Posted on

SONAR 2017.07 Release: Little Things Mean a Lot

Bus Pane Aim Assist

Aim Assist is a long-time SONAR convenience—it draws a vertical bar across all Tracks to follow the mouse cursor position, while obeying snap settings. With Aim Assist, it’s easy to align edits across tracks.

Until now, Aim Assist only applied to the Tracks Pane. Extending this feature to work in the Bus Pane has been one of our most popular feature requests from customers, and now it’s here in SONAR 2017.07.

Bus Pane Aim Assist
Bus Pane Aim Assist

With more advanced automation and routing, it’s now easy to use Aim Assist to align mix and automation settings visually across all tracks and buses.

Recently Used Plug-ins

We’ve found that SONAR users often have their “go-to” plug-ins that they’re using over and over again. With SONAR 2017.07, we’ve made it easy to insert any of your five most recently used plug-ins anywhere in your project—no other setup necessary, it just works!

Noteworthy Enhancements

Drum Project with 100's of little clips
Drum Project with 100’s of little clips

In projects with thousands of micro-edits—for example, when using AudioSnap and Split Beats to chop and tighten drum tracks—SONAR is now much more responsive.

In our SONAR 2017.05 Update we introduced Ripple Editing, and the SONAR community rejoiced. We’ve continued to make improvements, and in this SONAR 2017.07 release, SONAR is now smarter about working with MIDI data while Ripple Editing. You can learn more about how in the 2017.07 issue of our monthly Tech+Music magazine.

While using the Adaptive Limiter some of our customers noticed a ring modulation effect. Cool sounding? Yes. Intended? No. When using the 64-bit Double Precision Engine along with a 64 sample buffer size in SONAR some plug-ins—including the Adaptive Limiter—would misbehave. This has now been addressed in SONAR 2017.07.

This issue had affected other plug-ins as well and could have caused some users to not be able to use 64-bit Double Precision in SONAR. With this update, we encourage users experiencing this issue to try using the 64-bit Double Precision Engine again. You can find this in Preferences under Driver Settings.

Using Snap and the Smart Grid together is more visually consistent now between the Track View and Piano Roll View, and we have improved the look of grid lines while zooming out of a project—no more confusing beat markers in the Time Ruler or stacked grid lines displaying on top of one another. We now always display the beat in the Time Ruler and the Snap subdivision in the view. This makes it easier to see the relationship between measure, beat, and subdivision while editing. See below for additional changes to this area.

  • Track View, Track View In-line Piano Roll, and Piano Roll View now have consistent behavior when thinning grid lines during zooming in and out
  • Disabling Snap previously created problems with showing triplets and dotted settings, These buttons will now stay lit to better indicate what Grid Lines are being displayed when Snap is Off
  • Disabling Snap previously created problems with showing triplets and dotted settings, These buttons will now stay lit to better indicate what Grid Lines are being displayed when Snap is Off
  • Snap settings could previously become changed unexpectedly if they were altered when Snap was Off
  • The Control Bar’s Smart Grid option is no longer disabled on cancel out of the menu

30th Anniversary Rapture Expansion Pack

Tech+Music (issue 2017.07)

Reviews of the Month: SampleTekk Classic Grand Piano, DSF B3 Tone Wheel organ ● DIY Sampled Piano Mods – Enhance sampled pianos with these simple tweaks ● SONAR Update 2017.07 overview, with news on all the latest enhancements: Bus Pane Aim Assist, Recently Used Plug-Ins list, Clip Edit Speed improvements, MIDI Ripple Editing improvements, multiple fixes and enhancements ● SONAR 101: Understanding Loop Construction ● “You Mix, We Master” – every month, we master a reader-submitted piece of music in SONAR ● 30th Anniversary Rapture Expansion Pack: Freshen up Rapture Pro and Rapture Sessions with 30 free, exciting new sounds from Craig Anderton

Get SONAR 2017.07 Today

Follow this link to learn more about the SONAR 2017.07 update and download today:

SONAR 2017.07 Update

Posted on

Multi-Track Drum Editing – Identifying & Splitting Drum Hits

You need to start with a great performance

Before you begin to edit drum stems you have to make sure that you are working with tracks that were recorded close to a click. They need to be consistent. Tightening up the performance is something that is very invasive and requires a lot of time. If the drummer can’t put in the time to learn the parts then you should wait until they are ready to record their parts properly. Having this knowledge will make your life easier and should be something you think about during the preproduction stages of any record.

 

A note about the editing process.

The purpose of this type of editing is to identify the strong hits of the drum beat, split them into tiny parts, and then crop and align those small parts. The splits will depend on which part of the drum falls on each down beat.

In this tutorial Kicks happen every 1/4 note, snares every 2nd and 4th beat, and high hats on every 1/8th note. This happens for about 20 measures with various fills here and there and then it switches to a different pattern. We’ll move in measure by measure increments so that we don’t bite off more than we can chew at first.

Engage the metronome so that you can hear the pulse.  This will help you check your work as you edit. Download the project files here (if you didn’t download them from our previous post)  to get started:

Multi-Track Drum Editing Tutorial

Multi-track drum editing requires you to listen intently to the audio you’re editing. I recommend using headphones for this tutorial so that you can hear subtle edits. Erroneous edits are most exposed in the overheads, high hat, and cymbal frequencies so we’ll need to solo those as well as the kick and snare track while we work through this project.

As we work through the session the high hat and ride will need to be solo’d due to the spot mics that were placed on these. Everything else will follow suit with your editing.

You can also adjust your Track Height in the Track View by dragging the borders of the Continue reading “Multi-Track Drum Editing – Identifying & Splitting Drum Hits”

Posted on

Multi-Track Drum Editing – DLC and Basic Tools

The need for perfect drum production is at an all time high.

In today’s world there is a huge need for all types of drum production. Everything from VST instruments to advanced drum replacement software has been growing in popularity. For the most part, records that require the tracking of live drums always have some sort of drum editing applied. This process is meticulous, long, and can be frustrating if you have never done this much in depth editing before.

Downloadable Content:

Let’s start by getting you the files you need to follow along with this tutorial.

Multi-Track Drum Editing Tutorial

Once downloaded, they should open just fine inside of SONAR X3.

Understanding the basics.

Before diving in, let’s take a look at some essential tools that we’ll be using for major drum editing. These tools may be basic to some, but are definitely the right functions we’ll need in SONAR to edit down these drums.

Creating selection groups

The first step in editing multi-track drums is making selection groups. Once created, these clips will be synced to one another for batch editing tasks – like multi-track editing. During the course of this tutorial we’ll be relying heavily on splitting clips – grouping will make this faster and more efficient.

To create these, choose CTRL+A within the Track View and then right-click on your clips. Near the bottom of the menu there will be an option that says Create Selection Group from selected clips. Select this and a number will appear in the header of your clips indicating that your clips are all in a group now.

As we work through the song the different Split edits will cause the group number to increase. This indicates that a new group has been made. You can change whether or not this occurs within the Preferences here:

 

Tab to Transients

Tabbing to transients locates strong transients and moves Continue reading “Multi-Track Drum Editing – DLC and Basic Tools”