For your pleasure and edification the latest CakeTV Live webinar is now available for viewing on CakeTV. In this latest installment of CakeTV Live Brandon Ryan and I walk through the process of taking recorded, live drums from sounding, ‘meh’, to ‘larger than life’ using SONAR X1.
We explain everything from how to setup and organize a project to mixing, rout tracks to buses, fix timing with AudioSnap, setup and use parallel compression with the ProChannel, and much, much more.
A common question I get asked when doing J.A.M. Sessions, webinars, and other events, is how to setup parallel compression in SONAR. The next asked question is usually what parallel compression is and why it should be used.
Parallel compression is a mixing technique most commonly used on drums where one signal is split into two allowing them to be processed separately, or in parallel, and mixed together.
Typically a drum bus will be split into two drum buses where one drum bus will be compressed heavily and the other drum bus will be compressed lightly, if at all.
The reason for doing this is that heavy compression on drums can sound good but can also cause a major loss of transients and attack. Blending heavily and lightly compressed drum buses yields the best of both worlds.
There are a few ways to set up parallel compression in SONAR X1 Producer Expanded so I will show you how I do it using quick grouping, effects sends, multiple busses, and the ProChannel’s PC4K S-Type Bus Compressor.
Pentagon has been around in the soft synth world for a long time. If you’re a SONAR user you’re probably familiar with its prowess as an analogue modeling synth. What you might not be familiar with, though, is that it can be used as a vocoder, too.
Check out the CakeTV video below on how to setup and use Pentagon as a vocoder.
Continue reading “Go Deeper With Pentagon, The Hidden Vocoder”
Keyboard Shortcuts are at the heart of any DAW’s workflow, and SONAR X1 is no exception. And the QWERTY keyboard is still the central way in which we use those shortcuts and interface with our DAWs in general.
Traditional keyboards aren’t labelled for anything other than a particular language. However, the custom made, slimline, SONAR X1 LogicKeyboard has SONAR’s default Keyboard Shortcuts printed right onto its 125 multi-colored keys.
When we designed SONAR X1 we took many of the old, not-so-logically organized Shortcuts, threw them onto the table, and reorganized them into Shortcuts that we thought would be not only easier to remember, but also into groups of like Shortcuts that go together, which we call Key Clusters.
Continue reading “Keyboard Shortcuts and the SONAR X1 LogicKeyboard”
A couple of years ago we started SONAR University with a bang by releasing a fourty-plus minute long Master Class on drum production. Since then we’ve released two more Master Classes and dozens of Get Started and Go Deeper videos. And right now we’ve got one more Master Class video in the works.
Our first three master classes were released when YouTube had limits on video length. It started at ten minutes and eventually became fifteen minutes, but we were forced to break up our Master Classes into multi-part videos since they all were longer than fifteen minutes.
Thanks to YouTube now allowing videos of any length to live on their site, and in anticipation of the release of our next Master Class, we’ve decided to refresh our original three Master Classes as single, individual videos. Now you can watch them from start to finish with no interruption. Enjoy, and stay tuned for the release of the next Master Class.
Continue reading “New SONAR X1 Master Class Video In the Works, Old Videos Refreshed”
Last week Brandon Ryan and I hosted our second CakeTV Live webinar on music production with SONAR X1. Broadcast live over the internet from Burbank, CA, this latest installment of CakeTV Live was every bit a success as the first CakeTV Live webinar. With a steady 240+ viewers this time from all over the world, we had a steady stream of great questions coming in throughout the demo.
Of course, we understand that many of you couldn’t make it to the live broadcast, so we’ve uploaded the video to YouTube for your viewing pleasure. This hefty video weighs in at one hour and forty minutes and is loaded with music production workflow techniques straight from Brandon Ryan’s bag of tricks.
Continue reading “Second CakeTV Live Broadcast Now Available on YouTube”
If you thought NAMM was something, wait until next week when Musikmesse 2012 opens itself to the world in Frankfurt, Germany from March 21st – 24th. The planet’s largest Music Industry trade show is looming just over the horizon and we’ll be there to show off our latest wares, gadgets, and goodies, including a new brand new, yet to be released ProChannel module.
We’ll formally announce the new module at the show. In the meantime, check out the picture below to spot the module in action. But don’t tell anyone I gave you the drop, OK?
Continue reading “Musikmesse Preview And New ProChannel Module”
If you’re a SONAR X1 user then you’ve probably already seen that the free SONAR X1d update has been released for all versions of SONAR X1. And if you’re a SONAR X1 Producer Expanded user, then you’ve probably already noticed that you’ve got a shiny, new EQ in the ProChannel called the QuadCurve EQ.
However, you might be wondering what exactly the deal is with the new EQ and and what the differences are in the four modes.
Recently we released our NAMM videos to CakeTV. The six videos contain over an hour of footage of SONAR X1 demonstrations narrated by a combination of Cakewalk staff and Cakewalk artists. And there’s certainly a lot of interesting and useful information to be seen (and heard).
However, due to circumstances beyond our control, the video’s audio quality didn’t turn out quite as expected. With our booth in the Roland arena, and with so many adjacent demo booths within direct earshot, said audio contains not only what’s in the demo being filmed but also a lot of what’s going on around it.
Live from the Cakewalk booth in the Roland arena, longtime SONAR user, producer, singer, and songwriter Yogi Lonich (Wallflowers, Melissa Etheridge, Buckcherry, and Fuel) shows off his latest SONAR project and breaks down why he loves to create music in SONAR X1.
Upgrade to SONAR X1 or or find a dealer to become a new user today.
