Friday's Tip of the Week #167: Behold! Dual Mono Becomes Stereo!

 
Hey - where did the first batch of tips go?!?  Keep calm, and carry on reading...
 
The "Friday's Tip of the Week" was one of those things that was done on a whim, but took on a life of its own and after 120 tips (far more than the 31 that were planned originally), it started to get unwieldy. It was unorganized, most of the tips needed revising, some were obsolete, screen shots showed a GUI that was no longer in common use, and there were some typos and other issues.
 
It was time for a clean slate, so in early November I updated the tips, folded in more tips, fixed the typoze, expanded on some of the explanations, added a table of contents, and all that other good book-like stuff. Then I gave advance notice I'd delete all the old tips in this thread, and start over again with a new series of tips....so here we are with a sequel, as well as a full-blown book.
 

 
The book is 311 pages in PDF format, and is now available in the Cakewalk Store. You can download the Table of Contents to see what's included; chapters include MIDI, SONAR Workflow, Patch Points and Synth Recording, FX Chains, Automation, Tempo and Pitch-Shifting, Signal Processing, AudioSnap, Step Sequencing and Beats, Colorization, Loops, Melodyne, etc. - 120 tips in all.
 
Thanks for your support, your enthusiasm about this venture, your comments, and your participation. This is a great community, and you'll note that this thread retains some of the top community-contributed tips that were scattered in among the original 121 tips.
 
I hope you enjoy the book. And yes, the index will continue...for old times' sake, we'll pick up the tip numbers where we left off. 
 
Week 122: Clean Up Your Console View - Don't you wish the Console View could show Track Folders, and you could unfold and fold them? Well you can't, but here's how to have something very similar.
Week 123: SuperKick! Tune and Enhance Your Kick Drum - You can have a kick drum, or you can have a kick that could be mistaken for a seismic event. Here's how. With audio demo.
Week 124: "Percussivate" Your Part - Here's the easy way to impart rhythmic effects, polyrhythms, and interesting syncopations to sustained parts like pads and power chords. EDMers, take note - but this tip is about more than just that.
Week 125: Multiband Sidechaining - Use one audio track to "cross-modulate" another track, using multiband sidechaining with gates. With audio demo.
Week 126:  Linear-Phase EQ vs. Non-Linear EQ...Huh? - Cakewalk's Linear-Phase EQ has both a linear-phase and non-linear phase mode. Why does it matter? Which should you choose? What's the difference? All is revealed in this tip. With audio demo.
Week 127: Random Bass Line Creator - No, you're not going to replace Will Lee or Brian Hardgroove. But download a free MFX, then let SONAR swing into action and come up with some potentially useful bass lines. With audio demo.
Week 128: My New BFF Shortcut - When editing tracks, being able to switch between the Now time rewinding to where it started, or stopping where you stopped the transport, is vital - and this particular shortcut implementation works really well.
Week 129: Jamstik Meets SONAR - Although not really intended to be a Windows-oriented MIDI controller, the Zivix Jamstik can provide this function - and is particularly well-suited for use with Rapture Pro.
Week 130: The “How Does It Sound in a Car?” Tester - Are you one of those people who won't sign off on a mix until you've heard it in a car? Take the process to a more repeatable level with this novel FX Chain.
Week 131: SONAR's Dr. QuadraREX File Player - Play up to four REX files at once, play individual slices, drag MIDI files to the track view, modify the sound with Dim Pro's processors, trigger and transpose loops from your keyboard - it's all here.
Week 132: Delay-Free Faux Stereo - When you want to convert mono to stereo, there's more than one way to accomplish your goal...and this one doesn't require delay.
Week 133: Console Emulator Workflow Tip - If you use the Console Emulator, you already know why it's cool. This tip is about quickly verifying that all console channels have a CE, and that the settings are as desired.
Week 134: SONAR's Secret Time-Based Guitar FX - There's a really cool chorus that's not like other guitar choruses, as well as a pseudo-Echoplex - but you have to know where to look for them.
Week 135: An Efficient Workflow for Pre-Masters - Yes, you need to master your final mixes. But there's a very important step that needs to be taken before that, and here's an efficient way to go about it.
Week 136: Sonitus Presets - Yes, We Can! - Sonitus plug-ins are seriously cool...so much so that I keep creating presets. But managing those presets properly can be a little opaque--so this tip reveals all.
Week 137: Get More Out of TH3 Cakewalk Edition - The Cakewalk Edition of TH3 doesn't have an equalizer...or does it? Turns out that it does - with highpass, lowpass, bandpass, and notch responses - so this tip tells you how to access it.
Week 138: WTF Craig...Harmonicas? - One of these tips is not like the others...and this one is it. Check out why blues harp has merit, and how to get that down and dirty blues harp sound in SONAR.
Week 139: The Reason Why You Don’t Want to Compress the Master Bus - If like me you treat mixing and mastering as separate processes, this tip is important.
Week 140: SONAR's Incognito Lo-Fi Plug-In - Just when you thought you knew everything about Sonitus effects, it turns out there's an incognito lo-fi processor that can get seriously nasty.
Week 141: The Humanized MIDI Hi-Hat - Even if you're doing electro or other musical genres that typically expect highly-quantized parts, a little humanizing can bring a fresh, more interesting vibe.
Week 142: What Is the Sound of Two Hands Clapping? - Probably not all that great, because handclaps are deceptively hard to record. But take heed of these tips, and you'll have better results. 
Week 143: Using BLE-MIDI (Bluetooth MIDI) Devices in SONAR - "Cutting the cord" isn't just about removing the evil entity known as "TV" from your life, but getting rid of MIDI cables and using wireless controllers - thanks to Bluetooth MIDI.
Week 144: Four Quickie Automation Tips - Being able to navigate quickly among common functions is always a good thing, but not all shortcuts are obvious - so here are four ways to speed up working with automation.
Week 145: End Boring MIDI Drum Patterns! - "Friday's Tip of the Week," or public service announcement? You decide! Once you figure out the settings, the results are pretty amazing.
Week 146: The Perfect Fadeout - When you want to fade out a song using master bus automation, you can either take the time to place nodes exactly where you want them...or save much time by using this tip.
Week 147: Gourmet Flanging - Looking for ways to get the “tape flanger” sound of "through-zero flanging" without tape? Here's a way to get ever closer to that sound.  
Week 148: How to Use the New Drum Exciter Plug-In - Sure, the 2017.05 update has a lot of cool stuff in it. But that's no excuse to ignore the new Drum Exciter plug-in for Professional and Platinum owners.
Week 149: Morphable LFO Auto-Panner - SONAR doesn't have a versatile auto-panner - or does it? Here's how to create an auto-panner with over 48 waveforms, sync, MIDI control, and dual morphable LFO waveforms.
Week 150: MIDI Velocity "Compression" with the Transform Tool - The new Transform Tool is your one-stop option for dynamics control. This tip shows how to use it with velocity, but the same technique also works with other controllers.
Week 151: Super-Long LFO Waveforms - The drawing tool for automated LFO waveforms does have a significant limitation—it can’t draw “frequencies” slower than 1 measure automatically. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to do this.
Week 152: Build a "Virtual Room Mics" FX Chain - Let’s improve the acoustic environment in which your instruments live, by faking—uh, I mean, “emulating”—a pair of room mics. And all you need is a simple FX Chain!
Week 153: SONAR's "Secret Weapon" Convolution - Applying convolution to sounds can do a whole lot of interesting things, and SONAR has a "secret weapon" for convolution beyond REmatrix Solo.
Week 154: Re-Discovering SONAR's Audio Waveform Editor - With audio in the clips pane, it seems lots of zooming and resizing is needed if you want a single track to fill the screen. Not so!
Week 155: Reverb Tools for Bigger Reverb - Want a bigger, wider, more interesting reverb sound? Of course you do, so keep reading - and try Reverb Tools as an FX Chain, too.
Week 156: Let's Get Punchy! - Sure, comping gets all the glory. But punching has a lot of users, and there are various options with both manual and auto-punching that are worth exploring.
Week 157: The Missing—and Non-Missing—Link - This is an “eat your vegetables” kind of tip, but SONAR's ability to link and unlink clips has been around for a while - so it seems like a good time for a refresher course on this handy feature.
Week 158: Wireless, Hands-Free SONAR Control - Ever wanted to be able to send keyboard shortcuts via footswitches? Well, you can - and it's easy to accomplish. 
Week 159: The Matrix View Sampler You Can Trigger with MIDI Tracks - The Matrix View lets you drag in slices, and trigger loops and one-shots--but you can't trigger them from SONAR MIDI tracks unless you know what it's this tip.
Week 160: Cut Audio Groove Clips into Slices - Easily! - Wouldn’t it be great if you could treat Groove Clips like REX files, and extract individual slices quickly and easily? With SONAR, you can.
Week 161: SONAR Audio Stretching Options Explained - SONAR has five ways to stretch audio files, and it's important to choose the right tool for the right job.
Week 162: Here's Your Harmonic "Tremolo" - Some of the older, Fender “brown” amps used a variation on the standard tremolo which the company called a “harmonic tremolo.” Now you can make one in SONAR. 
Week 163: How to be a SONAR Power User - If you want to use SONAR in a smooth, efficient, fast way, you need to know how it works - and this tip gives a strategy for an efficient way to learn SONAR's basic features.
Week 164: The Case for Bass Multiband Compression - Sure, a lot of engineers will use a standard LA-2A-type compressor...but check out how the Sonitus multiband compressor can convert your bass sound from mild to mighty.
Week 165: The Modeled Guitar Tone Control - A lot of people think that guitar tone controls just roll off the highs. Well, yes…but…they also interact with pickups to produce a midrange peak, as modeled in this simple FX Chain.
Week 166: Perk Up Percussion with Probability - Few sounds are as boring as placing a percussion note on every step of a step sequencer...but we have ways to make those percussion parts much more interesting.
Week 167: Behold! Dual Mono Becomes Stereo! - This keeps coming up as a forum question, and I answered it in a post briefly...but feel it deserves “sticky status” and a more thorough explanation.

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Community Tip: What Data Defaults to Which Locations
 
The following was posted by Kylotan but it was a post buried in a thread. I think this info is really useful, so I'm pasting it here so it doesn't get lost in the noise. It explains what data defaults to which locations.
 

1. C:\Program Files\Cakewalk (Studio Instruments drop their multisamples here)
2. C:\Program Files (x86)\Cakewalk (Studio Instruments have a copy of their multisamples here too - it's fine to install the executables in both the x86 and the 64 bit areas, but the data too?)
3. C:\ProgramData\Cakewalk (Cakewalk supplied but user editable data is here, like drum maps, but also a bunch of synth presets seem to live here, eg. for Dimension Pro)
4. C:\Cakewalk Content (this is 75% loops, but also contains the sort of thing you might have expected in C:\ProgramData\Cakewalk, such as track and project templates)
5. C:\Users\[your username here]\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk (local settings, plus some more Cakewalk supplied editable stuff like drum maps - no idea how this relates to the stuff in C:\ProgramData\Cakewalk - maybe that is just a 'backup', copied for each user)
6. C:\VSTPlugins\Sonar (or whatever your VST directories are) (some stuff likes to drop its static data in here, like RXP, Session Drummer, and Perfect Space)

Community Tip: Edit Plug-In Manager Layouts in XML
 

Anderton

arlen2133
I also wish PIM could be exported "offiline" and edited via say Word or Notepad??
That would make sorting and setting up much easier.

The good news: It's an XML file, so you can open it in Notepad. The bad news: Your head will explode trying to edit it.

This makes editing it a lot easier (and it's free):
 
 NotePad++
 
Once installed, I recommend going to Plugins > Plug-in Manager > Show Plug-in Manager and select XML Tools and Install to help out with the XML editing.
 
Note that the files have a .PGL suffix instead of .XML.
 
 

Community Tip: Vocal FX Chain
 
Excellent tip, as always, Craig, thanks! I've made a Vocal FX chain based on this tip and would like to share it with the community.
http://www.files.com/shared/578a76d3b6eea/SWVocals.zip
Note: 1/4 to 1/2 delay switch may not work as intended, due to Sonitus Delay not responding to changes in the Factor field from FX chain unless there's a mouse click in the plugin itself. Will report it to devs, maybe it can be fixed.

Anderton
Week 122: Clean Up Your Console View
 
... You can do that with Folder Tracks in Track View, but you can't do the same thing in Console view...or can you?
 
For example, once an instrument's MIDI track is done (I use synth Track Folders with separate audio and MIDI tracks), the attention shifts to the audio track when you're mixing - so you don't want to see the MIDI track. ...

Extra thanks for your work from me too, and looking forward to the book and to future tips. Meanwhile, back to this tip of the week:
 
Due to recent retirement from my day job, I'm finding it rewarding to dig around in Sonar more. This time, I'm not able to duplicate your tip functionality (at least not yet). When I set up a track folder and populate it with MIDI and audio tracks, clicking on the folder indicator numbers under each type hides and shows the tracks just as you describe. But for me, the change in visibility is only happening in the track view with no corresponding change in the console view track visibility. I'm still on a learning curve with track folders, but I'm wondering if there are any preference settings or specific docking choices that would cause this disconnect between track and console.
 
Then, when poking around for pertinent settings, I noticed at the top of my console view a series of drop down selectors (Modules, Strips, Track, Bus, Options). Under the "Strips" drop down, there is an option to select or deselect "MIDI." Deselecting "MIDI" instantly makes all the MIDI tracks go away from the console view whether they are in folders or not. Seems very handy exactly for the reasons you mention. Re-selecting "MIDI" brings them back into the console view.
 
The strips menu does not offer a way to easily show/hide user-unique kinds of track groupings (different bands, etc.) the way your tip apparently works, but the vast number of Sonar controls made it easy for me to not know about the built in solution for showing/hiding MIDI tracks in console view, at least until now. Thanks for stimulating me to learn more.

Week 123: SuperKick! Tune and Enhance Your Kick Drum
 
If you do hip-hop or EDM and don’t try this tip, in the immortal words of Herman Cain—“blame yourself.” This tip turns wimpy kicks into superkicks, using a different technique compared to the Drum Replacer. I’ve posted an audio demo at craiganderton.com on the Demos page so you can hear how cool the kick becomes.
 
The basic concept is to add another track with a low-frequency sine wave, tuned to your pitch of choice. This can be a WAV file, but we’ll talk about how to take this to another level after we get past the basics. An Aux Track “listens” to the drum track, and uses EQ to filter out everything except the kick; you don’t hear this audio, but we use it to gate the sine wave so it tracks the kick.
 
Let’s check out the setup (and a tip o’ the hat to Jeremy Habetler for the cool Green Glow theme...nice work!).
 

 
1. Track 1 is your drum loop. Insert a pre-fader Send that goes to an Aux Track (named “EQ Conditioner” in this example).
2. Temporarily insert a Sonitus EQ into the drum track’s FX Rack. Tweak the response to filter out everything but the kick. You may need only one lowpass filter band, with the Q kicked up to about 10. Start at the lowest frequency, then slowly move up until you hit the frequency that best isolates the kick. However if other drum sounds creep in (like low floor toms), you may need to double up on the lowpass filters, as shown in the screen shot.
3. Drag the Sonitus EQ out of the drum track and into the Aux Track.
4. Now add the track with the low-frequency sine wave, and insert a Sonitus Gate.
5. Assign the Aux Track output to the Sonitus Gate Sine Input.
6. Because the drum track Send is pre-fader, you can turn down the drum track while you adjust the Gate for the best possible sound. Start by setting the Gate Threshold to let the sine wave through when the kick hits. 
 
Because the sine wave is very low frequency, you need to set the Attack/Hold combination to be longer than an individual cycle. For example the period of a 50 Hz sine wave is 20 ms, so a hold time of 22 ms makes sure the gate doesn’t trigger on individual cycles…although if you want some really nasty lo-fi distortion, be my guest and use short attack and hold times. Also, it’s a good idea to use some Lookahead; 1 ms is enough.
 
How you set the gate provides a ton of options. Extend the Release for a “hum drum” effect, or automate this control for more expressiveness. Increasing the Hold time alters the character as well. The Threshold setting is crucial to avoid false triggering.
 
And of course, one aspect of the "Friday's Tip of the Week" sequel hasn’t changed since the previous generation of tips:
 
But wait—there’s more!
 
If you use a virtual instrument instead of a WAV file to generate the sine wave, you can pitch the kick with a MIDI track, as required by the song. Or, use SONAR’s transpose function on a WAV file. You can also use this to add more "bottom" to snare drums, providing you can isolate it enough from the rest of the drums.
 
 

Hi Craig - another nice tip. I've used a similar method to augment a kick with a sine wave. But your tip adds some new elements. And your "wait there's more..." suggestion to use a VSTi to generate the sine wave is a great one. The kick demo sounds great. Definitely a great start to another batch of FTOTW's - and hopefully another book. Thanks

Maybe I don't understand what you need to do exactly, but assuming MIDI bass, copy the track, set all the notes to the same pitch, and trigger the kick. If not MIDI bass, use Melodyne Essential to extract MIDI and do the same thing.

Keith Albright [Cakewalk]
Definitely pays to explore, experimented with a layer of synth loops and set the gate to duck, came up with a cool locked to the drums rhythmic part.  
 
Bill talked about that back in March
https://www.cakewalk.com/.../Sidechaining-in-SONAR

Yes, I'm quite a fan of sidechaining...I covered several applications in the first generation of tips. One of my favorites involved ducking reverb when an instrument played to avoid "stepping on" the instrument sound.
 
You can also do some really nasty distortion by setting the gate times to the minimum and opening/closing on individual cycles. But I thought it was too disgusting to include as a tip of the week