And you can't do that in Sonar? What the heck is the Step Sequencer for?

In Reason, a block is pretty much a song section.  It allows you treat a large number of elements as a single thing for the purpose of arranging your tune through time.  I think it would be useful to several workflows and I could see it becoming indispensable to others.    

I can certainly live without it, but if the OP can't, then I don't think Sonar is a good fit.

Thanks for the replies. No, I suppose I'm not looking for "help" as if something was broken, but more along the lines if such a feature was in the program and I'm simply ignorant of its existence. I've got to admit, I was somewhat taken aback at some of the negative replies to what I thought was a fair enough question.

I've played with the other DAWs' demo modes and whatnot, and while they're all decent enough, Sonar's the best one in terms of ease-of-use. Most of my work is done to make stupid little comedy songs, and I thought the idea of being able to modify verse/chorus sections and have those changes replicate throughout the song would be cool, in addition to being able to create a new section and simply insert it after the fact would be handy as well. Since Sonar can't do that, fair enough.

Probably not a good idea to tout features of other DAWs right now but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume your query is genuine.

I don't even get what this is about. I'm assuming this was being viewed as a plug for other software? Rest assured, it's not. That was the first youtube link I found to simply demonstrate what I was after.


Again, thanks for the replies. I'll play with the idea of bouncing MIDI tracks to audio and play with Matrix view. (I get a lot of hanging issues with plugins when trying to use MIDI itself in Matrix view, but that's another support topic for another thread).

Reason's Blocks feature can be largely, even if not exactly replaced using instanced clips.
 
For example if you've created clips out of one section and laid instances of those clips out as per your song structure then any updates you make to one of those clips will be replicated throughout the rest.
 
So then each element of your song, verse, bridge, chorus etc, can be created just once from one single instance of each element and replicated throughout the same song and any updates on one of those clips of the same type can be updated and the changes will be reflected in each of the clips instanced from it.
 
In effect it achieves the same result but in a slightly different way.
Pretty much the same meat served with different gravy.

I don't even get what this is about. I'm assuming this was being viewed as a plug for other software? Rest assured, it's not. That was the first youtube link I found to simply demonstrate what I was after.

Yeah, sorry about that. There have just been a lot of problems around here lately with trolls coming in to stir up trouble.

IDK... I checked out a bunch of block mode vids and although I don't think there is anything specifically like it there are lots of other ways in Sonar to achieve basically the same thing. 

Cheers.

Beepster

I don't even get what this is about. I'm assuming this was being viewed as a plug for other software? Rest assured, it's not. That was the first youtube link I found to simply demonstrate what I was after.

Yeah, sorry about that. There have just been a lot of problems around here lately with trolls coming in to stir up trouble.

IDK... I checked out a bunch of block mode vids and although I don't think there is anything specifically like it there are lots of other ways in Sonar to achieve basically the same thing. 

Cheers.

One actually...

Thanks Jonbouy, I'll play around with that.

One actually...

I'll have to take a look at what you described. Haven't come across that method yet but I'm only a third of the way through the manual. Cheers.

In addition to what Johnbouy said, there is something easy that you could try:

You could add markers, and use them to set the zones of your "blocks".

Then SELECT ALL (CTRL+A), right click on any clip, then select SPLIT

There is an option to split at every marker.

So this way you'd have your blocks easier to see and manage. 

If you want to do it even cleaner, before doing any of this, do a SELECT_ALL, then BOUNCE TO CLIP. then split those.
this way, all split clips will be of the same lenght, belonging to it's "block" pattern. 

Hope that helps ! 

Cheers ! 

V

Heh... I was just gonna post about the Split Repeatedly feature.