Use what you like and like what you use!!!
 

 

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).

 

Am I the only person who likes clip groups?

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

Anderton
Am I the only person who likes clip groups?

They're great but not the same thing.
 
They also have some strange quirks that crawl up my bottom from time to time. Just being able to expose some kind of alternate "block arranger" thingie on the timeline that allows you to drag around whole sections, insert empty "blocks" and what have you would be awesome.
 
Essentially that would bypass having to do a bunch of stuff manually (creating the croups, creating splits, doing range selections, copying/pasting/inserting time/removing time).
 
Couple things that would make it better is
 
Auto x-fades across all moved audio (when you move a block it extends the audio ever so lightly on either side of all the audio and applies an auto crossfade that can be adjusted in a preferences menu)
 
Right clicking on the block header exposes a list of all tracks so the user can deselect tracks from the next move. That way if you only want to move a few tracks to a new location but retain other data in that new location you can easily do so.
 
Holding Ctrl would copy the block for moving leaving the original audio in place. Otherwise the audio gets removed and the next block falls back to replace it (and this drags all later blocks along with it up to the point where the original audio is to be inserted).
 
Ctrl + Shift while moving a block would leave a hole
 
Then there would need to be a dropping option of "Insert and move over" or "Replace" so the user can replace the target block or have it move further down the timeline (along with any data that follows).
 
Keybindings aren't important but that would be an awesome creative workflow for me. That's kind of how I write into the DAW as it is but honestly the way things are now isn't very intuitive. I would much prefer not having to dip down into or even look at the track view when arranging like this... let alone fiddle with all the little this that's or the others that need to be dealt with when arranging.
 
Just my chaotic rambling thoughts on the matter. I'm sure it has been put more eloquently earlier in the thread.

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).

The matrix is cool enough but it's really a totally different thing. I like to do stuff like that with playback stopped so I can think and scheme. When arranging a song I'm not looking to "perform" it and the Matrix adds a whole pile of new complexities to the whole thing.
 
I just want to go "I don't like Riff A here, Riff B is going on for too long, Noodle X might sound cool over here, etc" then just drag it all around as needed. For that to happen with the matrix you gotta plan it all out before hand, program the cells, bloody well know how to work the damned thing, etc. Totally not what I want for arrangement.
 
What I WOULD use the Matrix for is just spazzing out with samples and loops. For arrangement editing I want it to be fast, easy and boring.

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.

Beepster
The matrix is cool enough but it's really a totally different thing. [...]  I just want to go "I don't like Riff A here, Riff B is going on for too long, Noodle X might sound cool over here, etc" then just drag it all around as needed. For that to happen with the matrix you gotta plan it all out before hand, program the cells, bloody well know how to work the damned thing, etc. Totally not what I want for arrangement.

In theory, it should be possible to select a region (maybe click on a marker, something like that), hit a key, and all the clips in that range get added to another row in the Matrix View. Repeat for other sections, then you get to quickly experiment with the ordering by clicking at the top of the Matrix View columns, hearing how it'll sound before you start dragging things around.
 
In practice, it would be a bit harder than that - if you have a 8 bar guitar pattern playing along to 2 consecutive 4 bar drum patterns, it's not clear how that could translate quickly into one Matrix View column which uses single clips. If a Matrix View cell could play several clips in sequence, that would solve that - but it's probably overcomplicating an otherwise simple feature. Still, it's not impossible to do.
 
I too would prefer to just be able to quickly and easily drag entire sections around - ideally with ripple-edit functionality available, and auto-crossfades where possible, etc. But in the absence of that, and especially for electronic musicians who tend to work with clips that are quantised to exact measures, the Matrix View can do a fine job and would provide a similar workflow to Ableton or FL Studio's Live mode, which could conceivably be useful to the rest of us too.

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.