other sequencer manufacturers will be taking close note of. As with earlier versions of Sonar , version 6 of the Producer Edition contains a number of features not present in the more affordable Studio Edition. Fortunately, Cakewalk provide a clear summary of the differences between the two products on their web site www. Sonar 's new Audio Snap feature provides a range of options over and above those of the Acid -like Groove Clips that can be tempo-matched to the project or pitch-shifted.
Audio Snap is, however, not unlike another element of Acid Pro 's feature set — the Groove Tool — in that one of its functions is to provide audio quantising, and it has the ability to apply a groove taken from one audio Clip to other audio or MIDI Clips.
As with the Acid Pro equivalent, Audio Snap works non-destructively on Clips, so that any quantising can be fine-tuned or removed altogether as required. Audio Snap is not just about audio quantising, however — it can also be used to grab individual beats and move them manually, extract the tempo from a Clip and apply this to the project tempo, allow Clips to follow tempo changes within a project, or automatically split a Clip into a series of smaller Clips based on each individual beat.
Audio Snap operates at the Clip level and it must be enabled on a per-Clip basis. This can be done from the floating menu that appears when you right-click on a selected Clip, and enabling Audio Snap for a Clip opens the Audio Snap Palette. While this dialogue doesn't look too busy, there are actually a large number of possibilities here.
In order to do its magic, Audio Snap first has to identify the audio transients within the Clip, and the majority of the controls along the top of the Audio Snap Palette deal with this process, including the Sensitivity and Threshold sliders, which can be used to generate greater or fewer numbers of transient markers as required.
The lower left of the Palette shows the four key tasks Audio Snap can be used for. The Align Time Ruler task provides tools for extracting tempo information from your selected Clip and applying it to your project — the most obvious example might be for extracting the tempo from a drum loop.
The 'Find A Steady Rhythm' option is useful in this context, as it helps average out any subtle timing variations within the Clip.
The Quantise task provides two options. The basic Quantise is performed to a regular grid and, as with simple MIDI quantising, includes options for different beat durations, triplets, strength of quantise and degree of swing. In contrast, the Groove Quantise option allows a groove taken from one audio Clip to be applied to another — and providing this is done with due care and attention, it can be used to considerably tighten up sloppy playing between bandmates or to get a group of unrelated sample-library loops to 'groove' together in a more musical fashion.
As mentioned above, this is much like the Groove Tool function within Acid Pro , and with some experimentation and experience, is capable of some excellent results. The 'Pool' in the Quantise To Pool task requires a little explanation; this is not to be confused with the Cubase Pool, which acts as a home for all the files associated with a particular Cubase Project.
In Sonar , the Pool is a place where the transient locations from one or more audio Clips can be stored and combined as you can using the Collect feature in the full version of Pro Tools Beat Detective.
For example, you might add transients from separate kick drum, snare drum and hi-hat clips to the Pool, to create a master 'groove' for your project's rhythm.
Editing Publishing Working with Projects. Creating New Projects Working with Project Files Bit Depth and Sample Rate Undo and History Exporting or Bouncing Working with Tracks. Moving and Hiding Tracks Cloning and Deleting Tracks Changing Track Sizes Working with Track Folders Grouping Tracks Working with the Track Manager Zooming In and Out Viewing Buses Viewing Video Freezing Tracks Using the Track Inspector Using Track Templates Changing Track Properties Bouncing Tracks Editing Clips.
Selecting Clips Moving and Nudging Setting Snap Properties Using Track Layers Splitting Clips Creating and Editing Fades Looping Clips Changing Clip Properties Locking and Muting Clips Inserting Clip Effects Bouncing Clips Playback and Recording.
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