Andrew Rossa [Cakewalk]

Woodyoflop
 
I understand what your saying, i am one of the few young ones iv seen on here. Im 24 and i have used Sonar since i was roughly 16. my FATHER had introduced me haha. Proving your point. However i see it as somewhat of an advantage in a way. Sonar doesn't seem to cater much to hip-hop/edm as much as it does other genres as you described. This also gives young engineers such as myself an opportunity. I enjoy making hip-hop instrumentals with Rock style sounds and especially the drums. People actually really love it and it kind of gives me my own unique "sound". Also the artist i deal with love it. Im by no means saying im the first to do this. Im infact rather late to it, but i dont hear it as much.

We are actually actively engaging in the EDM community. We have one artist, Ilan Bluestone, who has done pretty well for himself and uses SONAR. And we've gotten a bunch of leads on new artists with the same profile. Here's the video we put out on Ilan:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaS5dyo60KI

It is interesting to see an EDM producer rave about Sonar, but I think this guy is the exception - the vast majority of dance music producers I hear talk about DAW's are talking about things like Abelton, FL, Logic and Reason. I guess there's a reason these DAW's have become so popular in the EDM world. You'd be hard pressed to find a single EDM producing video tutorial that uses Sonar. I'm not knocking it too much here, obviously I use Sonar for a reason - in many ways, the workflow and interface are second to none. I dabble mainly in electronic based music (not what you'd call "EDM" today but certainly beat and synth driven) but I also like to mess around with guitars, and Sonar seems to provide the best of both worlds....up to a point. There are still some areas in which I feel like my creativity is stifled when using Sonar for these styles, the main area being in controller/automation performance of effects. I find it horribly frustrating and convoluted and there are times when all I want to do is for instance, record a performance of the biFilter2 cutoff knob using a rotary on my MIDI controller....how in the hell do I do that? ACT is a thoroughly horrible, unusable, buggy mess, I can't just right click on the knob and select "MIDI learn," the "learn" feature on the FX Chain controls is just for assigning the knob to a plugin parameter, not assigning it to a hardware controller.....and so I just give up. This is the kind of thing that a user should be able to do intuitively with a couple of clicks and yet with Sonar it's frequently either incredibly convoluted, problematic or plain impossible. It's the kind of thing that an EDM producer is going to want to do on the fly without having to think about it, but Sonar fails miserably in this respect. I can just about get it done with synth parameters by using synth rack controls, but when the parameter is part of a VST effect, forget about it. Sure, you can draw an automation envelope, but drawing envelopes is not very musical. 
 
And of course Sonar would need some kind of baked-in LFO's and envelopes, assignable to anything, to make it stand out as an EDM-friendly DAW. 
 
I'm not knocking the new features that we've been given over the last couple of years - ARA/Melodyne integration, the new Drum Replacer are fantastic, but again this kind of thing is aimed primarily at the "real instrument" side of things, not electro styles. 
 
On the other hand, if you look through the free content that comes with Sonar, an incredible amount of it is EDM based. So there's that. But I don't think any budding young bedroom producers are going to choose Sonar on the basis of the included loops and one-shots. And as for drum VST's which come with or have come with Sonar in the past, well again very much geared toward a "traditional" drum sound. Session Drummer/Addictive Drums - both excellent, but not likely to appeal to the young beat-chopping sample-mangling electro producer looking for something more along the lines of Battery or Geist.
 
Sonar is great. And it's more than possible to make great EDM with it. I just really don't see it taking a serious share of the young synth based bedroom producer market....yet. Who knows what the future will bring  

One guy went from FL to Live and then to Cubase.  The reason why he switched to Cubase is he started using orchestra sounds with the Play engine and found Play more friendly with Cubase.

dubdisciple
I agree with sharke. EDM can be made on Sonar, but I find whenever EDM or hip-hop makers sit down at my computer they get frustrated at Sonar workflow for such things. I find it funny when the staff guys complain that Sonar is catering to that crowd when nothing could be farther from the truth. As sharke stated, real-time features are one of the reasons. ACT being unintuitive for man doesn't help. With that being said, Sonar does offer powerful features that work well for EDM and hip-hop for those willing to dig in.

 That's because they are not use to it.  For years when I got those free versions of Live I could never understand the session view. Studio One is probably the easiest transition from Sonar.  Live, FL, Reason, and Tracktion will seem foreign when you used a certain DAW for a long time.
 Tapping into a market that is clearly dominated by a DAW or two could be a waste of time. Remember Project 5?
 
 I think it's really hard to get a person who is experienced on a certain DAW to switch. Familiarity over rides new feature X.  You even find those who use a preferred DAW are even reluctant to upgrade to the newest version.
 

kitekrazy1

dubdisciple
I agree with sharke. EDM can be made on Sonar, but I find whenever EDM or hip-hop makers sit down at my computer they get frustrated at Sonar workflow for such things. I find it funny when the staff guys complain that Sonar is catering to that crowd when nothing could be farther from the truth. As sharke stated, real-time features are one of the reasons. ACT being unintuitive for man doesn't help. With that being said, Sonar does offer powerful features that work well for EDM and hip-hop for those willing to dig in.

 That's because they are not use to it.  For years when I got those free versions of Live I could never understand the session view. Studio One is probably the easiest transition from Sonar.  Live, FL, Reason, and Tracktion will seem foreign when you used a certain DAW for a long time.
 Tapping into a market that is clearly dominated by a DAW or two could be a waste of time. Remember Project 5?
 
 I think it's really hard to get a person who is experienced on a certain DAW to switch. Familiarity over rides new feature X.  You even find those who use a preferred DAW are even reluctant to upgrade to the newest version.
 

While i agree to an extant, i find even people who like Sonar find EDM and Hip-Hop much easier to make in other applications. If I sat three complete novices down with Sonar, Ablteton and FL Studio and told them to recreate a modern hip-hop.EDM/Pop song like , I strongly suspect the one on the latter two options would finish first.  i base this on watching this type of scenario play out again and again. Getting Geist levels the playing field for me, but otherwise, the lack of the integrated sampler solution makes a huge difference.  I'm not trying to slam Sonar because  i think it is superior in many other areas. 

Doktor Avalanche

dubdisciple
[If I sat three complete novices down with Sonar, Ablteton and FL Studio and told them to recreate a modern hip-hop.EDM/Pop song like , I strongly suspect the one on the latter two options would finish first.

Yup but the Sonar one would be the hit record...
Of course..

Unfortunately, that doesn't ring true either.  Not that one should measure DAW's by hit records, but in the hip-hop/EDM/pop world it's not even close.  To me that is actually not a bad thing.

kitekrazy1
FL is more involved with midi. It's piano roll is superior to most DAWs.
Sonar is quite easy working with loops. You can slice them. combine them, all sorts of things. If someone made a video on Sonar working with loops you would get that noise from the anti loop snob and also the Sonar is more concerned with EDM.
 
 What you miss with programs like Live and sometimes Reason is the small real estate for editing.  This is where Sonar is better with less zooming. 

i agree that the real estate is better.  it's more of the "how' than the look that seems to frustrate people oi nthese genres when using Sonar.  The step sequencer in Sonar is not bad per say, but it just doesn't offer that simple, grab a sample and treat it like an MPC feel. Thanks to Craig, loops are not as bad as I thought in Sonar and there are some hidden powerful loop features.  Unfortunately it's still easier in other programs.

I think one of Sonar's downfalls when it comes to working in the EDM/sequencer mindset is that it can be an absolute nightmare to move blocks of music around. Inserting time, deleting time, swapping section A with section B etc....these are all actions which have caused me immense frustration and hair pulling within Sonar, and from reading this forum over the last 3 or so years I've noticed that I'm not the only one. It's an area in which you're liable to encounter unexpected behavior, needless complications, bugs and sometimes outright crashes. I don't know whether that's because my projects are full of synths, MIDI and automation, but nonetheless it's something which should be completely intuitive and problem free in a DAW. Now if you're the kind of person who treats Sonar like a glorified multi-track recorder, getting an arrangement mapped out in its entirety in the outside world before laying the audio down onto tracks, then you're not likely to encounter these problems. But if like me you're the kind of person who lays a short musical idea down in the DAW and then develops it outwards in all directions like some kind of musical Big Bang, then I'm pretty sure you will have experienced these difficulties. Just something as simple as lassoing a large section of music and shifting it over a few bars can lead to all kinds of weirdness and I cringe every time I'm about to do it. 
 
Like it or not, a lot of modern musical styles are based around clearly defined blocks or patterns, and the ability to throw these blocks around seamlessly is essential to the creative process of electronic music. 

Strangely, a billion years ago when I first bought Cakewalk for Windows 3.1, I was afraid I wouldn't be comfortable with a linear program.  Why?  Because I was used to using drum machines and simple sequences that had patterns repeated and chained together into songs.  Although I have never been a loopy guy, that was just how I learned to work.  Now I am completely on the other side of the fence.
 
Funny, though, I somehow managed to write and record songs no matter what.

 

sharke
I think one of Sonar's downfalls when it comes to working in the EDM/sequencer mindset is that it can be an absolute nightmare to move blocks of music around. Inserting time, deleting time, swapping section A with section B etc....these are all actions which have caused me immense frustration and hair pulling within Sonar, and from reading this forum over the last 3 or so years I've noticed that I'm not the only one.

 
Totally agreed. And if anything it's got worse in recent years since the way the lasso interacts with the track folders and take lanes means you usually end up with a bunch of irrelevant clips selected on top of the ones you actually wanted to move.
 

Now if you're the kind of person who treats Sonar like a glorified multi-track recorder, getting an arrangement mapped out in its entirety in the outside world before laying the audio down onto tracks, then you're not likely to encounter these problems.

Exactly. I've always found it weird that some people here want to do the hard work of arranging and re-arranging a composition on paper or by physically playing it through in every permutation, and only then bringing it into the DAW. Isn't the whole point of having a tool like this to allow us to quickly re-shuffle song sections and see how they sound? Or to have the computer play things back to you while you think of the next section, like your own personal jam partner? Every time Sonar adds something that seems to favour Console View over Track View (like ProChannel stuff), or which favours the traditional way of working (like replacing Layers with Take Lanes), it makes things a bit harder for people like us.
 
Anyway, other changes that would help for electronic work:

• fix instrument tracks to be a useful first-class citizen that everybody is comfortable using.
• fix the Step Sequencer. Partly this requires drum maps to not be the usability nightmare that they currently are, but it also just means getting it working properly. I just tested on a MIDI drum clip that I converted to a Step Sequencer pattern - it still played perfectly in normal playback but the Step Sequencer window showed no beats selected at all. Then I added some more beats in the Step Sequencer and they became a new clip that started before the one I'd supposedly converted.
• fix the Matrix View. I've never got good results out of this (compared to alternatives like FL Studio). Sometimes it clearly mis-times at least one of the clips when making a transition, and it doesn't even seem to want to play half of my synths (eg. Superior Drummer).

 

I haven't got to know them yet, so haven't identified as friend or foe(ex Navy).

Internal to SONAR, if the matrix view got beefed up a bit it would be ideal for composition by sections. The editing functionality of what is already contained in cells is the biggest hurdle for me. A secondary "cell firing view" would be icing on the cake (similar to Geist's song tab).

Anderton
Am I the only person who likes clip groups?

They almost solve the "click once and drag a whole section" problem, except for things like markers which get left behind, and in that you still have to manually select all the clips in order to make a group out of them in the first place, which is harder than it needs to be due to the lasso trying to be 'smart'.
 
Then you get the hassle of it being difficult to edit individual clips within that group, because as soon as you click on one, the whole lot are selected. There are workarounds for that issue but basically you've just replaced one problem with another.

Kylotan

Anderton
Am I the only person who likes clip groups?

They almost solve the "click once and drag a whole section" problem, except for things like markers which get left behind, and in that you still have to manually select all the clips in order to make a group out of them in the first place, which is harder than it needs to be due to the lasso trying to be 'smart'.
 
Then you get the hassle of it being difficult to edit individual clips within that group, because as soon as you click on one, the whole lot are selected. There are workarounds for that issue but basically you've just replaced one problem with another.

The key is not to use the lassoo when dealing with song blocks that incorporate all tracks (which is what I need 95% of the time). I select all, then split at the beginning and end. Then I select all again, drag in the timeline, and have a keyboard shortcut to create a selection group. It takes longer to write about it than do it. 
 
As to markers, if you want to drag and drop the group, they won't follow. But if you copy special and paste, they will. You can also drag and drop, then copy only the markers and paste later. I do that a lot of there are pitch markers for acidized clips.
 
As to clicking and selecting all being a pain when trying to remove a clip from a group, that happens if you use the Smart Tool but if you use the Select Tool, you can just Ctrl-Click to select the clips you want to exempt, then use the context menu to remove them from the group.
 
The only real caution is you need to have the splits not split MIDI notes in the middle or it can get messy.
 
I'm sure more elegant ways could be invented, but I'm so used to this workflow in Vegas (where I'm always moving large blocks of video, audio, and automation around), that it's second nature and the fact that SONAR works the same way makes it easy for me. But it's also important to use the right tool for the right job or it gets klunky.