by Lance Riley
Background
In a world where consoles are less likely to be seen or even touched by musicians today and a control surface is referred to as a mixer occasionally, I always find myself missing the tactility of working in an analog studio. Don’t get me wrong though, I truly love all the affordances that our modern digital production environments allow for, but yet here I am… I wanted to make the mouse act more like a finger touching controls when working in SONAR, so we started working with that idea and came up with many ways that mouse gestures could be improved upon to do more than currently possible.
Introducing Smart Swipe
Workflow is extremely important to us, and we wanted users to see this as an improvement to their existing workflows without disturbing the way they use the app. We started looking at track state management and how we could make the app feel more responsive. There was already a lot of affordance to controlling groups of tracks through Quick Groups, but some gestures at times seemed like Quick Groups just weren’t quick enough. For example, I work a lot with 2 guitar mics, and sometimes I just want to solo or mute both tracks without using a bus. It seemed very natural to want to click and drag from a control on one track and have it affect the same control on neighboring tracks.
The benefits of using Smart Swipe
With Smart Swipe, you can:
- Quickly Mute or Solo multiple tracks that are in series like Guitars with 2 mics, recording Bass with a DI and a mic, etc
- Alleviate some situations where you would need to put tracks into a folder.
- Add additional control to tracks already in a folder.
- Quickly check the phase relationship across drum mics while playing back.
- Quickly A/B the processing of tracks by Smart Swiping the FX Bin Enables
- Isolate and listen to takes by looping a section and Smart Swiping the Solo Exclusive buttons on the take lanes.
- Quickly enable or disable multiple sends on the same track in the Console View
Track View vs. Console View
The Track View & Console View have some similar controls, but also several unique ones. Here are the areas in which you can currently use Smart Swipe.
- Track View:
- Track: Mute, Solo, Record, and Input Echo
- Track: Read, Write, and Archive
- Track: Take Lanes
- Mute, Solo (exclusive), and Record (exclusive)
- Track: Automation Lanes
- Read, Write
- Track: FX Bin Enable
- Bus: Mute, Solo, and Waveform Preview
- Bus: Automation Lanes
- Read, Write
- Bus: FX Bin Enable
Console View:
- Track: Mute, Solo, Record, and Input Echo
- Track: Read, Write, Interleave, and Phase
- Track: FX Bin Enable
- Track: Send Enable and Post (Vertically)
- Track: ProChannel Enable and Post
- Bus: Mute, Solo, Read, Write, and Interleave
- Bus: FX Bin Enable
- Bus: Send Enable and Post (Vertically)
- Bus: ProChannel Enable and Post
Summary
We are very excited to have added Smart Swipe to SONAR and we hope our users find it useful and meaningful to their workflow. Now that I have been using Smart Swipe for a while I can’t imagine using a DAW that doesn’t have this available. We already have further enhancements planned and are thinking of even more ways that we can continue to improve Smart Swipe and the SONAR workflow.
