Hello, friends,


I have succeeded in creating a Sonar 6 project with five VST instrument plugin instances. This includes three Pentagon instances with different presets. The simplest way I can come up with switching one MIDI keyboard between them is by bringing up the synth rack view, soloing all of the instances, and left-clicking with the mouse to bring focus in Sonar to the one that I want to play next.

What I would RATHER do is separate each of those instances on a different MIDI channel, keep them all "hot" in Sonar, and use the zone switching and/or local MIDI channel programming capability of the controller to address the instances separately. It's just easier and less scary not to have to mess with a computer running under Windows when you are playing live. However, I can't seem to find a way to make a plugin play unless I click to get program focus on either it's instrument rack bar, or if I'm in the track view, on the associated MIDI input track for that instrument.

Does anyone know how to make 'em all play depending on the MIDI channel you switch to?

The way I've done this is to set up MIDI tracks for each synth, assign each to a different MIDI channel and enable Input Echo. This allows me to select which synth I want to play via the MIDI Transmit Channel setting on my keyboard.

An alternative method would be to forget SONAR altogether and just use a plugin host such as SaviHost, which will let you run any synth standalone.