I see a ton of negative threads (some for good reason) and some basic rants, so I thought I'd post a little Sonar X1 love and hopefully brighten the mood a little.
Let me start by saying that I play bass, a very little bit of guitar, and that's about it....
Last Friday my Bon Jovi tribute band was scheduled to play a club over on Nantucket island, but at the last minute (the day before the gig) our keyboardist had some kind of troubles and had to cancel. We were in quite a pickle. We made a few calls out to the sub players that we work with but none were available and we were basically screwed.
Then I had a wonderfully crazy idea.......My quick, totally hack, omg what are we gonna do, solution?
Fortunatly I'm one of those "run tape" guys that record most of our practices, and had saved all of the songs that we play in multitrack format.
So the night before we left, I went through the set list and found out which songs started with the keyboards or had parts where the keyboard was the driving part of the song (Ie: Runaway, Never Say Goodbye, Bad Medicine, Van Halen Jump etc..)
I cut the previously recorded keyboard tracks up song by song, fired up session drummer 3, and assigned each keyboard part to seperate drums (yes I'm sure there was a better sampler that I could have used, but I'm not a keys guy and honestly I haven't used the others)
I installed X1 (no time for updates) on a laptop, copied over the files, installed the drivers for my scarlet 2I2, installed the drivers for my cute little korg nano keyboard controller, and what do you know!! I pressed a key on the controller and the keyboards tracks played. Praise be the God of your own choosing!!
Now all that was left was to print little lables with the song names and tape them to the controller, so I knew which key would trigger what keyboard sample.
I took the the computer setup to the gig and got ready to see if this little experiment would actually pan out. My band mates were a little sceptical at first to say the least, This was a rush job and I don't play keyboards!!
However we tried a few songs at sound check and it actually worked, smoothly I might add.
Was it pretty? Nope! Did it get us through the gig? YES!!!! Not to bad for a "finish this setup mess up at 3am, leave to get on the boat for the gig on the island at 6am, under the gun, is this gonna actually work?" solution.
So...to make a long story short... lots of love on this end for Sonar.