SONAR and Continuous Controller Automation
Hi Everyone,
I'm a SONAR newbie, but have been involved with computer music and MIDI since the mid-nineties. Cakewalk and Cubase were the first sequencers I used, back on Windows 3.1.
I recently purchased SONAR Artist, and coming from Cubase on Windows I can say it's a welcome change.
I use a lot of hardware synths and workstations, mainly because I enjoy the tactility and immediacy of them. However, there's one thing I've always struggled with when using them with a DAW - automation of controllers.
The problem I find is, although I can record the movement of any controllers into a sequencer track, the initial values are often wrong and difficult to restore. Say I start recording my track, and I increase the filter cutoff halfway through the track from 64 to 127. When I get to the end of the track, the filter cutoff remains fixed at 127. If I return to zero, the filter cutoff is still at 127, then halfway through the track it jumps abruptly down to 64 again.
Now, there's a few ways I've found to deal with this: one is to press record in SONAR, then move all the knobs to their initial starting position - but this means that you have to know in advance which controllers you're going to use in your performance ahead of time. The second is to retrospectively go through and manually enter in starting controller values for each CC that's manipulated in the performance, but if you've manipulated a dozen difference controllers across a few tracks, this seems to be a time consuming task.
Is there an easier way of doing what I am trying to do, or can the process of entering starting controller values for all CCs be sped-up somehow?
It's always seemed to me that it would be good to have a standard function on MIDI hardware to dump the current state of all controllers, to mitigate this sort of problem.
So, how do people work with controllers and hardware in their setups? I'd be very grateful for any tips people would be willing to share.