I am trying to do a smooth fiddle slur with my eastwest symphonic orchestra gold package. My old casio keyboard does not have a pitch wheel. But it seems like I should be able to draw a slur in the grid. The best I can come up with is a 1/32 triplet run. which sounds like a triplet.
 
Is there a way to draw a smooth midi fiddle or bass slur if you do not have a pitch wheel?

I'm not a piano roll view user, but I think you can draw in pitch bend controls. Look up pitch bend or controllers in the Help Menu. 

Skarda


I am trying to do a smooth fiddle slur with my eastwest symphonic orchestra gold package. My old casio keyboard does not have a pitch wheel. But it seems like I should be able to draw a slur in the grid. The best I can come up with is a 1/32 triplet run. which sounds like a triplet.
 
Is there a way to draw a smooth midi fiddle or bass slur if you do not have a pitch wheel?

Yes, in PRV click on the track, click on add new controller, select pitch wheel, change the select tool to the draw tool then draw in your slurs.

Thanks for the tip above. I tried but I am not sure what PRV is, and I can not find anything that says add controller, and I can not find any indication of a pitch wheel. Wow, and I thought i knew my way around Sonar. anyway, would you mind explaining where I find these functions.

I highlight the area and Insert | Series of Controllers | Pitch Wheel. 0 to +4096 is half-step up.  0 to +8191 is whole step up. 0 to -4096 is half step down.  0 to -8192 is whole step down.  (All the way down is one number more than all the way up.)

You can type in the time you want it to start and end.

My experience has been that players start the pitch bend a little before the beat and end a little after.  Steel guitars usually end considerably after the beat.  Guitars and fiddles end just a litle after the beat.

The trick is in drawing a natural-sounding glissando, and that takes practice.

My method: 
Choose start and end points by determining the interval of the slide, which is often a quarter or half note in duration. Insert three points - at the start, middle and end - and listen to the result. Of course, it will sound choppy at this point, but the idea is to verify that the slide begins and ends at the most natural-sounding times. Then fill in the gaps between those three points. It won't ever be a straight line you want. Most of the time it will either be a single logarithmic curve (like the "slow" curve in SONAR's automation or slip-edit options) or a dual-log "S" curve (like a combination of the slow automation curve followed by a "fast" curve). 

How many points you need to draw in will depend on the instrument. Some instruments smooth the points out on their own and might only need a few values, while others require denser grouping to avoid a zipper effect. But you will never need to draw as many points as a recorded wheel sequence would have generated.

So yeh, it's do-able. Even though it's more work, you can actually get better results this way than recording the wheel because it will be musically more precise.


Oh, another tip: it can be tricky translating a wheel value to a note interval. There are 8,192 possible values in each direction. Your instrument definition will determine what pitch interval that represents, so it's best to tell the instrument that the pitch range is the largest range you'll be using in the song. So if your slide is, say, 4 semitones, adjust the instrument's pitch range to 4. Then, a value of -8192 will be your starting pitch and each semitone will be at intervals of 2048. 

Example: the slide goes from C to E. If the MIDI note played is E (the ending note), the first pitch wheel event would have a value of -8192, the last a value of zero. In between, -6144 will be C#, -4096 will be D, -2048 will be D#.

After I insert controllers either by the insert command or by drawing, I highlight them in the event list, unselect the start and end values, and then use RUN CALL | THIN WHEEL to remove at least half of them and usually more.  I often run CAL twice, taking out every second event each time.

I unselect the first and last value so the start and end points will be right.

WARNING: If you use the Insert commend, you may find that Sonar inserts one extra bogus event.  Example: if you insert 0 to 8192, after the 8192 you may find a weird value like 8184 or something that is out of sequence.  Another reason the event list is handy.
 
To highlight in event list, click and drag in the left side down the list of events.  Or, you can highgligh the range by time or in any other view and then go to event list to make sure you have the right events selected.
 
Bitflipper is correct about the logarithmic scale, although I have found a straight line sounds good enough for fast events.  Interestingly, I find that steel guitar tends to slide fast at first and slowly at the end as the player zeroes in on the pitch.  But you are asking about fiddle...

PRV = Piano Roll View