SongCraft
Rain
Man, I've been trying to duplicate those drum tracks for one of those songs - I got the timing under control, extracted from the audio and all, but the actual sound cannot be matched. For all they lack, I can't just wipe them. I need to blend that stuff in.
If I'm not mistaken, the hats were blue jay drums leftovers soundfonts. They sound so relaxed I just can't match the feeling. I still have the samples somewhere back home in Quebec... I went through all the EZ Drummer/SD/BFD libraries, but nothing matches it.
Same for the piano line - I think I've located the original free sample collection online, but it'll still be a challenge to match the original.
The guitars - these were recorded over at a friend's studio, using my old black strat, through a pod. If I'm not mistaken, they were processed w/ acoustic mirror and a studer impulse. That's the easy part.
The melodic parts were processed w/ a PSP Lexicon 84. I can't replicate that, I'll have to buy PSP 85 and hope I can find the preset I based that sound upon - and manage to tweak it to get that sound.
But that song is worth it.
You know it's not enough to just save a preset because by the next album (year or so later) a poor guy could end up with 2,000 of the buggers and all the same category (Kick) and not remember which one {DOH}. That's why I keep sound-sets (see my previous post) and try to keep my libraries more manageable.
In your situation; for example; the drums, I would 'sample it' (a snippet) and copy/paste is your friend; after all SONAR is one big mother of a sampler LOL!! But then again; there are plugins such as Geist (I have not tried it) but I'm sure with something like that you can very easily take that drum hit (sample it) and assign it to a pad.
Well, Logic i pretty good for that kind of thing - among other things, it allows you to save sampler instruments as part of the project's assets. So if you move your project to a different computer, you'll still have access to all the sampler instruments, no matter if you don't take your sample library w/ you. Though in this case, the actual samples never made it into Sonar - they were all bounced from Fruity Loops and the loops were then imported in Sonar.
I hadn't thought of it, but you just reminded me of that option - I could have Logic slice the wave file and create a sampler instrument from it. It's a feature I've used so rarely that I tend to forget it's there. Might be a good idea in this case.
I'm getting better at organizing my stuff. FX presets are usually stored in a sub folder w/ the song's name in the plug-in's menu. Same for channel strips settings - subfolders w/ clear references.