Midi Drums

how much do you know about meter and tempo? if you have a grasp of those two concepts then you can probably point and click your way into some decent groove clips in no time. most drum beats have three things going on - the kick, snare and ride. the "ride" instrument is usually a hi-hat but can be cymbal rides or in high-energy sections toms and cymbal crashes. of course there are exceptions but this is the typical drums scenario.

i don't use the staff view in sonar, i use the piano roll view instead. this allows me to imprecisely place notes and automatically humanize the drum groove. i move around the various hits until they "feel" right and then loop as necessary. in my case i'm writing my own songs so it's more difficult, in your case you can use the original song as a guide.

if you don't know much about meter and tempo you'll just have to find a groove approximating what you want with whatever sonar ships as a "session drummer" nowadays and hope for the best. that seems to work great for some but as a control freak i've always rolled my own. i find it helps to have separate tracks for kick+snare, hats/overheads, and toms. this way i can loop effectively while having a manageable number of tracks to monitor in piano roll view to make sure i'm not doing anything impossible (or highly improbable) like hitting two cymbals, a ride and open hi-hat while doing a tom flam and snare drum roll all at once.

Session Drummer 2 which comes with S6 may get you going in the right direction. It has a bunch of drumming styles to choose from. You can then turn these into midi events in the clips pane in Sonar and tweak to your satisfaction.

FWIW, I'm learning how to do this now with Session Drummer 1 (included in Sonar 5).

Have fun!