Cakewalk gives the
other brands of software a run for their money by
releasing the feature-packed SONAR 6 Producer Edition.
Finally we have a program that natively supports both
VST and DX plug-ins along with well designed MIDI
controls like the built in MIDI FX and ACT auto-mapping
for your controllers. It can run unlimited audio or MIDI
tracks, comes with an arsenal of plug-ins, including
some brand new top-quality mastering effects and EQ. It
ships with 4 synths, a drum machine, sampler, REX loop
player, Roland VariPhraseŽ vocal processor, 2 excellent
reverbs, a new vintage mastering EQ/dynamics processor,
and a handful of other effects. It easily moves audio
around like MIDI with a new time manipulation feature
called AudioSnap. If you want to be able to host all
your plugs in one box, this is it. You can link ReWire
programs (Live, Reason, Project 5, etc.) run VST
plug-ins, DX plug-ins, MIDI FX, dynamics, EQ and mix it
all through a clean sounding 64-bit mixing engine with
excellent sounding POW-r dither. Support for video
frames, 64-bit OS and Vista-ready. Let’s check it out.
Installation
A very simple
installation process, you put in the included DVD disc
(just one) and you click next, next, next…..it asks you
where you want to put the program, and what plug-ins you
want to install, (including the older SONAR plug-ins)
but other than that it’s nothing you haven’t seen
before. The activation is a serial code. You need to log
onto Cakewalk’s website and they give you an activation
code after you register the serial number that is
printed on the DVD case. After that you’re unlocked and
ready to go. There is a 30-day grace period before the
program must be registered and activated.
Getting
Started
This program has a
wizard and tips of the day to guide on how to start
using the program. To get started quickly, just hit
file/new and choose a “normal” template for starters.
(You can also hit CTRL + N)
Like all programs, it’s important to make sure your
soundcard is set correctly and your MIDI
keyboards/controllers are working. Not a difficult task,
because it’s right there in the options tab under
“audio.” Tried it with my Mbox, an Intel laptop sound
card, and a Creative SoundBlaster HD card. Works fine.
Use ASIO or WDM drivers if you can because they’re newer
and better. “MIDI devices” options are easy too, just
highlight all your ports and click okay.
Last I would set
up the plug-ins. Every time you open SONAR 6 it will
auto-scan and load your new plug-ins but you first have
to point it to the correct folders. For example, I have
most of my VSTs in a folder named “steinberg/vst plugins.”
Just click “tools/Cakewalk Plug-in Manager/options” and
add all of the folders you want SONAR to scan. It will
load up all your DX and VST plugs with no wrapper! SONAR
6 indeed has native VST and DX support.
Once you got this
all set, you’re good to go. No need for the printed
manual (it’s nice to have though) -just click on “help”
(F1) and quickly search for what you’re looking for.
There are also great instructional videos on the
installation disc as well as Cakewalk’s website that I
highly recommend watching, because they are really well
done and explain everything clearly. If you really get
stuck then send tech support an email. I sent one in on
Sunday evening and they got back to me in 18 hours.
Thumbs up for Cakewalk Tech support.
Custom Everything
SONAR 6 goes above
and beyond with customization options. Menus can be
resized, rearranged, hidden, colors can be changed,
custom icons are available for your mixer, custom names
for menus, custom shortcuts, layout, toolbar positions,
tool icons can be shown or hidden…pretty much everything
that you want to change you can change. You can save
everything, of course and change to different layouts,
or the default layout at anytime. I found it quite time
consuming to play around with this, but nevertheless
it’s very useful and rather fun indeed. The best
customizing option for me is the plug-in menu. You can
finally change the order and appearance of your plug-ins
menu, which I know a lot of users with a long plug-in
list are dying for, including me. I would also like to
add that the transport window has been revamped and can
be further customized as well, which is an extremely
handy feature for those working professionally with
music, because a good transport is something you can’t
live without.
VC-64
Vintage Channel
The VC-64 is a
mastering plug-in that you’d most likely put on the
master track or bus. It has a gate, de-esser,
compressor, and a parametric EQ. These are effects
designed for mastering duties so you’ll find the
compression is on the mellow “soft knee” side. Slapping
this on the master bus in the SONAR 6 mixer and dialing
in some subtle sweetening helped me to polish and bring
together the final mix on some hip-hop tracks I had been
working on. The gate removes rumble but I found that it
can also be used to shorten or remove sounds, if you
play around with the decay/threshold knobs. The de-esser
is designed to tame sibilance but it has a sweepable
“freq” knob that you can use to duck other frequencies
as well. Interestingly, the processing chain can be
altered so that you can put say, the compressor first or
last, before the EQ, after the EQ, etc., and there are
presets to do this. There’s an invert phase button on
each processor. The processor is quite efficient, so
there’s not a huge CPU hit, and it’s visually appealing,
with vintage-style design and smooth shading on the
knobs and buttons. Cakewalk teamed up with Kjaerhus
Audio to make this
Active
Controller Technology (ACT)
Many studios and
users have incorporated control surfaces into their
setup and ACT control helps to make your control surface
much easier to use. As you click on different plug-ins
or windows, ACT control will automatically re-map your
control surface or keyboard knobs to whatever you are
looking at. I tried this using my M-Audio O2 keyboard
and found that it worked extremely well. Of course, ACT
wasn’t able to read my mind about the position of EVERY
knob or slider I wanted, but it got 90% of everything in
just the right place. Even if you wanted to further
customize it’s just a matter of turning on “ACT learn,”
then moving the parameter(s) on-screen, twist a knob or
move a slider and that’s it. What’s interesting is you
can map more than one knob on screen to a single knob on
your keyboard or controller. I was getting crazy filter
sweeps and sound control by mapping stuff like EQ freq
and filter cutoff to a single knob on my keyboard. You
can save all of your custom settings and favorite
mappings to be used again. New templates for popular
control surfaces are springing up all the time, which
you can download off the net, from various users as well
as Cakewalk’s website.
Oldies but
Goodies
The new VC-64 and
Session Drummer 2 are great plug-ins for upgraders, but
new users will also benefit from the other plug-ins
included from previous versions of SONAR. The reverbs,
for example, cover a lot of ground. All of your
synthetic, traditional and realistic reverb duties can
be covered by the Lexicon Pantheon and Perfect Space
reverb plug-ins. Lexicon is famous in the world of
hardware reverb and effects -this plug-in gives you a
version of the Lexicon algorithms. Perfect Space is a
convolution reverb with 350 preset algorithms and you
can load your own. The GUI is elegantly done with full
graphic display and essential controls for shaping your
impulses.
The Sonitus:fx EQ
it comes with is far superior in sound quality to the
older Cakewalk EQ and I usually reach for it first. But
the Cakewalk plug-ins don’t eat up as much CPU and they
can do the same thing in certain cases, so they’re
useful to have at your disposal. The Cakewalk bundle
also comes with many effects that Sonitus doesn’t, such
as delay/echo, tape/amp simulation, Spectra FX
modulation, flanger and pitch shifting. These two cover
most of your EQ, dynamics, panning, and modulation
needs.
The Alien
Connections ReValver plug-in is a guitar effects unit
that allows you to build your own effects rack with. You
can stack up reverb, distortion, preamps, power amps,
auto-wah, EQ, gain and speaker cabinets. The Pentagon I
synth sounds great. I would describe it as a versatile
“modern,” sounding soft-synth with some analog guts. I
find a lot of soft-synths suffer from digititis (too
digital) but this one has enough lush to make the
aliasing sound like music. You can also use it as an
effects processor or a vocoder.
The Roland
GrooveSynth has sounds taken from the original 101, 303,
505, 507, 606, 808, and 909 machines, and the
Dreamstation DXi2 is a simple, straightforward
polyphonic synth to create those in-your-face analog
sounds. The PSYNII is taken from Project 5. It’s a
subtractive BEAST when compared out there and the
patches get you going from a quick starting point. It
covers a wide range of electronica pad and lead duties
and yet it can handle the cheesy, typical blip and womps
that we all love. Like the GrooveSynth, you can use your
mouse wheel to quickly scroll the patches -another
thumbs up for sure.
Last on the list
would be the RXP and Cyclone loop players. The RXP loads
and plays .rex files while the Cyclone auto slices your
loops. These plugs share similar duties, but the Cyclone
allows you to delete slices and replace them with other
sounds, while the RXP ships with a 285MB of .rex loops
ready for you to start making noise. Both of these guys
allow you to load in your own loops, and feature a small
set of controls such as pitch, volume, and pan for each
slice. RXP has a multimode filter and amp envelope which
is handy for carving the shape of a hit or a loop. All
of the hits and slices can, of course be triggered by
MIDI notes.
OH
SNAP!!!!
A big feature to
talk about in SONAR 6 Producer Edition is the AudioSnap
function. And it is seriously a BIG feature. It’s a
mulitrack audio quantize function with groove
extraction. Huh? Basically it means that you can record
a MIDI or audio loop with no click or tempo set, and
AudioSnap will calculate the tempo and feel of the
groove you just played. So for instance, record a random
drum loop with no metronome or click. Now trim the start
and end to get a good loop going. Right click on the
loop and choose “AudioSnap enable” and AudioSnap will
slice the loop at the transients. You can now define
which sounds fall on which bar/beat and SONAR 6 will
calculate the tempo of your loop.
The tempo of the
loop can vary and SONAR 6 will create a “tempo map” that
changes as the beat plays to extract a very accurate
groove. You can then save this groove and force another
sound, say a bass line or even the whole song to follow
the feel of the drums with groove quantize. Or vice
versa. You could force drums to follow the timing of a
weird guitar loop, etc….the possibilities are endless.
It acts as an auto slicer and allows you to individually
grab single hits or sounds and drag them around to add
more lag or swing in there, or even quantize to grid.
The way this thing manipulates timing simply amazes. It
can do the silky, laggy, swing that the Akai MPC has
-just AudioSnap a drum loop and grab the lines (slices)
and drag em around. Lag the kicks and the snares. Or you
could push things a bit more “forward.” You can zoom in
like crazy small and correct the hit to fall exactly
where it’s supposed to, or not supposed to. You can also
slip-stretch audio with high quality algorithms from
Izotope and Radius. This is good to stretch or
time-compress one loop to match the length of another,
for instance. And the time stretching results are very
smooth and convincing. AudioSnap is like a built in Beat
Detective Pro (Pro Tools) plus Propellerheads’ Recycle
with professional non-destructive time stretching.
Viva la
vocal
For all of your
auto-tuning needs, Roland’s V-Vocal VariPhrase processor
should get your tongue twisted by saying its name really
fast. ? On top of that, it also takes care of your vocal
tuning, timing, and volume duties. Right click on the
audio you want to correct and click V-Vocal/create
V-Vocal clip. This opens the V-Vocal editor which shows
you the detected pitch of your audio with a squiggly
yellow line. You can then use drawing tools to smooth
out the squiggles (unwanted vibrato) and raise or lower
the pitch to the correct note. You can also add vibrato
(more squiggles) that wasn’t there before and make notes
or words longer or shorter. But you can’t draw a smiley
face, I tried. The dynamics section has a
breakpoint-type control over volume levels for each word
or note. Advanced users can edit the actual formants as
well. This is done from a very simple, yet intuitive
graph with dials on the bottom for pitch/scale and
sensitivity of the analyzer. When you exit the editor,
all of the settings are stored inside of the audio
selection, and you can double click it to re-open
V-Vocal and change stuff.
General MIDI/Soundfonts
Most users won’t
be doing much in the general MIDI or soundfont areas of
music, but we haven’t forgotten about you. Shipping with
every version of SONAR 6 Producer Edition is a high
quality GM2 compatible sound module called TTS-1 and a
slick looking soundfont player called SFZ. I had fun
breaking in the TTS-1 by downloading MIDI versions of my
favorite old skool Nintendo game songs and playing them
through this module. The sounds are better than the
older GM sounds, although they still have that GM cheese
to it, but that’s what general MIDI is all about. Those
Nintendo game files sure bring back a lot of memories!
The SFZ player
ships with a piano soundfont instrument taken from
Cakewalk’s Dimension Pro synth. It loads all those free
soundfonts one can find while surfing on the internet
plus any other sound font you may have, of course. It
has a few parameters to change the voice count,
polyphony, and disable effects.
A Few
Other Things…
There is an
included spectral analyzer called AN-879 which is
incredibly easy to use and read. You can customize the
look of your plug-in menu which is great news for those
of you who have a motherload of plugs. All plug-ins have
automatic delay compensation so you can use them with no
lag in real time, all the time. Thoughtful programmers
at Cakewalk made it so that your mouse wheel can be used
to control almost any parameter. Believe it or not this
really helps a lot when you are working on something
–especially for changing patches.
As always, SONAR
can print your plug-in tracks into audio in one click
(track freeze). That way you can turn off the plug-in
and save CPU cycles. There is an included arpeggiator
and chord analyzer you can use on every MIDI track along
with a few other built in MIDI fx. As mentioned earlier,
you can load your own MIDI fx plug-ins as well.
Conclusion
I must admit,
before I began this review I had underestimated SONAR 6
by far. By the time I had explored every nook and cranny
of the program, I was left a firm believer. A HUGE plus
is that this program makes it very easy to edit your
audio like MIDI. The bundle of mixing and mastering
effects is a tremendous asset and the included drums,
synths, and sounds are a strong foundation for creating
music and sound effects. For composers and beat makers
you will eventually desire more synths, drums, and sound
modules, and you will have no problem finding compatible
ones with SONAR’s universal format support.
A lot of you have
already started your own collection of plug-ins and are
simply looking for an easy way to use them all in one
place, and with the custom menus, sorting them out is no
problem. The look and feel of this program is very click
and drag, although there were a few buttons that I wish
were bigger. It’s not really a fair complaint on my end,
though, because nearly every single menu, button,
keyboard shortcut and layout can be fully customized
right down to the colors and shading.
I think Cakewalk
went through a lot of trouble to make sure everyone was
happy here and at this price, they sure prove it. You
simply won’t find a DAW or host program that has this
many pro-quailty features and plug-in compatibility at
this price. I highly recommend this DAW as a good
central starting point for those of you who need the DX
and VST support, along with in-the-box mixing and
mastering. Windows x64 and Vista users will want to give
this one a try as well.
