Smarter Quantize Needed

Turn the quantize off.

Actually, it's in the Quantize dialog box. You can set the strength from 0% (don't touch the notes) to 100% (put them right on the grid). Whenever I've quantized my poor playing, I've never gone to 100%. Just sounds too mechanical. Sometimes much smaller amounts give you a good performance that's still "alive".

The above advice about strength is good, but I might add a couple of points.
First, you can select certain notes to quantize at differing strengths. You don't need to pick a specific set of Q settings for the entire phrase or passage. Select notes using the prv but include or exclude specific notes before processing.
Next, put a lot of effort into an important rythmic passage, then use Sonar's groove quantization feature to have the other tracks quantize to IT. Now you can set your quantize strength higher because the expression is established by your reference pattern
I'm sure this is described in the support docs, but if it seem too confusing, let me know.

Steve Gadd is a MASTER!  Love his playing.

SilverBlueMedallion
Hello Everyone,
 
Please excuse me if this makes no sense (disclaimer lol).
 
OK so I am working on an all synth VST project and I have parts played by hand that aren't supposed to exactly fall nicely into 16th or even 32nd notes, I try to quanitize but it snaps to 32nds and still doesn't feel right - 64ths too.

This makes some sense, but not complete sense. 
 
The big question is what's the smallest musical duration you would need to use to notate the part? You shouldn't set a lower quantize resolution than that, except in the case of mixed straight and triplet durations in which case you might have to quantize to the next lowest triplet resolution as the greatest common divisor the two. If you weren't playing 32nd or 64th notes, and/or you're playing was loose, it's unlikely that things will move in the right direction when quantizing to such a fine resolution.
 
In order to get quantization to deliver the desired result, you first need to know what you played, and what quantize value would get it to sound rhythmically 'correct', albeit possibly a little too rigid/mechanical when quantized to 100%. If the timing is too loose to make that possible, then you'll need to look at the specific notes that are moving the wrong direction, and manually move them to within 50% of the musically 'correct' grid line before quantizing or possibly quantize different selections to different resolutions.
 
As others have suggested, percentage or swing quantizing is probably going to be needed to get the feel you want, but if 100% sounds totally wrong, then percentage/swing quantizing is not going to help.
 
 

Something you might try is to quantize to 32nd triplets.  It may not work, but it's worth try.
 
Good luck!!