Hey everyone,

I clone tracks all the time but almost always they're simple audio tracks. Yesterday I had a softsynth part that I wanted to double up on and maybe tweak the sound a little from the original part. Without thinking about it much I cloned the track. Somehow I assumed Sonar would create a new softsynth for that track with identical settings, the same as what happens with all your fx plugins if you clone an audio track.

What happened instead, of course, was that Sonar created another simple instrument track that pointed to the same softsynth.

It occurred to me that this is not necessarily the most logical behavior (especially not with simple instrument tracks). I also couldn't find a quick way to duplicate the synth sound, other than saving it as a new preset, inserting a new synth and loading the preset. All in all it seemed to me a workflow enhancement would be welcome.

How do you guys usually deal with this?

Bump!

Did I phrase this unclearly or am I really the only one who runs into this as an issue?

No, your question is clear.
 
I don't think there's a simple way to do what you want.
You will have to launch another instance of the same synth, load the relevant patch,  then Ctrl + Shift + Drag your existing Midi track to the new one.
You can then easily group the 2 Midi tracks so that any note adjustments you make in 1 will be reflected in them both.

I guess the best thing to do is a feature request for a check box in the clone dialog, whether soft synths should be reused or duplicated. Definitely better than starting discussions whether the actual or your suggested behavior would be more reasonable.

I doubt many people want two synths with the same setting playing the same thing.
What you could do is save the synth settings to a preset, open a 2nd instance of the synth, and set it to that preset.
Then cloning the MIDI track, and pointing it to the new synth, should do what you need.

Hey all, thanks for your comments, that's kind of what I suspected then. FWIW I don't usually want two synths playing the same thing with the same sound, but often there are a few similar sounds I need playing different parts. E.g. I was creating a backing track for 24K Magic by Bruno Mars and there are a bunch of similar saw based synths in there. Especially the bridge arpeggio and the main arpeggio sound close, but not the same.

Whenever I need to do this with vocals or guitar I clone the track and leave out the events. In this case I figured I'd do this with the synths but there is no quick option like that I guess. I'll put in a feature request!

I think i didn't finish my post.   After loading the preset synth and cloned MIDI, you could then fine-tune the settings or MIDI programming to suit what you wanted.
Honestly, i don't know how much the bakers would invest in this - i think yours is the first request i've seen for an Synth-clone feature.

Well, I'm tired of getting dissed for trying to help people by devising workarounds, but because I don't think Sanderxpander has a "screw you for trying to help" mindset, here you go.
 
The problem you have with cloning is due to the instrument and its settings being considered as part of the track. However there is an "old school" way to solve your problem. 
 
1. Insert an audio track.
2. Drag your synth into the FX Rack.
3. Clone the audio track.
 
You now have synths with the same settings, but they are completely independent. Of course you still need a separate MIDI track for each synth because you can't "Y connect" one MIDI track output to two synths, but you can clone the synths all day long and they'll remain independent.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Did you even bother to read my post Craig?! I get so tired of these workarounds for real issues...
Actually I'm just messing with you, that sounds like a really nice solution. By FX rack do you mean that track's FX bin or some other new feature that I've missed?
Having separate midi for each synth is actually preferable to me so that's not a problem.

I've never run an actual synth from an audio track fx bin (if that's what this is) unless it was a synth that had a function for that specifically (like Z3TA+ FX or Reaktor). Is there any reason why this might be a problem? Will it still show up in the synth rack (which I never use btw) or is it now completely tied to the fx bin? And can I simply select it as a target for my midi tracks or do I need to tick some boxes?

In any case, thanks! I still feel it would be more "elegant" if this worked directly on simple instrument tracks (because the assumption is that you clone the instrument track, not a bunch of references to an external synth) but from Sonar's logic I understand why it's not the case and this sounds like a really good solution!

Now be honest, did you think for about five seconds that you got shot down again? ;)

Save the existing Synth with it's settings as a Track Template, then bring that template into the project?
 
I guess it's not the solution you want, but it is a solution none the less.
I'd have to agree though, it would be much easier if it were possible to simply clone the synth.