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Studio Makeover Month: The Axeman Studio Setup

 

“The Axeman” is a guitar driven musician that has an appreciation for the heavier side of the music spectrum. He has a solo project they’ve been working on for years and years – slowly perfecting tone, demos, and musical compositions. He is always up for doing freelance work- so it’s important that he has a vast selection of gear and instruments to keep his clients coming back for more.

 

The gear:

The Axeman has a surprisingly mobile setup for the home studio. He lives a nomadic recording lifestyle because a lot of production these days involves traveling to various musician’s homes to work on preproduction and other intricacies of the record process. His expenses have gone into purchasing a Fractal Audio Axe-Fx Mark II to keep from carting around various Continue reading “Studio Makeover Month: The Axeman Studio Setup”

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DAW Best Practices: Migrating SONAR to a New Computer

So you just brought home your shiny new dream machine computer with the most powerful CPU, loads of drive space and more RAM then you know what to do with. First thing you do is fire up SONAR to work on a project but wait – you can’t find any of your favorite plug-ins. It’s time to migrate all of your favorite settings, and this handy article will show you how.

Set-up
The first thing you will need is a way to move files from your old computer to your new one. The easiest method is with Gobbler.  Continue reading “DAW Best Practices: Migrating SONAR to a New Computer”

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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”

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Professional SONAR users weigh in on SONAR X3 – Stability, Performance, & Workflow

X3 is being hailed as the most rock solid edition since SONAR’S inception.  Beyond the new tools and features, a lot of work was put into the core functionality of the program to make sure that even top-notch music-making professionals would find performance improvements.  From the Skylight User Interface enhancements, to audio engine improvements – and everything in between, professional users who depend on SONAR day-in and day-out for their livelihood are weighing in:

 

Timothy Wynn (Sonic Fuel Studios / SonicFuel.net) – Los Angeles, CA

Congratulations to SONAR X3 user Timothy Wynn on winning Best Score at the CineRockom Film Festival for “The Liberator” this year.  With several globally successful franchises already to his credit ranging from blockbuster video games such as Command & Conquer, Dungeon Siege, GUN, The Punisher, Red Faction, 2K’s The Darkness II, The Simpsons and Warhawk to music in the hit television series Supernatural, Tim Wynn has gained international recognition as a leader in a new generation of highly talented and versatile composers.

Most recently, Timothy used SONAR to work on the feature films “The Starving Games” and “MK Reloaded (2014),” while also scoring EA Sports Madden 25 with Chris Lennertz.

“Cakewalk software has always been great for me in general, but this round of SONAR has really been stepped up.  SONAR X3 is the most stable DAW I have ever used.   I’m running huge projects Continue reading “Professional SONAR users weigh in on SONAR X3 – Stability, Performance, & Workflow”

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SONAR X2 Feature Peek: R-MIX SONAR (Video)

I will never forget witnessing a demonstration of R-MIX software for the first time.  Fast-forward a bit, and I will also never forget being in a meeting where I discovered that R-MIX was going to be incorporated into SONAR X2 Producer. Music production light-bulbs started going off in my head imagining what I was going to be able to do with multiple instances of R-MIX inside SONAR (see video below.)

What is R-MIX? 

Technically speaking it is an audio manipulation plugin that is powered by Roland’s newly developed V-Remastering technology in conjunction with VariPhrase — lets you see the components of a stereo mix as color-coded clouds of energy and harmonic matter as the track plays.  Speaking as a musician, the only way I can describe it is by calling it “visual sound,” and it is truly impressive as well as creative.