Sonar vs. Pro Tools: And the winner is...
Okay okay - maybe a little dramatic.
Actually we recorded an EP recently in a semi-pro studio with ProTools. When it came to recording and comp'ing the vocals, I decided to do it at home in Sonar. I just felt that the tools to do that specific task
RULED in good old Cakewalk.
They were heavily comp'd - I mean each line loop recorded about 15-20 times, then chopped up and cross-faded.
When it came to compression/FX I went a little old fashioned and used volume envelopes rather than compression. I then used a heavily compressed track and a cloned dry track, which I routed to a vocal bus which was gently compressed again - added some eq/delay to make it 'sit', and then the usual verb etc via a separate bus.
Of all these tasks, just chpping/comp'ing seemed really cumbersome in PT - Sonar was
so much cleaner and logical to use, IMHO.
It was a very collaberative project vocal-wise, there were certain phrases that didn't sit quite right in the PT session, so in the studio I fired up my MacBook (yep) and quickly mixed down an alternative take to a USB drive which I then handed to the engineer - 1 minute later it's in PT sounding correct.
I don't actually know the point of this post - other than the fact I've always considered Sonar to be the best tool for comp'ing - and if you consider that most people agree that the vocals in a 'commercial' recording are the most important element (
i.e. a 'bad' vocal will wreck the sweetest mix) then I think it's pretty cool that my trusty old copy of 8.5PE stood up to a ProTools rig. I used all the bundled plugs in 8.5PE -
no 3rd party stuff at all. I think that's pretty cool, huh? Sonar was rock solid throughout and didn't let me down once when operating and collaborating within a pro studio using much more expensive products.
It can, CAN be done. The EP is on iTunes, and whilst we haven't promoted it much yet - you can listen to it here:
www.moderndaychicane.com I guess I'm just saying:
go Sonar! Peace.