Cakewalk in early writing stage / arranging unfinished work

When I'm writing longer songs (e.g. 20min prog rock tracks), I tend to write a bunch of multitrack 16 bar phrases that I expand on / develop / arrange depending on how the lyrics go.

But the point is, during the early stages, I've no idea where in the song they're likely to appear.

Currently I've got all these phrases in separate CW projects (like hundreds of them), so I'm thinking about how to best combine them, but also how best to tackle this in the future.

I used to use Music-X on the Amiga years ago, which had a neat way of organising tracks into sequence control tracks. In other words, I'd have say a verse bass, pad, drums and lead part (4 tracks), then I'd have a track called "Verse 1" which would play those four tracks. Verse 2 might play the same pad & lead track, but have it's own drums & bass. I'd do the same for the other parts of the song, so in the end I had a master control track called "Song" which played "Verse 1","Verse 2","Bridge 1","Chorus 1" etc. For really long songs, I'd have an extra layer of grouping for each 3 - 5min section that would be played by the "Song" track... so "Song" would play "Part 1", "Part 2"; "Part 1" would play "Verse 1", "Chorus" etc...

The neat thing about this was that every track started at bar one within the track list, so it was dead easy to record them without worrying about where in the timeline they'd actually end up until I arranged it in the "Song" track. Every track would be muted apart from the ones related to what I was recording, and when I'd finished, everything apart from the "Song" track would be muted.

Obviously Cakewalk/Sonar works differently from this, so I'm trying to figure out how best to do this.

My first thoughts were to use track folders for each part, this way I could group all the tracks for a particular part together, and mute it once I'd finished so I could go on to the next part.

I guess I could do a bounce of each part, and keep it in the folder for trying out arrangements later - not ideal, but would probably work.

But... say a part doesn't end up anywhere, and I want to use it in another song, it's not as easy to take it out. In other words, I'd need to open up another project and cut/paste them into the other project.

So maybe separate projects is the way to go, and to use the media browser to drag them into my song... but then how do I "audition" them through the media browser?

If anyone has any ideas on how best to do this, please let me know!

In the meantime, some enhancement requests that may help with my dilema....

(i) Project previews for the media browser.
It would be cool if as part of saving a project, an export of the first 10 seconds or so of the track was rendered and stored alongside the track, or maybe nominate an audio track or file as the "preview", so when going through the media browser projects could be easily auditioned.

(ii) Dragging projects into folders
Dragging a project from the media browser on to a track folder doesn't make the tracks end up in the folder... it would be nice if it did, so they were cleanly grouped there.

(iii) Folder Bouncing
If I drag a folder to an audio track, it would be good if this bounced the audio down to a single audio track.

(iv) Sub-Folders
Would be great to have these to better arrange things even further.

M.

bapu
I would love for CbB to have an arranging system like Studio One and/or Reaper.
 
Of course those DAWs rely on all the parts being in the song. I've never tried having parts in multiple different files.  

I'd expect CbB to rely on each part being in the same file too.
 
The import from the media browser is pretty good for getting parts in from external projects, it's identifying which project to import which is the issue. Having a way to audition the project from the media browser would be fantastic.
 
I think I can probably live with track folders for grouping the tracks within a part. 
 
But then once it's in, trying out different arrangements might be a slow process.
 
I keep thinking that the Matrix view could help here, if there was a way of pointing a cell at a track folder?
 
M.

mettelus
The SWA Complete SONAR X2 is now freely viewable on YouTube (9 hours of stuff), and 90% is still applicable.

Unfortunately, the chapters have no titles, but ShellstaX posted them here.

Chapter 26 deals specifically with an introduction to the Matrix View.
 
[I pulled that from an older post, so MV has seen a few updates since.] In Matrix View, rows do correspond to tracks, and they are exclusive, meaning that only one cell per row can be fired at a time. Columns are convenient since you can fire off columns in sync (i.e., can load an entire part into a column and just trigger the column). Down side, is if you want to edit the cell contents, you need to drag the data to a track to make the edit, then back into the MV; but it also has the advantage that you can use columns on the right to be "placeholders" for clips that have no current use so that they are easily found, but out of the way.
 
Before getting too carried away thinking this IS the answer, I would recommend checking out the video above, then loading up content from a couple of projects (they work best if cells are at perfect bar lengths) and play with it to see if the workflow suits you. The end of that video also shows how you can record a MV performance into tracks for further edits as a "normal" tracking project. Just keep in mind as you set things up in MV that "Rows will yield Tracks."

Thanks for the input mattelus.
 
I've done a fair bit of messing around with the matrix view, so I know how it works, but what I'm looking for is probably a bit more...
 
I can think of a couple of scenarios.
 
Scenario 1 - Project Previews
Imagine that the media browser has the ability to preview projects (so basically projects can save an export of themselves for later previewing).
 
I go through the projects in the media browser, dragging the projects I like to their own cell on the matrix view - it takes the rendered audio and sticks it in the cell, however it remembers it was originally from a project.
 
When I record my MV performance, what I want it to do is "expand" the performance back out to their original tracks - in other words, it would import the tracks from the project it "remembered" when I chose it. Even better would be if it created a folder for each "Cell" once expanded.
 
I guess the main difference here, is that I'd like the cell to group the tracks together in one cell rather than having the individual tracks on different rows.
 
BTW - I found a wierd bug here.... I tried dragging a CbB project on to the matrix view and all sorts of craziness happened.
 
Scenario 2 - Folders rather than tracks
Rather than pointing a cell at a track, I point it at the folder so the cell plays everything in the folder.
 
When I record my MV performance, it renders all the tracks in the folders at the position they were played.
 
M.
 
 
 
 

I do something similar while scoring films and TV Shows and this is what I do...
You can open more than one project at a time by changing a preference.
go to Preferences>Files>Advanced. (make sure the "Advanced" button on the bpttom left is selected)
 
So I put the main project track view on the right...the project I want to copy from track view on the left.  I make sure the track layout is the same in both projects (at least the tracks I want to copy). Then copy and past the new section.  Exit out of the copy project and open up the next section I want to copy.
 
I use Kontact for most of my sounds and jumping between projects happens very quickly.  I do not know if it is Cake or Kontact that facilitates this...but it works very well.  If you are doing just audio tracks it is even faster.
 
Good Luck