I'd like to see how others do things as I am still pretty new to DAWs in general.  Are there any demo or tutorial type songs availabe at Cakewalk?

The last demo project released by Cakewalk was with X3e. It's available here:
 
https://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowledge-Base/2007013323/SONAR-X3-Demo-Javier-Colon-Jimmy-Landry-These-Arms
 
There were demos with most earlier versions as well, but this is the only one I know of that's available for download from the Cakewalk site.

Thank you, much appreciated.

I asked about this a few weeks ago as well! I think it is time for a new demo!

That is one heck of a project.  I think they used every platinum plug in twice!
I could not play it all the way through with out audio drop outs.
 
It is good to get some pro channel pre-sets though !
 
Thanks

Try increasing your ASIO buffer. My old Q9550 plays that project easily with a 512-sample buffer. At 256, it would play, but would have a crackle or two. And that;s with all tracks unfrozen. As delivered, the synths are not all live IIRC.

 
I seem to recall the whole thing was muted in favour of the bounced output,  but maybe not.
 
I just replayed the demo and was quite impressed by the even distribution of load over my 8 virtual cores (all tracks active).  All 8 varied between exactly 20 and 30%.  I also noticed that while virtual core 1 in the performance graph in Sonar shows a bit higher than the others (which are almost exactly equal) in the Windows task manager all 8 are essentially equal.