Absolutely 100% love this cakewalk platinum.
After getting over whatever mess my laptop was in, it is a beautiful system.
I'm 64. Disabled. Bad back, failing ticker. I have audio going back nearly 45 years, recorded on nearly every media you can think of...except cassette. Tons of open reel stuff. It's time to gather all my music in one place, so I have something cohesive to leave to the family. Plus I want to record new stuff as well, and re-record what I can.
I've watched you tube videos til mine eyes were burning. I've posted sorted questions here.
All help is always appreciated.
But I am still missing much in the way of figuring this thing out...
From the use of buses to aux, send, pre/post-everything.
What can I do to efficiently and effectively learn what I need to learn.

In the past, I would just hit record on my Tascam/Teac reel to reels and away I'd go.
I never did any processing.
Fast forward to 1 year ago when I posted a question on another website...why have my songs always sounded so mushy, muddy.
Imagine my surprise to learn that, at 63 years old was the first I'd ever heard the term 'frequency masking'. I had spent thousands on better mics/headphones thinking it must be 'that', but resigning to the idea it must be me.
Now that the show is almost over, I've learned that I've done it all wrong the whole time. (At least I kinda know how to make those old recordings sound better now). In a way, they're all just sitting there waiting to be properly mixed.
But with time ticking away every day, I need to make every moment count. I need to learn this, and quickly.
I took advantage of platinum's Christmas sale...free lifetime updates.
At the same time over at Waves, they were having similar killer sales on their plugins.
Horizon bundle regular $4,000 on sale Dec 31...$801.
The Abbey Road collection regular $1,199 on sale Dec 31...$450.
There's good reason I bought this.
I know I can learn it, but everything is time sensitive, literally.

I think i have a decent setup. I'm almost certain there are many here who would enjoy taking the helm with these plugins.

But if I can't use them to their potential then...

Eventually, they will be passed on to my son and grandson, so it will still have its benefits. My son is familiar with sonar Producer...or is it X1...not sure...but he's not close enough to help right now.

I'm just hoping someone can steer me in a direction that may help me...rather than me posting every day.
I know trial and error does a lot, but when I don't know what or sequence to line certain things, or how...then 'trial and error' don't even get off the ground.
For instance, back in the day, if you added reverb or some other effect, you'd re-record the original take onto another track.
With a computer daw (and I'm sure to be wrong) it seems like your original stays in place while you 'pipe' the music to another track and have the reverb 'heard' there. So what happens to the original track? If the piped reverb has a wet/dry setting, does the original track do nothing? And if you have a dozen original tracks but they're all being fed to somewhere else...where does the end result come from?
Back in the day, it was simply re-recorded until you had something you liked.
In the daw, you can quickly add dozens of tracks that to me...some...have no use in the final tally(?)

I will learn what's put in front of me. But there's more 'this is how you do it' than 'why you do it this way'...which is easier (for me) to understand.

Just point me and I'll shut up

Thanks for your time, seriously.

In Sonar the original track is the source and streams to a buss either via a send or as an output or both.Sonar is nondestructive, thus nothing happens to the original track. However, you can process a track then bounce it. You're right there is a learning curve in Sonar. But that is also true of any advanced DAW. I think that taking it one step at a time learning the most pertinent parts to what you want to do will offer the best way to start on the road of becoming proficient with Sonar.
 
Also welcome to the forum. Most if not all of your questions can be answered here.  

HardDriver - for specific questions members here on the forum are very helpful and will most often help find the answer.

Your main question is "where do I find a lot of help to get going" in so many words. A really good place to go is groove3.com. There are multiple several hour tutorials on video that carefully introduce how to use Sonar, step by step. They are not expensive. It's possible there might even be a sale going on right now.

For ad hoc advice and tips the forum is great. For in-depth demonstrations and insight, try visiting groove3.com.

If you prefer reading books or manuals to seeing video tutorials, Scott Garrigus has a detailed book on using Sonar.

I agree, Groove 3 is a great start. I struggled with compression, sidechaining and ducking. They put it in terms I could understand and now use it on all my tracks. I'm in a sorta similar situation where I recently had my Tascam studio sessions converted to digital. I've discovered every session has special needs so once I have figured out the combination of each session I save my presets. These presets are a great starting point for other songs within the same session. I'm still ironing out vocal treatments but making progress. Good luck and I wish you the best on your quest.

Its a fun ride. Im very happy for you and this change you are entering.
I was a little reluctant at first (sometimes I still am). Many days I want to just pull out the old Tascam, thread up a reel and just go. but times have changed, some for the better, some not. but for the most part.. much better, much easier. editing is a breeze. You remember those razor blades and cutting boards ? I don't miss those.
I also don't miss patching a million things (though I still have a patch bay). ive worked in some of my analog hardware in to my digital system, you might find doing the same is helpful.
 
The one thing that really helped me the most was my Control surface.
I was so used to clicking buttons and turning faders that this mouse thing just really turned me off.
But I picked up a cheap control surface about 10 years ago, then another one, then a Mackie MCU about a year ago. They will run you under 300 usa bucks used but they have motorized faders, knobs, buttons, exc that give you the same feel of that "Hands on" thing we had with analog gear.
 
I look back almost 20 years now when the manager at a studio I worked in handed me a manual to learn this product (Cakewalk pro audio) and under my breath I mumbled something like "Pfff this wont last. Tape is where its at and always will be". Now its hard even finding good tape at a reasonable price. and here I am still using Cakewalk and loving it.
 
Cakewalk has made things very similar to the old analog days. So for example your question about reverb..
You have a track that runs to a reverb bus. you have a send level on that track that feeds that reverb bus.
Same as the old days .
 
The thing I enjoy the most though, is not having to treat tracks destructively.
Years ago we printed many thing including EQ, sometimes compression, even dangerously adding FX to guitar solos.
Well now everything can be done in the later stage during mixing. So you will always have those original un altered DRY tracks.

HARDDRlVER
...back in the day, if you added reverb or some other effect, you'd re-record the original take onto another track.
With a computer daw (and I'm sure to be wrong) it seems like your original stays in place while you 'pipe' the music to another track and have the reverb 'heard' there. So what happens to the original track? If the piped reverb has a wet/dry setting, does the original track do nothing?

I assume you already have at least one track in Sonar.
 
Look on the left side and you should see a grey box labelled "FX".
Click your right mouse button in there and a popup menu will appear with all effects you have.
Choose one, say, a reverb. The control panel for that effect should now appear.
Close that panel for now and look in the "FX" box (we call it FX Bin) and there will be a bar in there.
Click on the middle of it and your control panel will open again.
 
Now you can set up a reverb to your taste.
The signal is coming from your track, into the top of the FX Bin, out the bottom and on through the rest of the channel controls to, probably, your Master bus (or directly to the interface output).
 
Your track is NOT affected. It is like a tape output was sent directly to a desk and a hardware reverb was connected to the Insert plug at the back of the desk.
 
But this costs CPU power, so click on the button with the snowflake symbol and it will bounce track and reverb, overaying the track.
Should you want to change the reverb (or add a second effect), click the snowflake again.
The overlaying bounced track is removed and you are back to your original track with the effect running live, ready for you to modify.
 
Back in the day we would bounce the track with its reverb to a new track.
Or we would connect a reverb to the desk's effects send/return loop.
 
All this is still possible but not strictly necessary.

Thank you, all of you for your insight and considerate opinions. How many times have I been 'talked down to' as if those speaking had always known everything and I'm nothing more than a bother, a hindrance to them.
It's like I can breathe and not be so stressed by simply asking the same questions mostly everyone has surely asked before.

Thank you for this.

Jon

On a side note:.. (don't laugh)...
Two important things I learned today...
Take lanes (?). Very convenient way of listening to various 'like' takes.
My most recent recording system was the Roland VS recorders, the 2480 and 1880. I enjoyed them but their learning curve..
I never accomplished much on them because of it. I've already achieved more with cakewalk than I ever did with the standalone daws. Their 'take lane' (if that's what it's called) were referred to as virtual tracks. The difference was, they're hidden beneath each other. Cakewalk take lanes are pretty much the same thing but side by side, where you can audition edit and compose a track from the various takes.
That's wonderful.

The other thing I learned today;
I had left the daw doing something for quite awhile and didn't get back to it for about a half hour. I had no idea what caused it, but the screen had frozen to the point I had to do a power button shut-down. When I booted up, things seemed OK until I hit play on what I had been working on. The time line and meter were lagging, like skipping. I thought something crazy had happened. A fresh reboot didn't change anything. I then though I'd be reinstalling sonar. It's the only thing on the i7 4 core laptop. I've done the whole latency fix that Sweetwater put out. I thought I was in trouble.
I searched the forum..
In a small post back in 2012 concerning x1 (I believe) I found mention of...tapping the pause key will render this behavior as an effort to alleviate resources. The post mentioned that the pause key may have been accidently been hit.
When my screen had frozen just earlier, I may have indeed hit the pause key by mistake. I know I tried ctrl/alt/del to try to remedy the frozen issue...perhaps that's when it happened.
So I tapped the pause key as the post suggested and eureka! Everything back to normal. Time line running smooth as silk.
If I hadn't found that one little post from 5 years ago...

I can't wait to get to know this system. Who knows, perhaps one day I might be able to help someone else.

So thank you again for your suggestions, your knowledge, your kindness most of all.

Jon

The reference guide is a beast but it's worthwhile taming it.

With 2500 pages there surely has to be some information in it.

Trust me it really is worth it.

Harddriver, first of all there's nothing wrong with posting questions every day.
 
For best results, try to limit each post to one question and make each question as specific as possible. I know, that's easier said than done when you're starting out and don't yet know what questions to ask. Or to even be sure you'll understand the answers you get!
 
Just know that answers come in little discrete chunks, not sweeping revelations. Once in a while, one of those chunks will trigger an epiphany and the clouds will part. Most of the time, they do not. Most of the time, you have to be content with stashing each nugget away in your head until they eventually reach critical mass. Which they always do. Eventually.
 
One piece of advice: don't buy any plugins yet. Yes, that's quite the opposite of the general message you'll get here. But Platinum comes with everything you need at this stage, and throwing more third-party products into the stew will not make it more palatable, just more confusing.
 
If you're comfortable with the analog multitrack paradigm, you can start by using SONAR exactly the same way, as a tape substitute. Think of each audio track in SONAR as a track on your old reel-to-reel. Like your R-R, you enable recording on a track and then push Record. Like your R-R, those tracks get combined in a mixer. The difference is that in SONAR you can have as many tracks as you like, and the mixer is built in to the software.
 

*Bitflipper*
Understood. Except...for the plugins...waves had a killer sale on the horizon bundle and abbey road bundle at Christmas. Couldn't help myself. But, to agree with you, platinum is daunting enough in itself that I've yet to use one. The time will come. Thank you.
Now, lemme see if I can locate this 'reference guide'. At 1,200 pages you'd think I'd have tripped over it by now.