Posted on

SONAR X3 Quicktip: Play Guitar, Convert it to Bass

There are times when you are in a bind and need to get a solid bass line down, but there is not bass player in site. Well, now in SONAR X3 you can easily record your bass parts on any instrument and convert it to a virtual bass instrument using the new ARA integration.

First let’s plugin the instrument of your choice. For me, the closest instrument was an acoustic guitar. I’ve been playing around with some chord changes recently and I need a solid walking bass line to jam along with. Unfortunately I don’t have a bass guitar close-by so I’m going record the bass line on the guitar Continue reading “SONAR X3 Quicktip: Play Guitar, Convert it to Bass”

Posted on

SONAR X3 Making Its Mark in the LA Scene

On the backend of the 2014 NAMM Show, we had an opportunity to take a spin around LA and drop in on a few SONAR users hard at work.  From rock, to EDM and just about every genre in between, here are what some SONAR X3 users in the LA scene are up to:

Adventure Club

While we were making the rounds, we were lucky enough to find out that the Canadian duo Adventure Club was camping out in downtown LA for a while with their mobile SONAR rig.  Adventure Club is defining a new wave of modern musicians and SONAR is at the forefront of their sonic assault.  Originally hailing from Montreal, the duo has recently been all over the globe playing to more and more dedicated fans after seeing the success of over 1.3 million views with their single “Gold” feat. Luna.  Their SONAR tracks have been streamed over a million times on Spotify, and they were noted in the 2013 Top 10 artists most consumed on SoundCloud.

AC has been touring across North America, as well as parts of Europe and Australia and has also played at various music festivals including the American Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, Nevada. They also made their first appearance at the Ultra Music Festival-2013 in Miami and additionally found themselves playing at the Ultra Music Festival in Seoul, South Korea in June 2013.

The duo’s remix of “Crave You” by the Flight Facilities was featured in the episode “Restraint” of the MTV television series Teen Wolf.  We got a chance to sit down with Christian and listen to some of his productions in SONAR and found it interesting to see how he gets some of his unique sounds Continue reading “SONAR X3 Making Its Mark in the LA Scene”

Posted on

Guitar Tips: Open Up Your Guitar Tunings

Tuning your guitar differently can produce some incredible new sounds for the creative process. Open tunings in particular produce shimmering and complex overtones when you play with a lot of open strings. Here is a quick rundown on four different tunings for you to experiment with when you’re looking for a bit of inspiration.

Standard Tuning

First you have the good old Standard tuning that everyone uses. This tuning is mostly in fourths and is called “Standard Tuning” because every guitar comes stocked with it’s strings tuned to E A D G B E.

Playing a major shape in this is tuning is rather easy and introduces the use of the “power chord”. To constructively show off the different tunings I’ve used a progression of G, A, Bb, A as a reference for the rest of the tunings. The major shape in this tuning looks and sounds like the following:

DADGAD

DADGAD is my personal favorite alternate tuning due to it’s suspended sound. The stacked 5ths and suspended 4th produce an incredible harmonic series above just about any passages you play.

The easiest way to get your guitar to DADGAD f Continue reading “Guitar Tips: Open Up Your Guitar Tunings”

Posted on

The Guitars We love: Cakewalk Staff Show & Tell

You may have noticed that it’s guitar month here at Cakewalk, and we sure do love our guitars!  In fact, about 3/4 of the Cakewalk staff plays and owns at least one guitar.  So we thought we would wrap up the month with a little show and tell of some of our favorites. Share your favorite guitars with us on Facebook.

Adam (IT) with his 2004 Epiphone Joe Perry Boneyard Les Paul Standard & his drummer.

Continue reading “The Guitars We love: Cakewalk Staff Show & Tell”

Posted on

Cakewalk at NAMM 2014

NAMM embodies so many different aspects of the music industry that it’s hard to describe it in a few words. As a first time NAMM newbie I for one can say that it is a music geek’s ultimate paradise for poking and prodding different companies about the products they bring to the show. Attending with Cakewalk gave me the freedom to demonstrate world-class software as well as interact face to face with our customers and users.

 

10am Thursday morning started off with a Continue reading “Cakewalk at NAMM 2014”

Posted on

TH2 Producer: Not Only Guitars

TH2 Producer amp sim can do more than you might think

By Craig Anderton

Overloud’s TH2 Producer offers amp modeling with multiple amps and cabinets, as well as several effects. So while it’s a perfect subject for guitar month, and hopefully the following will give some inspiration to guitarists, let’s also consider what non-guitarists can do with a processor designed for guitar.

The power of parallel. Parallel processing is one of my favorite techniques. Fortunately TH2 not only accommodates parallel processing (the signal path follows a serial—> parallel—> serial  protocol), it also provides different “flavors” of parallel processing.

The parallel section starts with a crossover, so the parallel split can:

  • Provide “bi-amplification,” and send highs to one path and lows to the other
  • Enable a Bandpass filter mode, where one path has a bandpass-style boost, while the other has a complementary notch. A separate “spread” control determines the notch bandwidth
  • If neither is enabled, both paths are simply a parallel connection with no filtering

For extra flexibility, a “swap” button reverses the outputs (e.g., if one output was highs and the other lows, swap reverses that).

The output mixer sums the parallel paths back together again, with Phase Inverse, Delay, Width, Pan, and Level controls, as well as a Balance slider. The TH2 Producer manual can fill you in on the details.

Bass wah. Let’s start off by not straying too far from guitar, and looking at how to use TH2 Producer with bass. A problem with putting any kind of filtering or distortion on bass it that it thins out the sound. You can solve this problem by using the crossover to separate the low end and keep it clean, while adding wah to the midrange frequencies (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Parallel processing can keep the low end clean, but process the highs (click to see the entire image).

Again, we’ll use the Normal Splitter mode, with 490Hz as the split frequency. The Crying wah pedal handles the higher frequencies. The rest of the controls are straightforward Continue reading “TH2 Producer: Not Only Guitars”

Posted on

TH2: Understanding Memory Locations and Variations

Overloud’s TH2 advanced preset saving introduces a great way to store, call-up, and switch presets on the fly. Instead of relying on the internal saving methods of SONAR X3, TH2 uses a series of Banks, Sounds, and Variations to better suit a guitarists setup in a live situation.

 

Banks

When you first open up the program the top of the window displays some number values. The first 3 digits on the left refers to “Banks”. TH2 can hold up to 999 User Banks and 999 Factory (non-writable) Banks. To switch through the Factory Banks simply use the up and down arrow keys next to the 3 digits as seen here Continue reading “TH2: Understanding Memory Locations and Variations”

Posted on

Anatomy of an FX Chain: CA Vintage Wah (Free Download)

You know you want it…there’s something irresistible about a greasy wah effect

by Craig Anderton

Some people think all you really need for a wah sound is to set a parametric EQ to bandpass with a fairly high Q, and sweep it back and forth. However, a vintage wah’s bandpass filter has a skirt that rejects high and low frequencies, which doesn’t happen with a parametric EQ’s bandpass response.

I came up with a technique that does the vintage wah effect quite well by copying a guitar track and flipping it 180 degrees out of phase so the signal canceled. Then, I’d set one track’s parametric to bandpass with a fairly high Q and sweep it. Because the only difference between the two channels was the bandpass peak, that’s all you heard—the highs and lows canceled out.

The VC-64 is ideal for this application, because it has two parallel paths and you can throw one of them 180 degrees out of phase. However, it’s a very Continue reading “Anatomy of an FX Chain: CA Vintage Wah (Free Download)”

Posted on

CES 2014 – It's a wrap

Walking the halls of CES is like rummaging through a rainforest as a caterpillar.  Things are way farther away than they appear, and you will see a million interesting new things on the way to your destination.  If you read Part 1 of the CES blog, you most likely got a feel for what the (now CES-famous) Gibson Tent was like.  On the last day of CES, I ventured deep into the CES halls of abyss and saw some pretty interesting things.  Here are some of the more interesting sectors that I witnessed:

Robotics

Partly interesting – partly scary; robotics are here in full swing, and all the big players in the industry at CES were making sure they were going to be noticed.  There was an actual “Robotics” section with everything from bots that will clean your floor, to super-bots that will make you dinner.  It was obvious that companies are still trying to figure out where this sub-industry will go, but CES was the place to get a good idea of the direction of mainstream-robots of the future.  I saw everything from human-like robots to ones that look more like something that could dig up your yard. Continue reading “CES 2014 – It's a wrap”

Posted on

SONAR User and Composer Jerry Gerber to Give A Power-workshop on MIDI at NAMM 2014

When programming complex orchestrations, getting that authentic “feel” can be a big challenge for any producer or composer regardless of the DAW at hand.  It takes many years of use-case scenarios along with a full bag of MIDI tricks of the trade.  Longtime SONAR user and MIDI-manipulator Jerry Gerber possesses both of these elements, and will be sharing his secrets at the 2014 NAMM show.   Interestingly, the workshop is not targeted for just SONAR users, but rather for anyone who wants to create the most artistic MIDI recordings possible with the technology they have available. Continue reading “SONAR User and Composer Jerry Gerber to Give A Power-workshop on MIDI at NAMM 2014”