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Sonar 8.5 - A Love Story
I have happily made the switch from Project 5 to Sonar 8.5.
I have fallen madly in love with my new buggy beast.
Here is the first song: http://soundcloud.com/deepeddiezilker/michigan-skies - feel free to rip it to shreds. First times are always a little awkward as tension fills the room and her hesitation yields to the sincerity of the moment.
Okay - the bad part is that not everything that's supposed to work, works, and having a system with nothing less than the recommended specs, I am a little disappointed, but then Sonar, I'm guessing, has only recently acquired Windows 7 support.
The included soft-synth, Pentagon - no show. Shows up in the directory but errors out.
The included percussion processor has no face - no GUI. Getting Sonar to work with the HP factory soundcard (Realtek HD) in WDM Mode proved to be so jarring that I wound up down-loading ASIO4ALL, and apart from a couple of quirks (click-track comes from the headphone jack ONLY - and ONLY the click track? I have to open the audio options dialogue box and then the ASIO profile box to get sound from Sonar - and I can't expect to hear sound from ANY other application including YouTube, once Sonar has been engaged - even if it's since been turned off.), I'll hopefully be ironing out with a swift attack on the learning curve, the overall quality of this DAW far surpasses anything I've had the pleasure to work with.
Oh, and Roland - I know you acquired cakewalk but Groove-synth and that other crap-tastic thing with the mixing board - they don't work (High aliasing, low functionality on my computer) but having had experience with Groove-synth, already - IT ABSOLUTELY FUCKING SUCKS - even though I've used it on a couple of songs for little odd jobs like doubling a bass-line or adding percussion. Still - it sucks.
I wound up downloading a couple of plug-ins, from KVR, in order to make the kick-drums. I am hopefully missing something, skill and experience wise, about Session Drummer 3 but my current impression of it is that it is far too pre-fab-centric with only superficial editing of its parameters. Love those Hi-Hats in my song? Those came from session drummer - I think they're lovely. Look, ma, no EQ. Just echo. Quantized - Swing = 1%
I put the kick drums through the included Vintage Channel Strip, compressing it and then shelving the bass. I love how the kicks sound, BTW. The Vintage Channel Strip is a useful tool, definitely. Quantized - Swing = 1%
Included for up-selling to its actually working version, is Rapture32LE - That plug-in is responsible for the little formant sine-wave squiggling, with a sometimes appalling lack of regard for key, throughout my little tune. Put it through some echo, I did, but that's the stock sound - no edits - even though I did experiment with the step modulation envelope a little. Curious bastard had problems understanding MIDI note On's after the MIDI note Off's should have been sent when that feature was employed.
The panning pad comes from Zeta (I love this one - it's tasty!) and a preset I ran through its double filters and a very slow oscillator, run through some minor shelving on the channel EQ, then processed with the Channel Tools stereo imaging plug-in after I ran it through some compression (itself a marvel of graphic functionality and precision). The channel EQ has a lovely feeling of precision about it. The GUI is more functional than pretty but it still gives me the tingles. Quantized - Swing = 50% - like that matters - I quantized them to the measure.
The bass-line - My old friend, Dimension Pro has had a makeover to 64-bit - even though when I tried to turn on her echo, fumbling through the presets it completely killed the sound on EVERYTHING in Sonar. Still - I didn't really need echo for the bass-line and apart from that little glitch, it did the job, nicely (even though you're probably thinking the bass-line is a little too loud). I ran it through EQ and then compression. Quantized - Swing = 1% - I'm left handed and was STILL having problems nailing it.
Piano - The included Amber Piano Modeling Plug-in - Lovely, slightly more editable than Session Drummer 3, but usable, none-the-less. Put that through the reverb after EQ'ing out some of the low and middle. Could come up in the mix, I suspect, but then I really just wanted to have the experience of putting in a line that ran counter-points against the static chord progression - that's right! I cheated, musically. Sue me, but the track is free. What do you expect?  Unquantized - Hear the weaknesses and weeks free from practice.
Congas - Yes, I phoned them in, too. What's more, is that I used echo to simulate a player's flams and ruffs. I know - pathetic! But Dimension Pro did it again! I mean it made sound in the way it was supposed to and as I expected and I didn't even try to use Dimension Pro's built in echo. Dimension, it should be noted, is loaded - It's stacked with everything it had in Project 5 and then some. Quality stuff, there. Quantized - Swing at 50%
You're on in 4 - clicks, that is. Recording MIDI is a breeze and in spite of the reported latency I barely noticed any when I hit the keys. Editing MIDI was even easier. The Groove Clip Looping function has been extended to MIDI - it worked great for audio in Project 5. The cool thing was that I barely needed to cut much of anything - it really was very manageable.
Sonar does some interesting things, when it comes to adding virtual instruments. If it's a new track, you kind of have to tell it that you want it hooked up to your MIDI input. It gives you a track folder to which either more instruments or MIDI tracks may be added. Hence, if you want to double a synth, you would put another synth in the same folder. Conversely, as I did, you may want to add a MIDI track, in order to add crash cymbals to your hi-hats.
The mixer, consequently, will have two MIDI tracks attached to the instrument(s).
I could have, and probably should have, just edited the MIDI to reflect higher values - that would have been the neat thing to do, but Sonar makes it easy to cheat (once you figure your way around its convoluted implementation) and just push up (or down) the fader on the MIDI track.
That's it, for this post. There's a few things about my first song experience with Sonar that I didn't cover but, in the nutshell, that's the short version. I did put a limiter on it but didn't use that to implement any mastering make-up gain.
I'll try to cover more about this on-going, currently fresh saga, as I go on making the musics. If anyone has any pointers, hopefully Sonar users but definitely DO NOT exclude yourself if you're not, please feel free to point them out.
This software has so many little nooks and crannies and what I wrote about MIDI, alone, is the tip of the ice-berg, so far as my experience with it is concerned. Going and editing note length, for instance, was an exercise in extreme patience until I started hot-keying my way through it and I'm still wondering why they just won't let you mouse a stretch of multiple notes. I'd love to learn more about these little bends in the road.
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Now with extra singles!
my old stuff, not quite up to snuff - but I still dig it - UPDATED 9/23/2012
Last edited by EddieZilker on Feb-18-2010 at 03:08
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