sharke

charlyg

Spencer
That's not true. Ableton are making serious bank. Imageline, despite their free FLstudio upgrades, are also well off and make tons of r&d. Of course, we're talking about companies that are aware of what the current market wants. There's been some steps taken in the right direction lately for CW, but so much more needs to be done.

So much more? In whose opinion? What the current market wants? Mostly we(market) want choices. But to say we(users) want Sonar to be just like every one else(what the current market evidently wants) is not something they have ever tried to be. Frankly, there are more than a few of us who like the CW model just as it is. They focus on what we, the Sonar users want, and try to improve on delivery of those wants. I like to repay that loyalty, and not ding them at the end of the post.


And that's not even getting into the features we keep getting monthly.

If Sonar aren't fully tapping into anything, it's the explosion of EDM/bedroom producers. Look at the average age of people on the Sonar forums, it can't have escaped your attention that there is a predominance of over-40's (myself included) and a noticeable lack of EDM whippersnappers. You only have to look through the songs forum to get a general idea of Sonar's age and genre demographic. Not that there's anything wrong with this demographic, but I really feel like they're not doing everything they could to tap into the coming-of-age electronic crowd. Those kids are flocking to Abelton and Reason in droves. That may be to your liking, but I believe Cakewalk is going to have to do more to appeal to this crowd to stay afloat long term.

 Funny I've heard they spend more time on this than other stuff. That's usually from the improve the staff view crowd.  You could get a newbie to make an EDM track using loops in 10 minutes in Sonar than using Live. Plus Sonar markets their software via Steam and some kid may plunk down some money for Music Creator because it's low cost.
 Loops are used a lot these days and Sonar is really great for working with loops. I'm disappointed they abandoned Beatscape. I don't think anyone else made a 16 track Rex player. That might sway some Reason users.
  
 

Andrew Rossa [Cakewalk]

Woodyoflop
 
I understand what your saying, i am one of the few young ones iv seen on here. Im 24 and i have used Sonar since i was roughly 16. my FATHER had introduced me haha. Proving your point. However i see it as somewhat of an advantage in a way. Sonar doesn't seem to cater much to hip-hop/edm as much as it does other genres as you described. This also gives young engineers such as myself an opportunity. I enjoy making hip-hop instrumentals with Rock style sounds and especially the drums. People actually really love it and it kind of gives me my own unique "sound". Also the artist i deal with love it. Im by no means saying im the first to do this. Im infact rather late to it, but i dont hear it as much.

We are actually actively engaging in the EDM community. We have one artist, Ilan Bluestone, who has done pretty well for himself and uses SONAR. And we've gotten a bunch of leads on new artists with the same profile. Here's the video we put out on Ilan:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaS5dyo60KI

It is interesting to see an EDM producer rave about Sonar, but I think this guy is the exception - the vast majority of dance music producers I hear talk about DAW's are talking about things like Abelton, FL, Logic and Reason. I guess there's a reason these DAW's have become so popular in the EDM world. You'd be hard pressed to find a single EDM producing video tutorial that uses Sonar. I'm not knocking it too much here, obviously I use Sonar for a reason - in many ways, the workflow and interface are second to none. I dabble mainly in electronic based music (not what you'd call "EDM" today but certainly beat and synth driven) but I also like to mess around with guitars, and Sonar seems to provide the best of both worlds....up to a point. There are still some areas in which I feel like my creativity is stifled when using Sonar for these styles, the main area being in controller/automation performance of effects. I find it horribly frustrating and convoluted and there are times when all I want to do is for instance, record a performance of the biFilter2 cutoff knob using a rotary on my MIDI controller....how in the hell do I do that? ACT is a thoroughly horrible, unusable, buggy mess, I can't just right click on the knob and select "MIDI learn," the "learn" feature on the FX Chain controls is just for assigning the knob to a plugin parameter, not assigning it to a hardware controller.....and so I just give up. This is the kind of thing that a user should be able to do intuitively with a couple of clicks and yet with Sonar it's frequently either incredibly convoluted, problematic or plain impossible. It's the kind of thing that an EDM producer is going to want to do on the fly without having to think about it, but Sonar fails miserably in this respect. I can just about get it done with synth parameters by using synth rack controls, but when the parameter is part of a VST effect, forget about it. Sure, you can draw an automation envelope, but drawing envelopes is not very musical. 
 
And of course Sonar would need some kind of baked-in LFO's and envelopes, assignable to anything, to make it stand out as an EDM-friendly DAW. 
 
I'm not knocking the new features that we've been given over the last couple of years - ARA/Melodyne integration, the new Drum Replacer are fantastic, but again this kind of thing is aimed primarily at the "real instrument" side of things, not electro styles. 
 
On the other hand, if you look through the free content that comes with Sonar, an incredible amount of it is EDM based. So there's that. But I don't think any budding young bedroom producers are going to choose Sonar on the basis of the included loops and one-shots. And as for drum VST's which come with or have come with Sonar in the past, well again very much geared toward a "traditional" drum sound. Session Drummer/Addictive Drums - both excellent, but not likely to appeal to the young beat-chopping sample-mangling electro producer looking for something more along the lines of Battery or Geist.
 
Sonar is great. And it's more than possible to make great EDM with it. I just really don't see it taking a serious share of the young synth based bedroom producer market....yet. Who knows what the future will bring  

kitekrazy1

sharke

charlyg

Spencer
That's not true. Ableton are making serious bank. Imageline, despite their free FLstudio upgrades, are also well off and make tons of r&d. Of course, we're talking about companies that are aware of what the current market wants. There's been some steps taken in the right direction lately for CW, but so much more needs to be done.

So much more? In whose opinion? What the current market wants? Mostly we(market) want choices. But to say we(users) want Sonar to be just like every one else(what the current market evidently wants) is not something they have ever tried to be. Frankly, there are more than a few of us who like the CW model just as it is. They focus on what we, the Sonar users want, and try to improve on delivery of those wants. I like to repay that loyalty, and not ding them at the end of the post.


And that's not even getting into the features we keep getting monthly.

If Sonar aren't fully tapping into anything, it's the explosion of EDM/bedroom producers. Look at the average age of people on the Sonar forums, it can't have escaped your attention that there is a predominance of over-40's (myself included) and a noticeable lack of EDM whippersnappers. You only have to look through the songs forum to get a general idea of Sonar's age and genre demographic. Not that there's anything wrong with this demographic, but I really feel like they're not doing everything they could to tap into the coming-of-age electronic crowd. Those kids are flocking to Abelton and Reason in droves. That may be to your liking, but I believe Cakewalk is going to have to do more to appeal to this crowd to stay afloat long term.

 Funny I've heard they spend more time on this than other stuff. That's usually from the improve the staff view crowd.  You could get a newbie to make an EDM track using loops in 10 minutes in Sonar than using Live. Plus Sonar markets their software via Steam and some kid may plunk down some money for Music Creator because it's low cost.
 Loops are used a lot these days and Sonar is really great for working with loops. I'm disappointed they abandoned Beatscape. I don't think anyone else made a 16 track Rex player. That might sway some Reason users.
  
 

Sonar comes with an incredible number of loops, many of them very high quality and many of them geared toward the EDM crowd. And of course it's very easy to get some loop based music together with groove clips. But that's pretty much where it ends - modern electro styles are very much driven by the chopping and mangling of beats, and I found myself researching and purchasing Geist to do that sort of thing. 

One guy went from FL to Live and then to Cubase.  The reason why he switched to Cubase is he started using orchestra sounds with the Play engine and found Play more friendly with Cubase.

Geist also imports RX2 files and allows for quick pad re-assignmet/layering of the RX2 slices. There is a lot of sound manipulation capability in it.

Most of the EDM acts I've seen use MacBook Pro laptops.

I agree with sharke. EDM can be made on Sonar, but I find whenever EDM or hip-hop makers sit down at my computer they get frustrated at Sonar workflow for such things. I find it funny when the staff guys complain that Sonar is catering to that crowd when nothing could be farther from the truth. As sharke stated, real-time features are one of the reasons. ACT being unintuitive for man doesn't help. With that being said, Sonar does offer powerful features that work well for EDM and hip-hop for those willing to dig in.

dubdisciple
I agree with sharke. EDM can be made on Sonar, but I find whenever EDM or hip-hop makers sit down at my computer they get frustrated at Sonar workflow for such things. I find it funny when the staff guys complain that Sonar is catering to that crowd when nothing could be farther from the truth. As sharke stated, real-time features are one of the reasons. ACT being unintuitive for man doesn't help. With that being said, Sonar does offer powerful features that work well for EDM and hip-hop for those willing to dig in.

 That's because they are not use to it.  For years when I got those free versions of Live I could never understand the session view. Studio One is probably the easiest transition from Sonar.  Live, FL, Reason, and Tracktion will seem foreign when you used a certain DAW for a long time.
 Tapping into a market that is clearly dominated by a DAW or two could be a waste of time. Remember Project 5?
 
 I think it's really hard to get a person who is experienced on a certain DAW to switch. Familiarity over rides new feature X.  You even find those who use a preferred DAW are even reluctant to upgrade to the newest version.
 

kitekrazy1
I think it's really hard to get a person who is experienced on a certain DAW to switch. Familiarity over rides new feature X.  You even find those who use a preferred DAW are even reluctant to upgrade to the newest version.

 
It took me a loooooong time to wrap my head around Ableton Live. But then I found there was an "ableton way" of doing things, like it was one of the first programs to really dive into drag and drop. Once I figured that out, it made sense. It was sort of like how driving in England would drive an American insane until he figured out you were supposed to drive on the left hand side of the road...
 
I think the main difference among programs is whether they're modeled on a studio or a sequencer. SONAR is definitely the studio paradigm. That said, I use it for EDM because I tend to throw a lot of digital audio into the process, not just MIDI. I do think software design tends to "nudge" users in a certain direction, but most music software is general-purpose enough you can pretty much make it do what you want.
 
It was interesting watching how Ilan Bluestone used SONAR in his GearFest presentation. A screen shot would look nothing like the typical SONAR project. It's most bits and pieces spread over lots of tracks with processing as a given. He definitely seemed comfortable working within SONAR's framework, albeit not necessarily using it the same way as everyone else.
 

kitekrazy1

dubdisciple
I agree with sharke. EDM can be made on Sonar, but I find whenever EDM or hip-hop makers sit down at my computer they get frustrated at Sonar workflow for such things. I find it funny when the staff guys complain that Sonar is catering to that crowd when nothing could be farther from the truth. As sharke stated, real-time features are one of the reasons. ACT being unintuitive for man doesn't help. With that being said, Sonar does offer powerful features that work well for EDM and hip-hop for those willing to dig in.

 That's because they are not use to it.  For years when I got those free versions of Live I could never understand the session view. Studio One is probably the easiest transition from Sonar.  Live, FL, Reason, and Tracktion will seem foreign when you used a certain DAW for a long time.
 Tapping into a market that is clearly dominated by a DAW or two could be a waste of time. Remember Project 5?
 
 I think it's really hard to get a person who is experienced on a certain DAW to switch. Familiarity over rides new feature X.  You even find those who use a preferred DAW are even reluctant to upgrade to the newest version.
 

While i agree to an extant, i find even people who like Sonar find EDM and Hip-Hop much easier to make in other applications. If I sat three complete novices down with Sonar, Ablteton and FL Studio and told them to recreate a modern hip-hop.EDM/Pop song like , I strongly suspect the one on the latter two options would finish first.  i base this on watching this type of scenario play out again and again. Getting Geist levels the playing field for me, but otherwise, the lack of the integrated sampler solution makes a huge difference.  I'm not trying to slam Sonar because  i think it is superior in many other areas.