Using Sonar For Electro House Production
As an exercise, I used X3 to duplicate a workflow that's relatively easy in Live:
http://youtu.be/ku9SEgzKmZAThe video is definitely worth watching for production techniques if you have a 1/2 hour to spare.
I was able, with the help of external plugins, to get close. To start with, I have all of the VSTi's the guy used: Massive, Sylenth, Battery as well as the external audio plugins.
For most of the EQ's you can get by with the Pro-Channel EQ. For compressors, you're stuck with Sonitus if you want to do side chaining (an absolute necessity for EDM). There is no equivalent in X3 to Lives Auto Filter so you'll probably need to get the Waves MetaFilter if you want to use a VCF on your tracks. I couldn't really find a good sounding distortion plugin in X3 so I ended up using a Voxengo Tube Amp (TH2 was much too shrill and broken up to get a good sound without spending way too much time tweaking it, maybe the Z3TA+ effects would work). Unfortunately, it's not possible to have more than one Pro-Channel EQ on a track, so you'll have to use a different EQ for post FX processing.
Without Ctrl-D (duplicate clip), creating the MIDI tracks involved a lot of Ctrl-C/Crtl-V followed by Bounce To Clips, then more Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V. If you can't do boilerplate in less than an hour, your workflow is hobbled.
One thing I noticed when I got to the last part (Ozone 5 on the master) was that with everything live, there was a considerable amount of visible background noise even with the transport stopped (definitely audible when you turn the monitors up), it was easily dealt with by fiddling with the gates, probably an artifact of having a lot of processing on the instrument tracks. It was like having a bunch of stomp boxes and amp hiss at live shows (fortunately no 60Hz).
I think you could probably pull it off with the plugins (Z3TA+, DimPro, effects, etc) provided with X3 with the addition of a VCF (MetaFilter), but it will probably take a bit longer to get similar results. I thought it was interesting that he always placed the glue compressor after the EQ, conventional wisdom would have that ordering reversed.
I'm going to work on figuring out best practices in Sonar to do this stuff, I suspect that it will involve more processing of bounced tracks than real time processing of soft synths. It is encouraging however, that it's possible at all. :)