Please Note—This Review refers to Sonar 4.

Rejoining The Fray

When I sat down at the computer for this most recent exploration of Cakewalk’s new Sonar production software, it was with a bit of tentative apprehension. I have taken recently to filling the ever shrinking cracks in my teaching schedule with a burgeoning supply of song material and musical ideas, so taking the time to simply wander the halls of a new software high school promised to rob directly from the little creative time I have been able to set aside. Fortunately for me, I was so wrong about that now I plan to leave my computer up and running (with Sonar) on days that I work from home so that in a flash of inspiration I can get my music recorded more quickly and completely than I ever have before.

Pretty positive start, eh? You better believe it. Opening Sonar to me has always felt like putting on an old favorite t-shirt, sort of comfy and familiar and since I have noted the basic look of the program and feature set in past reviews of former versions, this one focuses on the new stuff.

“Mel, Kiss My Bits” (The Other Kind of Working Flow)

This version of Sonar did not make a staggering transformation in appearance although something about it, perhaps the color scheme, made it look a little more muted and seductive. Or, it could have been the glass of wine I had while mixing. In any case, this version specifically addressed some of my frustrations that had generally led to my reliance on other means besides software to capture my musical explosions of the moment. When you are a song writer with limited time, it is nothing short of ease of use that can make or break a software recording experience. There is nothing in the world more frustrating than losing your inspiration to wrestling with the technology that is supposed to be helping you out. Many a compatibility issue and computer crash has led me to the thought that we might be better off going back to making music with washboards and jugs and letting the passing breeze claim the tune. Fortunately for Cakewalk (and me) this last experience led me not down that same path.

So what’s new pussy cat? At the risk of repeating myself…let’s start with looping. Recording via looping of song segments and using pre-constructed loops (Acid or otherwise) has become one of the quickest means of generating the basic foundations of a sequenced song. Sonar supports looped recording of audio into separate tracks so you can throw down a bunch of variations of your four-bar bass line in no time flat and then audition them to see which you like best. I find this particularly useful for recording vocalists (yours truly included) who need a couple of run-throughs before the phrasing or pitch is nailed to the pocket. Just set the loop points and start singing. This also adds a new dimension to the old engineer ploy you probably have heard before…”Yeah I’m just gonna let the track run for a minute…sing along for practice”…engineer secretly hits record button just in case something magic falls out onto the mic. Now you have that many more chances to capture the best performance. The MIDI loop recording works equally well, as you can imagine, though I haven’t found a way to stop the echo of MIDI data recorded on each take through the loop as you move to the next track.

Loop editing of preexisting material has, in my estimation, taken more time than it was worth in the past. With the tremendous volume of great audio out there by companies like East West, Big Fish and others, it seemed like a better investment of time to just keep searching for the perfect loop rather than try to doctor a near suitable one. Sonar takes us a big step closer to fixing that problem by use of an Enhanced Loop Editor. I can’t count the number of times I found a four bar drum segment that was great except for one too loud or poorly pitched snare hit. The old fix was a trip to Cyclone DXi to replace the offending note altogether, but that meant sequencing Cyclone as another played instrument in the song. Changing the pitch of a looped guitar riff midstream was an even bigger headache, requiring either reprocessing the audio or laying down pitch markers every few breaths. This tedium is no longer necessary with Sonar’s new slice by slice volume and pitch envelopes. No more sacrificing the ease of slip stretching your loop Acid-style as far across the song as you need it to go in order to get the functional flexibility you may require from your loops. I am pretty demanding of mine.

Back On Tracks

Keeping like tracks together in sequencing software had also been a frustration for me in the past. Once upon a time I used to take the time to manually color coordinate the vocal tracks, rhythm tracks, etc… That way, if I needed to move one from the bottom of the heap to the top for viewing purposes I wouldn’t immediately lose it to my failing vision…tiny computer budgets equal tiny screen sizes. The new Track Folder brings a quick and easy end to this headache, by allowing you to store and view multiple tracks in one condensed track slot. The folder additionally allows you to record arm/mute/or solo all tracks in the folder with a simple mouse click without losing individual control over any one track. This is great for quickly isolating instrument groups in the song that need fixing; the entire drum array for mixing purposes or a slightly out of tune horn section that is rubbing the song the wrong way - for example. Part in parcel of this work flow booster is the ability to draw fades and slip edit multiple tracks at once. Horn players in your session cut off a pad at different times? No problem, just draw a fade across all tracks so they end at the same instant and presto, you just saved yourself thirty minutes of union wages to keep them rerecording their parts.

The Track Comping feature has to be one of my new favorites for this program. Protools LE users (as I have become in recent history) know how crucial comping of single tracks can be as audio reproduction stops at the magic number 32. In Sonar, you have the option of the tradional overlapping clips or you can explode the comped track into individual clips. This way, you can easily see exactly where your clips cross, fix cross fades, and quickly eliminate unwanted audio data from takes previously buried from view by the primary clip. Super addition and without the limit of any number, magical or otherwise (so long as your processor can handle the work).

“How about the big picture?” you ask. “How about the big picture in a miniature view at the top of your screen?”, I reply. Viewable at the top of the track window is a new Complete Project View of the beginning of your tracks to the very end. On that slide is an adjustable window which directly reflects what it is you are viewing in the track pain. While I like the idea and it works sure enough, I had trouble getting used to adjusting the window to see what I needed to and wound up reverting to the good ol’ navigation buttons on the bottom of the track pain. Call me an old softy.

Freeze Sucka!

For those of us with limited space and setup time, the use of virtual instruments and there accompanying user templates have galvanized the recording process and opened tremendous sonic opportunities. Cakewalk saw to this with complete DX support and a very functional VST wrapper bundled with the last Sonar incarnation. The big pain in the booty always came when it was time to take the sound from those usually multiple virtual instruments and turn them from MIDI playback into editable audio tracks. If you are fortunate enough to have a soundcard (or more) with lots of I/O, the cost of this conversion in Sonar was the time it took to bus the sound out of your machine and back in through the soundcard. If you I/O options are limited, the process became considerably more complex with step by step soloing of the instrument and routing and rerouting till you were dizzy. Mercifully Sonar caught up to Cubase and the other big PC sequencing beasts on this front by introducing the Synth Freeze option. This function quickly manifests the audio produced by the V.I. into an audio track. “Quick freeze” and Quick Unfreeze” functions make toggling back and forth between the audio and MIDI version a cinch. A “Full Unfreeze” is also available and necessary should you decide to make a drastic change to the instrument’s playback like adjusting the BPM of the entire song a few pulses. (Obviously the MIDI would follow the tempo where the audio would not). Turning a few bars of frozen synth tracks into equally malleable groove clips can be a real power saver if you are prone to running several instruments at once and processing with effects at the same time.

Speaking of synths and virtual instruments, one of the goodies included in both versions of Sonar 4 is Roland’s TTS-1 - a multitimbral, General MIDI-2 synth with a complete battery of good basic sounds that we have come to expect from Roland. I found the interface easy to use and the drum module especially user friendly to get just the right sound for the cymbals and hand claps that I used to spice up my rhythm track loops. For someone buying into the world of song sequencing for the first time, this instrument will prove a great tool for basic tune construction and learning the soft synth ropes. TTS-1 has 256 sounds and 9 drum sets, with customizable presets of course. Every sound is tweak-able and it comes complete with its own reverb, chorus, and EQ. And just to make sure that you don’t waste time deciding whether or not you’ve found the right sound for your song, each channel has an audition button that plays the patch in a musical phrase much like the Korg Triton’s audition button so you can hear the tone in a musical context. This is a pretty nifty feature and is accessible from both the main instrument view and the independent channel editing window.

Ahhhhhhhhh…dio

For the audio that is not MIDI/DXi generated, there is a considerable array of audio bending options not the least of which is flexibility provided by the clip creation tool which allows you to treat audio segments you have recorded, the same way you can treat loops – complete with beat slicing and the aforementioned pitch and volume control by slice. The standard (but sonically improved from Sonar’s last version) time and pitch stretching processing tools are included.

Sonar is set to deliver and export audio in a veritable slew of industry standard audio formats from MP3 to lossless conversion to Windows Media Audio 9 (WMA). For those who need to go straight to disk for immediate A&R distribution – and good luck to ya, Cakewalk employs POW-r Dithering algorithms (the same used by ProTools) for converting 20, 24, and 32 bit stuff to CD standard without introducing noise to muck up your pristine tracks. The CD I burned sounds pretty good on the car stereo if I do say so myself.

The Producer version of Sonar comes with some great third party goodies that make the audio experience that much more enjoyable. The Sonitus FX suite became a quick and tasty fix for shaping my sample audio during my test drive of the program. Though the included cakewalk effects are adequate for a song writing tool, my ultimate speedy mix would not have sounded half as colorful or even a third as punchy without the Compressor and EQ included in the FX suite. The presets actually needed only a bit of tweaking to get the proper touch for my pop tune de jour. The other great inclusion bears the name of famed reverb Lexicon. Halls, chambers, rooms and plates, all deliciously wet sounding are at your fingertips with the Pantheon Reverb. My very dry drum loop, never would have cut it without dipping it in the Kick Drum hall to the tune of near 10%. Sonar’s very complete new console view (debuted in Sonar 3) makes assigning these effects and routing them a snap without ever having to leave the main track view.

Oh Crap, We’re Surrounded!

Ok, ok, ok, everybody’s talking about surround sound. Clearly one of the newest defining terms of professional excellence in the software mixing world is the capability to take your song into a virtual surround environment. I am not quite up to speed there myself, and frankly may not be there for sometime, but when I’m ready…Sonar is already there. For those of you who already live and breath in a heightened surround sound environment, there are some really great features embedded in Sonar 4, such as the Surround Panner which gives you an impressive control over the spatial center of your sound (and is also fun to play with star-wars-style if you have a joystick). 30 different surround configurations are available and thankfully none of us will have to give up our favorite stereo effects when we make that leap into the future. This is due to Sonar’s Surround Bridge, which allows you to magically use any stereo effect in surround (stereo versions of the Pantheon and Sonitus compressor come included with the Producer edition). So Cakewalk may be playing a bit of catch up to Nuendo on the surround front, but they are doing it without giving up the quality of control at a price that is considerably less painful than the competition to someone on a teacher’s salary.

For Score…And It Seems Like Seven Years Ago

My cousin has been asking me politely me to score his independent film for what seems like years. Fortunately in my procrastination he has had other, projects to work on while I waited for a tool I could use without racking my brain on a serious learning curve. Well, S4 provided me with the perfect opportunity to give it a shot, or rather it destroyed my excuse to keep putting it off. Working tracks against the film was as easy as importing the video from Sonar’s file menu (the program supports QuickTime, Windows Media Video with 5.1 Surround Sound, and AVI with 5.1). It took a minute to load up, of course but there at the end of the trip was the video laid out in miniature Video Thumbnails across the top of the sequence. Those little snap shots (though they seemed to slow the machine down considerably) made it very easy to scroll through the film and plot out the starting and stopping points by way of markers for the movements to be written. Then, it was a simple matter of arming a MIDI track to throw down a keyboard sketch that I can return to flesh out in detail sometime…later…sorry Scott, see ya at Thanksgiving. Naturally an actual running version of the film is viewable with SMTPE whether or not you choose to view the thumbnails. And when the movie is done, we’ll be able to export to any one of several formats (MPG, AVI, MOV). To the best of my knowledge, no other program besides Pro-Tools can do this right out of the box. Sonar 4 also allows you to encode Quicktime movies and comes with a version of Quicktime software ready for installation. Good stuff.

Summary

So what struck me initially as a possible stretch of my available creative time actually wound up being one of my more productive solo sessions. Over the 10 hours I spent in the program, Sonar’s new features allowed me to track and mix an entire tune (preliminarily), start tracking the meat and potatoes of another song and sketch the scoring of a soon-to-be-hit film. My favorites in a nutshell are the workflow boosters in this version (primarily the track organizing and cross track editing functions) and the third party Sonitus and Lexicon inclusions. Nothing about the program bugged me significantly though if somehow Cakewalk could manage a straight AIFF export from the file menu, I would be impressed. But there, of course, is the issue of who belongs to what audio format and I didn’t come here to start a fight. In any case, for the price, Sonar in its Producer form is hard to beat. It has virtually all the bells and whistles of the biggest of the competition and even some they do not. (For those that I did not mention, feel free to check out the full feature set at www.cakewalk.com or the audioMIDI.com product description). In my estimation, it is well worth the cost of admission to see what this production animal can do for your creative juices.

Check Out Sonar 4 Producer Edition Here.

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