Agentcalm
One question on Sonar X3 Robert. I have reinstalled X2 several times now but its crashes a lot with an error  Sonar.exe not responding.  I have to use Task manager to try kill it.  I've installed latest drivers for my sound card (an M Audio usb device) and disabled the laptops onboard sound card.  But still very flaky. Have you found X3 more stable?
Thanks again guys.   Xave

I skipped X2, so I can't reall compare it, but X3 has been stable so far. Bear in mind, I am running it on a 32 bit Vista system. Vista is not supported with X3, but the docs indicated it will run in Vista, so I tried it. There was a hiccup with the VST scanner (There is a Vista specific problem), but I found a way to fix that.
I haven't had a chance to push it much, but so far it seems to be behaving fairly well.

Thanks R.  Yeah if i could get the snare and kick seperated it would be great.  The toms can all sit on one track as i wouldn't be putting and effects on them.  Im not using any overhead mics as im doing this at home so only using virtual drums.  Onward n upward :)

Agent.  My apologies for not explaining i was not using "overhead mics" literally.  I meant you could route your virtual instruments as if they were all be recorded from overhead mics. A sample setup would be something like this:
 
Session Drummer 2 Kick routed to channel 1
Session Drummer 2 Snare routed to channel 2
Session Drummer 2 high hats routed to channel 3
Session Drummer 2 Low Tom routed to channel 4
Session Drummer 2  Mid Tom routed to channel 4
Session Drummer 2  High Tom routed to channel 4
Session Drummer 2  Crash Cymbal routed to channel 5
Session Drummer 2  Ride Cymbal routed to channel 5
That still leaves three outputs for percussion or other sounds.  You could easily assign the high hats to the same channel as the cymbals if you needed another free channel
 
Create Buss for Kick, Snare, Overhead, Drum master respectively
 
Since kicks and snares are the most likely to be reinforced with layering, the individual busses leave room for that sort of thing.  Route the other channels to overhead.  The idea here is to simulate a typical overhead mic setup but with a lot more control pre-buss than one would have if you were using actual overhead mics. having a reverb on this buss and or send from a reverb buss helps sell this. Using channel tools to control width on this buss  Route all of these busses to drum master so you can have one master fader for drums to mix with other tracks in your song.
 
Needless to say this is one of many ways to go about this.  One could also toss in a buss for parallel compression or create a buss with a convolution reverb to simulate a room mice capturing it all and then routed to drum master buss as well.
 
 

Hi Dub.  No,the apology i think should be on my part for mis-reading :)
Yest this is exactly what i would like to achieve with the snare to track 1 etc.  I need to read up on buses though because i am completely lost  on your section where you mention using a bus. It was always just something i used when my car wouldnt start. But thanks for the tips though, all great stuff for me to get my teeth into :)
Xave

Agent.. learning about busses will open up a whole new world to you and give you a lot more control and flexibility.  Even the simplest of uses for a bus will make life easier for you.  Imagine if you have all your drum channels exactly the way you want, but after adding other instruments and vocals that is no longer the case.  If they are routed to a bus, you can just lift or reduce "drums" instead of individually making changes. And yes, a bus is a great way to get around when car breaks down or don't fee llike finding parking ;)

I'll certainly look into it Dub.
Just want to say thanks to y'all for all the above tips.  I've been messin around with SD2 this evening and have the drums on seperate tracks and havin all sorts of fun pannin' left right n center.  gettin some ol reverb goin on the snare n all. This is already makin a great difference to the song im workin on and is definatly openin up a whole new world for me.  I'll look into this bus critter Dub and see how it goes.  
So thanks again guys.  It never ceases to amaze me the great help a feller gets on this forum.  Real glad i bought sonar and didnt go for one of those free download or cheaper DAW. 

This is one of the more helpful forums.  Before you know it, you will be the one helping others

Hi folks, I am stumped by something on SD3.  How do I add a second crash cymbal?  Any help would be most appreciated.

Hi Paul 
I'm just looking at SD3 here. So when you open SD3, on the top right you see two options.
Drums and Mixer.
Drums is the one that shows you the picture of the drum kit.
So you want to click on Mixer.
You'll see drum items 1 to 8 are the normal snare, kick, toms etc.
And then 9, 10, 11 and 12 are those "pad" items.  You can assign any extra drum or cymbal to those pads.  If you right click on any of the pads icons you'll see an option called "Load Instrument"     From here you can select and standard drum item or cymbal, tambourine.  I just tried it here and added in a crash so it works  :) 
Hope this helps. 
 

Every instrument exposed in the mixer view is exposed in the Drumit view. In the image below, the red arrow points to Pads 9 through 12. The red box contains the pad with notes 52 - China, 54 - Tambourine , 55 - Splash. FWIW, the only thing hard coded in SD are the notes the kit pieces play. There is nothing preventing one from creating an all cymbal kit, a barnyard sounds kit or a kit of complete  audio tracks. The sounds a note plays is determined by the sfz file loaded.