My Sonar Coda

At a certain point, programming begins to feel like an art--so many moments of discovery and invention, the act of flowing pieces together into an orchestrated whole. I'm not a good programmer and I haven't written that much code but I have programmed enough to know that feeling.
 
I've been thinking about the countless hours of programming that have been poured into Sonar, all of the people building on discoveries that came before them, all the late nights, all the little victories that only they know about. And I sometimes wonder if just a few lines of the code that Greg Hendershott originally wrote are still buried somewhere in the sophisticated DAW that Sonar became.
 
This software has been with me most of my adult life, developing just as I have. I studied composition and arrangement at Berklee, when Berklee was two buildings and the acronym MIDI hadn't been coined yet. If you wanted to hear your arrangement, your only hope was to find people to play it.
 
I wish composers today had the experience of living in a world without MIDI and then watch it come alive. It was just a few years after Berklee that I bought my first MIDI synth--a Casio CZ-101--and a copy of Cakewalk. The CZ-101 was multitimbral (if you were willing to accept four monophonic parts!) But that first experience--using Cakewalk to compose and play back a four-part piece without needing any other musicians--that was magic. When I saved that sequence, I named it "First," of course.
 
I still have it.
 
Back then, the "Cakewalk forum" lived on something called an Internet Mail List. You sent an email to the list address and it automatically fired your message back out to all subscribers. Clunky, but that's how we talked back and forth. Hendershott was an active member. He set a standard for customer focus that I've never forgotten. Through the years with the mail list, then the USENET forum, and then finally the company forum on the Web, I've spent many hours learning from other users.
 
I created my very first commercial audio bed on Cakewalk. It was pretty primitive. I had a Kurzweil K2000 that had four outs, so--once again--I created a little four-part piece featuring a primitive sampled violin that I thought sounded great. (My opinion changed, over the years...)
 
I transferred the sequence to the K2K and dragged it into the studio, where the engineer dumped the four audio outs into something called Pro Tools. I had never seen non-destructive audio editing before. I think I heard angels singing.
 
The commercial turned out great, in my opinion, because it was more music than V/O. (Well, I wrote the V/O so I may have had a hand in that!)
 
And Cakewalk just kept on getting better. I have been able to do many commercial projects since then (with much better samples). And I no longer envy Pro Tools.
 
Looking back, it seems like it happened so fast, from the time it seemed preposterous that we could have hard drives big enough and fast enough to hold more than a few audio tracks. From the time when it seemed like a dream that a powerful synthesizer could actually be created in software and live in your computer.
 
As a company, Cakewalk did a pretty good job not only keeping up but also pushing forward. I remember them changing so fast that one day someone inside decided it was silly to keep the company name "Twelve Tone," a name that had nothing to do with its flagship product. So they changed the company name to "Cakewalk" to match.
 
Then they promply renamed their flagship product "Sonar"! I still chuckle about that.
 
I often wondered if Sonar was the best DAW for me. I bought Reaper once and got very good deals on Studio One and Bitwig in the past year or so. They didn't quite do it for me so I never saw the need to switch. I used Studio One a bit more than those other two but Sonar was still my main DAW. I think part of the reason is that I still have a lot of hardware synths hanging off my DAW and Sonar handles that setup pretty well. And you can do some pretty sophisticated stuff with MIDI in Sonar that those other guys can't do.
 
But I've learned to recognize when an era has gone. So, the day Cubase made its crossgrade offer, I got a USB elicenser (ugh), a copy of Cubase, and a Groove3 tutorial, hoping this would be the solution. It was. It took me a week to fall in love with Cubase, so I'm good. I use Sonar now only to transfer old projects out. Can't look back. Gotta move forward.
 
Still, I have such happy memories of Cakewalk/Sonar, such respect for the work that has gone into it, that I didn't feel right about having this whole thing end without thanking all of the Cakewalk employees past and present for the work they have done. I know you weren't there just for the paycheck--I could tell that every time I used the software. I wish all of you the very best in your future paths, wherever they may lead.
 
Best,
Keith

A very enjoyable read there Keith.
I started out on an Atari ST and followed the Cakewalk path until recently too.
I bought Cubase 9 Pro at the beginning of this year just because I had some spare money. I'm glad I did now. I finally got it set up after the 'announcement'. I'll be upgrading it to 9.5 after Christmas.

I have over 10 years of professional work still in Sonar format so I'll have to use that for as long as I can in tandem with me work in Cubase.

Thanks for your post. It was a pleasure to read. I second your sentiments.

I made 24 years with Cakewalk. The death throws of the Amiga forced me to the PC in 1993 and my first copy of Cakewalk something or other was bundled with some hardware I got. I remember those days and by the time Win 95 came out a couple of years later with all its hype I was firmly entrenched in the PC and Cakewalk.

For 24 years nothing changed except for the ever gradual evolution of hardware and software. Now though it has changed and with Cakewalk gone, there’ll be an important part of the future missing; well at least for me. But I’m excited despite the horror of the last months events. I’m building a new PC which I haven’t done in about 7 years and I’ll be moving on with a new appreciation for what I have now, realising that suddenly things can just be taken away because of someone else’s greed or ineptitude. Yep I’ll appreciate what I have all the more and the good fortune I’ve had in the past to have what I have now. Many folks aren’t blessed with a creative outlet that can bring them so much joy. I’ll always be grateful or that and the opportunity to share others creativity with them.