Beginner nightmare

I am a beginner to digital recording and bought Sonar Pro because a friend had it and liked it. I admit that I should have done my research and bought something else because this is obviously the worst choice for rookies. I opened Garage band and had rhythm tracks in minutes. I have spent over an hour every night for a week on this.... and I still have no idea how to program drums. I conclude the ranting portion of my post by stating that unless I have yet more steps to go through I find it hard to believe that for the money, Addictive Drums only gives me one Kick, one Snare, and one Crash and that's about it. Not a single Tom so don't call this "one kit included".
Ok, I did the Drum mapping, and can open the PRV, and sometimes I can open the Step Sequencer, but don't know what im looking at. I figured out how to open a Beat from AD2 into a Track, I can delete beats but cannot add any, cannot figure out how to do that. 
While im here, once I can program a beat, im going to want to string beats, fills and parts together to form songs and cant wait to loose what's left of my hair figuring that out.
Trying to stay positive but this is the least intuitive, user friendly program ive ever encountered. Thank you to whoever can help.

Thanks and im starting to get the picture that we all start out as super frustrated as I am now. Believe me, im on Caketv, the Forum, You Tube for at least an hour a day, and I am getting closer but......
Ive played with the loops but the way I write, im going to need to program out my drums very methodically and I accept that its going to be challenging, but im going to keep banging my head against this wall because anything else is just delaying the inevitable. Thanks

Groove3 would be my recommendation.  Its worth the 10 bucks (or maybe its 15, I cant recall for sure) they charge a month for free access to all videos.  There are SONAR specific tutorials for beginners.  Wish I would have had something at least similar when I started, but then again; only the army had internet back then.
 
 
https://www.groove3.com
 
Good luck!

Thanks for the encouragement everyone, I will be more patient, I totally get that.Now about that Drum programming.........
Cant record a note without it

Welcome to the forum Moradbipbip. As you can see your fellow members will stand by you as you learn Sonar. All you need to do is ask and a member will help you.  Take your time and study the manual. Learn the language of Sonar. That is its terms, how things are named. This will help in finding answers. It will also help us in answering your questions.
 
What ever you do don't think you are the only one that is having trouble getting things to work. One thing that cost nothing and will expedite your learning are the tutorials in the manual. Do each in turn because they are meant to be done in order. They will introduce you to the concepts of recoding in Sonar. How to edit and how to mix. When you run into a problem or get stuck come here and ask how to do something. 
 
Now you are here and have already started off great. I hope you will soon be a Sonar guru. 
 
 

Hang in there - Sonar IS a full-featured product, and there are tons of features.
 
These Cakewalk forums are a GOLD MINE of helpful folks, and even though they are user-forums, many of the Cakewalk staff members DO frequently pop in and help folks out or clarify things for all of us.
 
There are some included tutorials, and the Cake TV and ZILLIONS of other freely available videos, that address just about anything you could wish to do with Sonar, AND there are commercially available videos and really well-written books too.  Almost ALL of these options are way easier to learn from than just trying to absorb the product documentation, though there is a BUNCH of good useful information there too - it's just hard to connect the dots with that by itself, sometimes.
 
One thing that will help you right away, is to understand how to search for explanations and tips in these forums, because the forum search mechanisms themselves are quite primitive and not at all usable.
 
Most of us folks here will use Google to search for Sonar issues and answers, but have learned to make the Google searches more effective.
 
I suggest you add the Google 'site:' search control parameter to your search strings, to tell Google to only look for pages on the Cakewalk site, and further, if desired, to limit the search to only look in these forums.
 
To DO this, here are a couple of examples that may help demonstrate this:
 
Example 1 - for finding specific documentation pages, type the following into your address bar and hit Enter (for Google Search or whatever your default search engine is):
 
site:cakewalk.com documentation sonar step sequencer velocity
 
The above will search the cakewalk.com website for Sonar documentation on working with the velocity settings for the Step Sequencer.  For a more general set of results on using the Step Sequencer, just drop the 'velocity' from the search string.
 
Example 2 - to search these Sonar forums for threads/posts about drum maps, type the following into your address bar of a browser tab:
 
site:forum.cakewalk.com drum map
 
So, with either of the above, just change the parameters at the end as desired, to search for documentation or forum threads/posts for whatever you happen to be struggling with, and that will go a LONG way to quickly getting you answers without having to spend hours looking for needles in haystacks - both search methods will greatly cut down time needed to find many answers for things you are having trouble with.
 
And, post threads if you cannot find the information you need, and you will quickly find that these forums have a BUNCH of really dedicated and helpful folks that will bend over backwards to help you figure stuff out.  The one thing I would add there is that there is a general hope/expectation that you will be actively engaged in the threads you post, and that you also are making an effort to work at getting up to speed on things by reading/watching/trying as well.  But in any case, again, lots of available help in the forums, in addition to the other mentioned options above.  :)
 
Welcome to it - to do basic recording and creation of midi tracks - both for synths and for drums, you CAN get up to speed fairly quickly in Sonar, despite its great depth of features/functions.  'Record' is 'Record' no matter who's recording software you are using, and things like sequencing drums and editing audio and midi tracks are REALLY well covered with lots and lots of examples, so you will get up to speed and productive in a reasonable amount of time - it's really about combining becoming efficient at learning and finding information on how to do things, as well as spending some time just working through the mechanics of DOING things a few times until you get the hang of it.
 
Bob Bone
 

sausy1981
Don't know whether you've seen my vids on this. I did a couple recently on this subject. Head over to www.YouTube.com/andrewbyrnemixing and check out the 2 videos I did recently on Addictive Drums.

I can recommend these vids, they're excellent. I've been using Sonar for years but was having trouble understanding AD2 until I watched these, they opened a few doors for me.

Thanks James and Mike, also just so the OP knows that if there is something specific you would like me to do a video on all you have to do is ask. Hope I can help.

Moradbipbip
Thanks and im starting to get the picture that we all start out as super frustrated as I am now.

I suppose people who have a lot of experience with other full-featured DAWs don't have as much of conceptual frustration you are feeling.  But they have a different kind of frustration, such as "I know SONAR must be able to do this, but it isn't the same was as product xxxx"
 
That comes with the territory.  The world of full-functioned DAWs is really marvelous, but also extraordinarily complicated on many levels.  If you are serious about this, I would strongly recommend that you continue with Sonar and not go back to Garage Band.
 
While there are several full-functioned DAWs that are more or less equivalent, I think you will find that this forum is entirely different from the others.  Cakewalk has a very long tradition of working closely with customers are trying to make them happy and successful.  This forum is loaded with people who are extremely knowledgeable and eager to help those of us who are lower on the learning curve.  That makes a huge difference.
 
Best of luck to you.  It won't be long before you feel like a power user.

You may want to get some midi grooves from someone like Groove Monkee.  It's a much easier way to get started programing drums.  Russ is a really nice guy and he even has some free loops to get you started.
 
http://groovemonkee.com/
 
Feed those into a drum synth like Session Drummer and you're off and running.
 
HTH

Thanks Everyone. I had a nice breakthrough last night and I have lots of material to learn, so ill keep everyone posted. Nice to see so much support

GregGraves
When it comes to drums, there is absolutely no replacement for a real drummer.  End of story.  Period.  Programming drums with AD2 is very difficult and very time-consuming if you are shooting for pro quality with nuance.  XLN does sell midi tracks, as well as Groove Monkey, etc.  Those are good starts, but still don't get you around the time-consumption and difficulty.   To program drums you have to think like if not be a drummer.  There is no way around that.  For starting out my advice is to go get some drum loops.  I have found the Drums On Demand product to be quite useful for songwriting and arranging.  What you don't want to do is get frustrated, because frustration inhibits creativity.  You want to be able to slap your ideas together and get them down on tracks ... and then .... go figure out all the techno stuff.  Pop a suitable vanilla drum loop on and clone it 80 times the length you need, and get on with making your creation.  My 3 1/2 cents.

You don't need to replace drummer, you need to do your own electronic drum beat. If you use someone else's loop and just put it in yous track, you do someone else's music, not fully yours.

GregGraves
When it comes to drums, there is absolutely no replacement for a real drummer.  End of story.  Period.

Same from pianist, trombonist, xylophone player, and every other musician.  But we can't always afford to have a live band come in and record.

I'm 100% sure adq NEVER uses a preset on a EQ, Compressor or Reverb else he is not the "entire engineer".