CAKEWALK Sonar 6 Producer Edition (Win)

May 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Allan Metts

Like clockwork, the fine folks at Cakewalk release a new and significant version of their flagship digital audio sequencer each year. This year is no exception. Sonar 6 Producer Edition includes several new tools for working with audio and MIDI, as well as some major productivity enhancements that will let you spend more time making music.

Snap Judgment

Perhaps the most important new feature in Sonar 6 is AudioSnap, which is really a collection of many powerful features. Using AudioSnap, you can line up your project's beats and bars to a previously recorded, free-form performance. You can then quantize an audio track almost as easily as a MIDI one and tighten up the timing of sloppy performances (such as a drummer and bass player playing out of sync) after the performances have been recorded.

Transients in the audio are computed when you first record or import an audio file, so when you enable AudioSnap, you can immediately use a palette of tools to manipulate them (see Fig. 1). If you're dealing with a passage that was recorded without a metronome or other timing reference, you'll first want to align the project's timeline to it. You can navigate among the transients using the Next and Previous buttons or the Tab To Transients command and designate a bar and beat for any or all of them. Sonar will establish the appropriate tempo changes to line everything up the way you want it.

Manually setting the bar and beat for individual transients can be tedious work, so Sonar gives you an Extract Timing feature to do this automatically. You simply specify how much musical time your transients represent, and Sonar will figure out the tempos.

But your audio may have more or fewer transients than it needs for this feature. For example, if you're extracting timing based on quarter notes, you may not have transients spaced exactly on quarter-note boundaries. To help matters here, Sonar provides Sensitivity and Threshold sliders. The Sensitivity slider enables only the transients that fall near musical intervals (you determine the interval). The Threshold slider enables only the transients above a certain volume level.

You can also enable or disable individual transients or insert new ones if the Threshold and Sensitivity sliders don't finish the job. A transient marker can even be “promoted” to prevent it from being disabled by the Threshold and Sensitivity sliders. That gives the marker a special status that makes it immune to the effects of the sliders. (You would do this, for example, when you know that a particular transient is falling on the beat.)

AudioSnap's Extract Timing feature works well on percussion and other parts with a well-defined rhythm. But I tried manipulating an acoustic piano solo and had a little trouble finding a set of transients that fell on regular musical intervals, which is what AudioSnap depends on.

After a bit of tweaking, I finally arrived at a set of transients that fell only on the first downbeat of each measure. But then I discovered an omission in the Extract Timing feature: my piano solo was in 6/8 time, meaning that each of my transients was spaced a dotted half note apart. Unfortunately, there is no option to use dotted half notes as the expected pulse duration for timing extraction. (Cakewalk is aware of this problem and plans to address it in a future update.)

Quantifiably Speaking

When your audio track is lined up with Sonar's beats and bars, the real fun begins. Now that the program has an idea of the relationship between the audio transients and the timing of your music, the beats within this audio track can be manipulated. If your drummer wasn't playing right on the beat, you can fix the performance. Or maybe you'd like to transform a straight rhythm to one with swing. Both things are possible with AudioSnap's Quantize feature, which works essentially the same way as quantizing a MIDI track. The AudioSnap palette supports both the traditional and groove forms of quantizing.

Or perhaps you like the feel of the original performance and want your other tracks to fall in line. AudioSnap can do this too. To perform this operation, you add the transients from the source track to the Pool (which allows them to be used by other tracks). Now go to the track you want to change, and select Quantize To Pool in the AudioSnap dialog box.

When you Quantize To Pool, you are quantizing to the reference track's transients, just as you quantize to established musical intervals in traditional quantizing or to a previously saved groove in groove quantizing. You have control over both the strength and window threshold of the quantizing operation, and you can perform the operation on both audio and MIDI tracks. With audio tracks, you are moving portions of the audio. With MIDI tracks, you are moving the MIDI events.

I used this feature to align the bass and snare drums of a recording with the acoustic piano part. Instead of these instruments playing a straight rhythm, the bass and snare emphasis aligned with the accents of the piano part, which really tightened up the performance. I also used AudioSnap to clean up a sloppy performance after the fact (see Web Clip 1 and 2).

AudioSnap has other features as well. You can have audio clips stretch automatically to follow changes in tempo, split beats into individual clips, or extract MIDI events for use in establishing a reference for groove quantizing. (Only the timing of the audio transients — not the specific pitches — is written as a series of MIDI note messages. AudioSnap is not a pitch-to-MIDI converter.)

Control Freak

Software synths and plug-in effects are more popular than ever, as are hardware control surfaces that give you real knobs and sliders to turn. But as your projects contain more tracks, more software synths, and more plug-in effects, you begin to run out of knobs and sliders. It becomes tedious to constantly map and remap the knobs you see on the screen to your hardware controls.

That's where Sonar's Active Controller Technology (ACT) comes in. ACT maintains the bindings between the controls on the screen and the controls on your desk and switches them appropriately as you change tasks in Sonar. So while you're working in the Track or Console view, your hardware knobs and sliders control track levels and panning. Switch the program's focus to a soft synth, and those same knobs and sliders will automatically start controlling filter cutoffs and LFO speeds.

Edirol PCR controllers have a particularly nice ACT implementation in Sonar (see Fig. 2). An onscreen visualization lets you see exactly what each button, rotary control, and slider maps to. You can also see the current value of each control. As you change context in Sonar, the control labels and values change instantly as well.

If you don't have an Edirol PCR controller, you'll probably use the generic ACT MIDI Controller surface, which provides essentially the same functionality for hardware devices with up to 16 continuous controllers and eight buttons. By default, the ACT MIDI Controller shows you eight buttons, eight buttons with a shift key, eight sliders, and eight rotary controls (a common configuration). Unlike the Edirol PCR surface, the generic ACT surface provides the capability to learn which MIDI message corresponds to which control (the Edirol mappings are predefined for use by this specific family of controllers).