I mostly produce rap music, although I also dabble a little bit in various electronic genres. I've been doing my music production in FL Studio, then saving WAV's and bringing them into Sonar X2 to record to. I'd like to be able to do my production in Sonar as well though, it would be simpler having one program, plus I definitely prefer some of Sonar's features to FL. Question is, my drums are mainly from a collection of drum samples, can anyone recommend the best (as in simplest and most optimal playback) way to do this? Whether Sonar has a sampler VST or some other option. I'd also like to have the option to still EQ each drum separately if possible. And I considered ReWiring FL to Sonar, but that's a bit cumbersome and resource heavy.

You most straight forward option is to use Session Drummer
 
Simply load your audio files onto the relevant kit pieces and you can play them like drums (and obviously programme them in the PRV etc.)
 
You can then set Session Drummer to output each drum to a separate track so you can mix and process them individually in Sonar (there are plenty of tutorials on how to do this - try CAKE TV on YouTube)
 
A more "complex" 3rd Party option would be to use a VST like NI BATTERY, which has more control of the sample but I think you will be fine with Session Drummer
 
Good luck and let us know how you get on
 
 

Hey thanks for that, I saw Session Drummer mentioned when I did a quick search before posting, but still couldn't quite tell if it's what I needed, sounds like it oughtta do the job. I'll have to rerun my install to put the instruments in, but I think that'll be worth it. I'll post back on how it goes.

I dabble in hip-hop and edm. There is no apples to apples equivalent to the fl studio drums workflow so it will take some adjusting. The key to making that adjustment is to mentally breakdown the semantic construction of how fl studio works. The simplified version is fl studio's default channel is a single sample sampler set to be triggered via stepsequencer with a default note of C1 ( dont have fl in front of me so default maybe c3 but idea is the same). Options exist to change pitch and even switch to piano roll. Creating a similar setup in Sonar is not as efficient but may offer more overall options in the big picture. Too literally try to emulate flb studio workflow one could simply create an instance of dropzone for every drum sample and use step sequencer for each channel. I honestly would not go that route but it is a possibility.

Two solutions I have actually used are third party drum software and Session drummer. I use Geist because it combines step sequencer, sampler and slicer but there are other options. Session drummer takes a little more prep but can be very effective. For starters it contains quality 808 samples which are still the most commonly used in hip-hop. The awkwardness begins when you wish to use your own samples. Even then it isn only awkward if you need to use multisamples. Otherwise simply replace kit samples with your own. I suggest setting up a template with your most commonly used sounds loaded into SD3.

Geist is well worth buying, snap it up if you see it in a sale. It's perfect for creating drum kits from samples. There are 8 "engines" each of which can host a kit consisting of 16 pads, and each of those pads can host multiple layers of samples. It has excellent onboard effects (filters, EQ's, delays, modulators etc) which you can apply to individual layers, pads or the whole engine itself. You can also do all of your pattern sequencing in there, and each track of each pattern can be automated any way you like. You can also arrange your whole song in there, as long as it doesn't contain any time sig changes. Otherwise you can just trigger the patterns via MIDI (or trigger individual pads if you want to do all the sequencing in Sonar).

Battery 4 is also excellent - it's more powerful in terms of creating drum kits from scratch, and the per-drum effects are top notch. It's only drawback is that it has no pattern sequencer. I'm glad I have both Battery and Geist and I use them both, but if I had to choose between one and the other I would probably choose Geist.

SFZ Player (included in SONAR) is pretty good. I define my own SFZ layouts in text files.
Documentation here: Sound On Sound article

Another lowcost option is poise( about 50 bucks). Even though sfz and other sfz based solutions can work, but are very unintuitive. One can setup templates but that only helps for a base. In hip-hop production it is common to swap samples on the fly or try different combos of stacked samples. Making those changes in sfz based programs is time consuming and a total workflow killer

sharke
Geist is well worth buying, snap it up if you see it in a sale. It's perfect for creating drum kits from samples. There are 8 "engines" each of which can host a kit consisting of 16 pads, and each of those pads can host multiple layers of samples.

For the OP's benefit, the lack of drag 'n' drop velocity layering is the main shortcoming of Session Drummer by comparison. You can only drop one sample on each pad, and Session Drummer just scales the amplitude with velocity. In order to implement velocity-switched layers, you have to build a custom SFZ file for the kit. If Geist let's you drag 'n' drop, multi-samples that would be great. Sounds like a cool plugin in any case.

Yeah you can drag and drop onto pads from Geist's onboard browser. If you hold down alt when dropping, it adds it to the layers.

With geists layers you have the options of having up to 8 layers play round robin, stacked, or based on velocity. Geist does have its cons but it's as close to MPC style production as you will get via software.