Our keyboard player is not the strongest (very nice guy). So I have decided to try to help him out with few keyboard pieces here and there within the song (I am a guitar player). 
I have m-audio midi keyboard (keystation 88) and I have cakewalk Sonar X3 (with Dimension Pro, Rapture, Z3TA)... I haven't dug into either of these 3 yet but I do have knowledge about X3 Producer (thanks to this forum and Craig Anderton), I do blues rock recording at home most of the time..guitar based.
My question to this forum, I can take my midi keyboard to the stage and plug into my macbook which has windows 8 installed as dual boot. Among the item I already own, which Cakewalk product can I use to get my midi controller function as a full blown (soundwise/tonewise) keyboard and play some pieces.
We mostly do classic rock covers (Deep Purple, Rainbow, Eagles) just to give you some idea about the genre we like.
Is there an IPAD solution to this?
I would still love to use Cakewalk products.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

I have no real opinion on this but don't forget Lounge Lizard. It's more limited than the other synths but will give a nice Fender Rhodes sound which is great for blues and rock. I'm think DimPro would probably have some good patches for that Deep Purple organ type sound. Zeta is more electronica type stuff but there are definitely some more "synthy" sounding patches. I don't think I've ever even used Rapture. Oh and don't forget about the TTS-1 which is a general purpose synth and might be a little more reliable on stage.
 
But really you'll just have to go through the patches. You are bound to find tons of stuff you like from pretty much all of them.

I believe there are Mac versions of both Dimension Pro and Rapture. In which case you could run them in stand alone mode. I believe you can run them in stand alone mode on the Windows platform also. You shouldn't have to run them in Sonar unless you are trying to sync up to some other events in a Sonar project.
 
Regards,

EP - Lounge Lizard and there is the piano synth.  Other acoustics - DimPro.  Organs - Rapture.  Other synths - Zeta, tho Rapture is good, too, esp. w/ the Museum sounds.  Do you need drums?  AD has those and you should still have session drummer.  TTS-1 is a gm synth, and might not sound good enough tho it is a handy all-in-one sound maker.
 
And yea, you might be better off using the mac versions of DimPro and Rapture if you are playing live not playback.  If you need a DAW, SONAR should work for live.
 
@

I am leery of recommending DimPro and Rapture for Mac until they support an OS newer than 10.6.8. There are too many complaints about installation issues. Has this changed recently?

scook
I am leery of recommending DimPro and Rapture for Mac until they support an OS newer than 10.6.8. There are too many complaints about installation issues. Has this changed recently?

I don't really know the answer scook. My response was more about that he was running Sonar under a dual boot Mac. It would seem to me that running native in OSX would be more stable that running under boot camp. But I haven't actually researched the issue.
 
Regards,