When editing in Piano Roll you can insert sustain pedal "up" OR "down" with one mouse click.   In Staff View you get BOTH, but at a unchangeable fixed distance, as far as I can tell.  
 
1. Can piano roll provide what Staff View does: pedal "on" and "off" with one mouse click?
2. Is there any way to change the fixed DISTANCE Sonar seems to place between the "on" and "off" in Staff View?   What determines that arbitrary distance?
 

I don't use the PRV much, except for drums.
How do you insert a pedal event in PRV?
In Staff view, you can drag the pedal up event wherever you want, as determined by your Snap settings.

Interesting query; such a feature has never even occurred to me.
 
I can't imagine a scenario in which the time between pedal down and up events would be consistent. I often don't even get it right when I'm using a physical pedal, and end up skootching pedal-up events around in the PRV to fix inadvertent note overlaps.
 
But now that I think about it there is a way to do it with one mouse click: drag the note out to its desired length and skip the pedal altogether.
 

I tend at the piano to keep the pedal ON (IE DEPRESSED) until the next note or Chord: then I do a quick UP(OFF)and DOWN(ON) again.  This has the effect of keeping the pedal down most of the time, without producing a cacophony of overlapping sounds.
 
TO do that all you'd need is a mouse click that produces a tight ON-OFF OR OFF-ON sequence, microseconds separating the ON from the OFF.
 
This would be VERY useful.
 
Just making the note longer doesn't make use of the "sustain" sample that is part of the latest piano samples.  The sustain sample (activated when you depress the sustain pedal only) is actually very useful, because it provides a good amount of authentic room or hall sound.
 
Wonder whether there might be a way of tricking Sonar into doing this... or maybe some kind of aftermarket keystroke macro program....

57Gregy
I don't use the PRV much, except for drums.
How do you insert a pedal event in PRV?
In Staff view, you can drag the pedal up event wherever you want, as determined by your Snap settings.

In prv Click on the + sign at the bottom of the velocity "lane" (which can be made to show up by itself, below the piano roll lane.)  This brings up the "cc 64" lane, where you can enter on and off sustain marks.  
 
Entering pedal on /off in staff view is a super-painful, time-consuming, hair-pulling-out experience.

MY SOLUTION.  
1. In CC64 Lane do 1 tight OFF/ON sustain sequence
2. Highlight and Copy that sequence.
3. Assign a dedicated PASTE key using KEY BINDINGS
Now... I'm going to experiment with this....See if it works.

OK one problem.  Works, except that "paste" (f2) ALWAYS requires the additional step of specifying the track and then ENTER.  
 
Need a key binding that activates a kind of "quick paste" where track is predetermined and the key binding simply pastes whatever is in the paste memory, always to the same track, and automatically without confirming with the ENTER key!!!

This is an excellent suggestion.  I have been struggling with pedal up and down for a long time while trying to program it as well.
May be this has implication that the coders don't do much music like we do.
dan
 
 

i kind of remember being able to just click and drag these markers along the timeline in the staff view
 
if i remember i'll try when i get home tonight
 
 

seed
i kind of remember being able to just click and drag these markers along the timeline in the staff view
 
if i remember i'll try when i get home tonight

Yes... it does this in Staff View, but it's pretty cumbersome and mostly useless.  In staff view, one mouse click gives you sustain ON and, at an ARBITRARILY pre-defined distance, sustain OFF.      
 
That's just not how pedaling at the piano works in real time!!!
 
 If you study how you're pedaling works in real time, you'll see that the pedal is, in fact, DOWN (sustain on) most of the time (very, very often), and OFF just for a moment between dissonant chords or note progressions.   Hence pedal "OFF" then, almost immediately "ON"---- done with ONE mouse click in piano roll view---- is the way to go.   That's the opposite of what currently happens!
 
In other words:  Sonar/Cake needs to refine its pedaling option... and it would be VERY easy to do:
 
In a nutshell.....
1. User defined distance between sustain ON and OFF.  
2. User defined order---sustain ON OFF or sustain OFF ON.  
3. Doable in PIANO roll view,  not just in staff view, with ONE mouse click !!!