Helpful ReplyWhat's Your Favorite Underrated Sonar Feature or Technique?

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Anderton
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Re: What's Your Favorite Underrated Sonar Feature or Technique? 2014/06/29 12:06:47 (permalink)
Hey everybody - as mentioned I'm seriously thinking of excerpting the best bits from this for my next Sound on Sound column, and am considering how to "give credit where credit is due."
 
Much of this will need to be edited, supplemented, posts combined, etc. to make for a smooth reading experience. So it will be hard to always attribute tips directly. I was thinking the best way to handle this is an acknowledgement at the end listing everyone who contributed something that was used, and using their forum handles instead of their real names. This is so newcomers who come to the forum because of the article can see the names of some of the members who tend to do helpful posts.
 
Does that work for everyone?

The first 3 books in "The Musician's Guide to Home Recording" series are available from Hal Leonard and http://www.reverb.com. Listen to my music on http://www.YouTube.com/thecraiganderton, and visit http://www.craiganderton.com. Thanks!
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Beepster
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Re: What's Your Favorite Underrated Sonar Feature or Technique? 2014/06/29 12:23:56 (permalink)
Well personally I think maybe just a blanket statement of "Compiled from the Cakewalk Forum Community" with a link to the thread would suffice and probably be the best route then add a link to the thread if you wanted. Not that I really participated but if something I suggested got used and attributed to this handle I'd hate to see people end up searching my user name for tips and end up with a bunch of my earlier "contributions" here (or even more recent ones). Every so often an old thread pops up that I posted in and I nearly facepalm my brain out the back of my head. lulz
 
JMO
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shawnbulen
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Re: What's Your Favorite Underrated Sonar Feature or Technique? 2014/06/29 13:43:17 (permalink)
Dream Logic Audio
An oldie but a goodie - The CAL script language is as powerful as it is underappreciated - at least for the functions that still work.  Over the years I've collected, created, and modified hundreds of CAL scripts that do all kinds of specialized functions.  

 
The reason I initially purchased Cakewalk years ago was CAL!  (note my avatar...)
 
I have scripts to convert controllers to notes & vice versa.   If you implement a deliberately poorly written random number generator, complex repetitive sequences result.  I have scripts to generate "random" controllers within a range in tempo, random notes within a range in tempo, etc.  These "random" notes are fun for background percussion, CCs for treatments.  
 
I have a script to add a sequence of CCs (a waveform) after every MIDI note detected, etc.   CAL is very handy, I would think it would be an electronica/dubstep user's dream.  
 
Shawn
 
(One more note: If programming CAL feels daunting, then do your programming in Excel!  It's pretty easy to generate sequences of notes/controllers in Excel & convert to CAL syntax.)
 
post edited by shawnbulen - 2014/06/29 14:31:16

Dogmatic attachment to the supposed merits of a particular structure hinders the search for an appropriate structure.
 - Fripp
#153
jsg
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Re: What's Your Favorite Underrated Sonar Feature or Technique? 2014/06/29 14:33:46 (permalink)
Anderton
Despite logging untold hours with Sonar, every now and then I come into the forum and someone has come up with some cool trick, shortcut, or feature that makes me go "Wow, that's really cool...I didn't know that!"
 
So I thought a cool thread would be shortcuts you love, usual applications for ordinary devices, or cool techniques that you hardly ever see mentioned. I'll kick off with one of my favorites: Using the Sonitus Delay to create stereo imaging from a mono source. I just insert it, set one channel for 0.1 ms delay and the other for 20-30 ms or so, turn down the feedback and crossfeed, and use the mix control to determine the width. I don't know why, but of all the delays I've tried for this application, the Sonitus seems to work the best.
 
Next...




Two favorites:
 
1. The ability to have multiple staff views open at the same time.  I usually have 5 open, 1 each for winds, brass, percussion and strings, and then one with up to 23 instruments (the max Sonar can handle).  No other DAW, including DP8 and Cubase allows multiple staff views that can be locked so that you don't have to keep adding or removing instruments.
 
2.  Color-coded event list.  The event list is crammed with a lot of numbers, you can get dizzy looking at it for long periods of time.  No other DAW that I know of allows color-coding so that controllers, notes, patch-changes, etc.can be in different colors.  This is amazingly helpful.  
 
My long-standing criticism of the staff view still stands:  its inability to correctly display tied and dotted triplets and its inability to properly display 64th notes is still an issue.  I live with these problems because they have no effect on playback, only notation.   Since I export my Sonar files to Sibelius to create the score, it's not that big of a deal.  Plus I am nearly 100% sure that Cakewalk will never invest the time and money to fix it.  Still, I wish they would.  Sonar X3e, all in all, is a fantastic DAW in terms of MIDI recording and editing, audio recording and editing and its ability to handle VST instrument and signal processing plugins.
 
JG
http://www.jerrygerber.com/symphony8.htm
#154
scook
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Re: What's Your Favorite Underrated Sonar Feature or Technique? 2014/06/30 13:34:08 (permalink)
mklink - the DOS command. I use it to create directory junctions, relocating parts of SONAR and other apps from their default location on C: to other hard drives. I also use junctions to integrate a centralized collection folders containing customized files into the SONAR folder structure.
 
AutoHotkey - a background hotkey program with scripting. One script that gets a workout toggles the transport regards of current focus, the script is bound to the Windows-S combination:
#s::
SetTitleMatchMode RegEx
ifWinExist, SONAR.*
{
    WinActivate
    send {Space}
}
return
 
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