• SONAR
  • Sonar X2a for songwriters
2013/04/02 14:51:31
thunderkyss
  In your opinion, what are Sonar's strengths for the songwriter?
2013/04/02 14:56:17
Lynn
Unlimited tracks, good tools for editing, plenty of virtual synths, and a quick workflow help.
2013/04/02 15:35:35
robert_e_bone
You can fairly quickly extend clips to become song sections - like dummy drum click tracks and chord sequences and such.

Plus all the other stuff mentioned above.

Bob Bone

2013/04/02 16:18:59
Paul P
From the manual :

"Publishing usually means printing your music; it’s one way to share your finished product with other performers. After you’ve recorded and arranged a song in SONAR, you can produce printed lead sheets and small scores with lyrics for sharing. You can also share the music files themselves. SONAR will save your music in a format that you can put on a web site or email to other people."

And :

"Adding and editing lyrics in the Lyrics view

Lyrics appear in the Lyrics view as a stream of syllables, each one associated with a note in the track. In this context, a syllable is any continuous string of characters, without a hyphen. For example, “love,” “desire,” and “infatuation” are all syllables; each one would be associated with a single note. If you want to break a word into multiple syllables, you must hyphenate the word. For example, “de-sire” would map onto two notes, since it is now two syllables long.

When you enter the lyrics, you can mark the syllables the way you want, or you can simply type the text in normally and use automatic hyphenation to break the text into syllables. This means that you can add lyrics to a project by copying and pasting them from another application (such as a word processor), and then hyphenate them automatically.

To extend a single syllable over more than one note, you can use extra hyphens, separated by spaces. For example, in “Oh-say can you see…”, the “Oh” is extended over two notes. If a track contains no lyrics yet, the display will show only a series of hyphens (one for each note in the track).

If you enter more syllables than there are notes in the track, SONAR assigns the extra lyrics times at quarter note intervals."

2013/04/02 16:21:12
chuckebaby
loops, loops are a songwriters best friend, I also suggest checking out the matrix,
even if your not in to that, it can help with song arrangements.
2013/04/02 19:02:10
icontakt
Regular and inline PRVs, Clip Header, bright and easy-to-identify note colors and 'Show Clip Outline.'
2013/04/02 19:36:36
musicroom
X2 is used primarily for song writing here. I find its' layout intuitive, fast and easy to get something recorded and out the door in a rough mix. I use templates, loops and effects chains. With that said, probably any daw that I used a lot would work fine. My opinion is the folks at Cake have this daw business down and I find that X2 is helpful while staying out the way.
2013/04/02 19:53:38
Kalle Rantaaho
IMO there are a couple of DAW software which are clearly loop/sample based electronica/hiphop/dance and live/instant orientated, but all the other big ones, SONAR, Cubase, Pro Tools, Studio One etc are genre neutral.

Or... what is a "songwriter" in your vocabulary? Do you mean like a man and a guitar, maybe bass, drums and piano? Except for the ones who only do orchestral, film scores and instrumental, commercials etc. I think all of us are making "songs" in our own opinion.

Anyway, I can't name any single feature in SONAR, or in any other DAW, that would somehow be "a strength in songwriting", because all features in a music making software are aimed at making music.
2013/04/02 20:15:08
The Maillard Reaction


Some of SONARS strengths for song writers have yet to be realized:

Here's a list that could really be helpful to someone who likes to write songs.

Better staff view functionality.

Better "fit to Improvisation" tempo mapping functionality.

Better set Measure/Beat to now results.

Maybe some chord harmonizing tools... the cal script stuff is so old it's officially deprecated.


The way it is now, SONAR doesn't get real friendly until after you have written the song and have actually begun producing it.

Better tempo mapping tools would really be helpful.


best regards,
mike
2013/04/02 22:05:05
vintagevibe
chuckebaby


loops, loops are a songwriters best friend, 
Real songwriters don't depend on loops.  
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