When I play a VST instrument on my keyboard and want to record it, there's always something going wrong.
 
I think I understood the "concept" behind most controls I came across in Sonar, except for the recording.

Example: I want to record "Hybrid 1" so I mark the red circle on it's track. When I play on my keyboard I can hear "Hybrid 1" is playing correctly. Recording is set to comping, save all takes in same track, create new lane.
Then I press record but when I'm done, I don't see new lanes. Searching around I find "Vacuum 1" magically got the red circle activated, too, and my MIDI (which never played trough "Vacuum 1") has been placed on top of "Vacuum 1"s original MIDI. And it's not in a new lane.
 
The first couple of weeks I thought this was my mistake, but I must say now I find the recording pretty counter-intuitive. I always have to make sure

• I have the correct track marked
• I have no other tracks marked
• I have the correct track selected

but even though I'm doing this, it still fails in 50% of all recordings. Isn't there some "What you hear is what you get" recording? I'm really struggling at this point.
 
All hints welcome!

Never mind, I found it in a tutorial on Groove3. In
Settings -> MIDI -> Playback and Recording -> Allow recording without armed track. That means I can basically have all red circles off and just select the track I want to record. Can be closed.

One warning.

With "allow recording without armed track" enabled be very careful to make sure you only have the track you wish to record selected. Otherwise MIDI can end up being recorded in the wrong tracks by accident.

Disabling the "allow recording without armed track" function and using the MIDI track record arming buttons prevents that happening.

It can be very annoying to find you have recorded lots of MIDI over existing MIDI data you did not want to change. I learned that lesson the hard way years ago.

Well I had that problem other way round. Somehow very often tracks where armed that I didn't want to have armed and Sonar recorded to those tracks instead of the one I was playing. Now I record what I hear, that's more convenient for me personally. But thanks for the warning anyway.

i'm with tlw on this - so be careful. chances are pretty high that you will create a mess using this option.
 
if you stick to it, you need a very well cleaned up MIDI routing i.e. which channel from which controller goes in which MIDI track, using omni in that case can do a lot of harm quickly