A 25 minute long epic concept piece (AKA An exercise in project management)

Hey guys, back again!

So, how far can we push SONAR? Quite a bit as it happens, and this particular song was done on a dual core i7 laptop that had just 4 gig of RAM at the time and running audio from an external USB3 drive. And it worked great. :)

The song "What Tomorrow Brings" is the first in the list here and can be streamed in its entirety (the others are short samples only) for free:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/lord7

Tech details:

All done in SPlat, 90% of the effects are stock, mostly Sonitus, especially the compression and EQ. There's a few third party effects on there, like stereo widening and mastering effects but I really wanted to keep it in-app as much as I could. Guitar tones are all PodFarm 2.5 with a LOT of layering.

Synths ranged from DimPro to FM8, Rapture and all of the orchestration was Edirol Orchestral. Pretty average orchestral sounds in isolation but in a mix, Orchestral just works great!

Literally dozens and dozens of layers of vocals, probably around 15 tracks of guitars and voice acting. Funny tech trivia: all of the voice acting was done via Skype, and all of the actors were all over the country. Technology hey? :)

This was a big lesson in project management to make it all work, especially on such a low spec'd machine. I did all of this in several projects, partly to help spread the resources around and partly to keep things safe by having incremental progressive updates too.

I started with the demo sessions with programmed drums, just so we had a guide. That was bounced to a stereo guide and put into a new project.

That project was the live drum recording. They were all tracked, edited and tightened up where needed. That was over several projects, starting with the raw edits up to the "ready to mix with" versions.

That last version was put into another project and all of the guitar and bass tracks went down next. Guitars went down dry so I could reamp or use plugins as needed, but it ended up being PodFarm on everything in the end. Nice to have options either way!

Everything was bounced to a stereo track again and put into a new project for the keyboards. This was especially important because I needed it to be super light on resources and have no latency from plugins affecting the performance.

All of THIS was then bounced to stereo for the vocals project. Lead vocals went down first, comped from about 5 takes, then cleaned up and tuned in places where necessary (I'm big on getting the best performance first, even if it means the odd note is flat. You can fix a flat note but nothing can save a bad performance).

Then the vocal choir layers.... Oh man. Why do I do this to myself? HAHA! But the results speak for themselves - the chorus is massive.

So with all the tracking done, it was time to assemble everything. Each project had the individual tracks bounced down and pasted into a master project. This meant there were no guitar plugins or live synths to drag the project resources down, and I could concentrate on the actual effects I needed for mixing.

There was a few times where things weren't working out so I would have to go back to the project file with that element and make a tweak and reimport the part to the master project but that was fairly painless.

Considering how big this project was (in many ways) it all came together really quickly in the end! But yeah, especially on such a low powered system, project management and good planning is essential. You can most definitely do large scale projects in SONAR on all kinds of hardware.

Anyway, hope you guys like the song and find the info useful, and absolutely feel free to ask any tech questions if you have any. :)

Cheers for the nice words! :)

The Skype thing was done the old fashioned way - I hooked a patch cable up from the line out of a laptop running Skype and hooked that into the audio in of my audio production machine. Dumb-ass me didn't bother checking to see if these was any better solutions, did he? It turns out there's call recording plugins and patching software like Voicemeter that would have done the job automatically for me. Bah! Haha! Oh well, got the job done.

Lining stuff up was easy - each project basically started from the same spot, so even if there was a sound effect at 22 minutes in, there would be 22 minutes of nothing first when I imported that track into the master project. It was only a bit fiddly when I had to go back and change stuff and reimport it, just keeping track of it all.

It'd be awesome to have nested projects like, say, Sony Vegas or even REAPER does so you could just embed each element rather than bouncing down yourself and having to keep track of it manually.

But yeah, a bit of problem solving and planning did the trick! :)

Cheers! Glad you're enjoying it! :)