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Back in the old forums there were statements made about the lack of videos made using Sonar suggesting its unpopularity. Well, there have been a plethora of quite recently uploaded video tutorials on YouTube using Cakewalk By BandLab. For any newbie coming into these forums asking questions, I think a sticky should be made of these videos which are very informative. Below are a few YouTube channels I've found. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwqZ0GPSfFgbc8gLCxaYngRGVvlaf57gI https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSfPaEe4wG_TxprjqVLxh9yAH-zGhA8bH https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDkWv3OTMpOHb2hMjuNWBQWyuhhIF6bHj https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeySI9gLWqezjlplGQqTJyhrbvCvKdzTk

Hi everyone, We had an amazing NAMM 2019 show and it was so great to meet so many long time Cakewalk users as well as our business partners there. BandLab had a a beautifully designed space showcasing all the brands and Cakewalk had a very prominent presence at the show. Here are a few pictures. We had stage performances from several artists showcasing all the BandLab brands throughout the day including Heritage guitars, Harmony amps and guitars, and Tiesco pedals. We had a mobile recording rig set up and Cakewalk was used to record all the performances. Ashwin from BandLab and @Mike Balzarini did a fantastic job on the live sound and recording setup at short notice and everyone commented on how great the performances sounded. We recorded 8 channels for all the sets and I would upload the projects at the end of the day for @Jon Sasor and @Jesse Jost to mix and upload the finished tracks to BandLab using the new Export to BandLab feature that we just added in CbB. Jon did an amazing job mixing and mastering these at short notice. To listen to all the great music recorded live check out our NAMM 2018 feed. Jesse also posted some more information about the artists playing. Thanks again to you all for your support and for all our users who took the trouble to come to NAMM and meet us. It was great listening to your feedback and meeting you face to face. PS: I forgot to mention. This year all the demo songs played at NAMM came from Cakewalk users. It was great showing real world production projects at the show. Some of these were were full projects with all the plugin's intact. The Silverlight tune had tons of Slate plugins as well as an MP4 video clip synced to it. It played with no problems even at 256 samples on a Surface Book. Also some NAMM Videos that Meng shared in another thread:

Before the shutdown, I was using Sonar, Studio One, Ableton Live, and Pro Tools (when I had to work on projects cut in a Pro Tools studio(. After the shutdown, I'm using CbB, Studio One, Ableton Live, and Pro Tools (when I have to work on projects cut in a Pro Tools studio). I even bounce around among DAWs a lot via AAF (hey Cakewalk - when are we going to have AAF import/export? I like it a lot better than OMF) and exporting/importing stems. I just wrote an article for Sweetwater inSync on the case for learning and using more than one DAW, I expect it will be published soon. I think it will be of particular interest to those who are concerned about the learning curve involved in learning a new program.

Get it here https://www.spitfireaudio.com/labs/?utm_source=Spitfire+MASTER+List&utm_campaign=2721cac5ee-LABS_Frozen_Strings_Announce_221218_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_df4ead2b5d-2721cac5ee-344042709&mc_cid=2721cac5ee&mc_eid=d87ba9184d

Me too. A lot of it is way over my head but he's a very engaging chap, and I love his 'what makes this song great' series.

+1 for the creative potential! I find that I can drop chords into the PRV in this thing faster than with any other tool. For example, handy for quickly building up a MIDI chord progression in one track, then adding a matching bassline to it in another track.

Honestly, time is a precious resource. I'd much rather they distribute a PDF user guide so that we can search and view while on the go. I'd much rather read the manual while I'm riding shotgun or between sessions at the training center than waste hours of my time watching YouTube videos. Not having a PDF manual, at least the old Sonar Platinum manual with the obvious caveat that some things may differ, is awful. I have time in between activities while out and about, but I'm definitely not going to sit in front of YouTube and waste that much time. I want an actual PDF user guide.

i think it is worth it for the creative potential but I think you have to get it on the sale price to make it worth it. Al least for me anyway.

Sadly I probably will let my $25 gift expire as there isnt much I crave that the $25 makes it worth it.

Just downloaded this one - they have some great sounds in this free series

Isn't it the truth! Everything is fine, then just as Waves puts every plugin they have into one gigantic bundle for $49 the hot water heater bursts, which soaks your ceiling (and WHY do they put 40 gallons of water in the attic anyway???) and ruins your dining room table. Not to mention the dinging room floor. Then before the plumber can arrive the dryer and washer BOTH poop out. And, oh yeah, don't forget you've been putting that new roof off for two years . . . . And in the meantime Izotope put all it's bundles on sale for 90% off.

Got the WT Bass amp. It may not replace the Kuassa Cerbehaus(sic) bass amp, but it was pretty good when I demoed it last year.

I learned that my plan to not fix something that wasn't broken turned out ok.

I've got a wealthy non-guitarist friend who's been a huge Floyd fan since the early 70's. Apparently he's seriously considering putting in a bid. If he wins, i think i'll be at his house more often!

It is highly likely that peeps who buy DG's guitars will not even play them...

I used it for the Helios 69. Very impressive. I've got some heavy sessions coming up that it will be perfect for.

Hi Kloon, sorry to take so long to reply - work, work, work. Around mark 0:48 & 1:24 for example it sounds like there might be pitch correction going on - I know that these days a lot of singers pull off that sound in their delivery, so it may just be the way you're singing. I don't mind it, but in moderation (like Cher 'Do you Believe in Love'....OK probably not the comparison you were looking for ) I love the harmonies around 3:40 My one crit is that I would have loved to have heard the song take off in another direction. It feels like it's building up to something big, but never quite kicks off. A soaring key change? A tempo shift? It's a solid song though - sounds like it could be on a soundtrack. Great job!

Big improvement, good stuff!

Sigh. The point is, the word 'spice' used to be ****'d out on the old forum, and also there wasn't/isn't a Spice Girl called 'Spice' Spice, so... Oh what's the use...

Can't really fault anything on the track - great playing, great placement - Great mix. One question: What would you do with this type of track? Is it for Libarary music? Soundtrack music?

That series is awesome. There has been quite a few songs where I recall having seen the tab for it, but when I played it through, one part just wasn't quite the same. I always assumed that maybe the band just doubled some stuff, so it won't sound right with just one guitar? But then Beato does a physical play through and pulls out some dissonant note with a hidden rest and I slap my head, realising I have been playing it wrong all along! 💩 I think my relative pitch is only relative to parrot fashioned learning. 🤪

The offer's finished now but it's still showing as 11 GBP here in the UK so abacab's theory might be right.

Only Larry has more DAWs than I so it's time to cut down. I basically stopped using Sonar after v5. The GUI was getting so cluttered. I kept buying licenses because I like to support developers who have the "I trust you" attitude towards end users. Part of that was also I started getting more interested in dance genres and went to FL Studio because of the licensing and great support. I deleted my Gibson Sonar and keep Bandlab. The DAWs I will keep for the future are FL Studio, Live, Reason, and Reaper. I wish I were an expert in Reaper. Some have ditched their pricey DAWs for Reaper. Reason is so unique and stable using it in it's proprietary format. I also keep Acid Pro 7. I may bite on the Magix version someday. Studio One was on my cut list but it's hard to say no to a $70 upgrade. So I'm making a Trance project in it and is a little more challenging than FL or Live. As for Live there will be no more upgrading to Suite. I'm stuck with Bandlab and FL Studio for life. Not too bad. Imagine if you started out today. There is no free DAW like Cakewalk,

Ed's losing his touch. No girls in this year's picture!

I feel sorry for anyone who buys one hoping to sound like David...

I've recently discovered the Rick Beato YT channel. Lot's of great stuff in there.

He's nothing like I thought he would be, which is strange because I've never consciously thought what he might be like.

My wife and I just sold our condo, but haven't bought a new home yet. I've got the money sitting in my bank account. I wonder how mad she'd be? After all, "a house doesn't make a home..."

Grumpy old men. I am to so it's ok.

What have we learned? Well for starters, that one DAW is probably not enough...

I disagree - the bassist is just trying to upstage the guitarist while he's playing the solo. ---typical if you ask me.

Yes, we talked extensively about my must have feature of my other favorite DAW.

this is a great theme!!! I love it...thanks!!!

Another example of your versatility, Bjorn! It reminded me of "Lord Of The Rings" music. I'm waiting for the Elves to knock on my door

Wow, someone didn't do their homework! 😆

I believe that I recall this song when you posted it on the old Cakewalk Forum. It was just a pretty then as it now. But --- can you ever have too much reverb??? I know --- how dare I say that with my penchant for the overuse of 'verb on vocals. Nice one Bjorn!!

Plus, I have a really hard time with the user interface. It is quite different from Cakewalk, Studio One, Mixbus etc. It is pretty capable but I really struggle with its interface and so have not updated.

The Velocity MFX that comes with CbB almost does it, but not quite. A midi compressor would actually be pretty easy... I'll add it to the list (unless the bakers add one more slider to theirs) 😎

I'm an anti-quantizing person for most forms of music (some electronic dance music and disco songs need it). I believe that along with auto-tune, they are tools better to be left alone. IMHO quantizing takes the soul out of the music. It takes the breath out of it. It makes it sterile. The rhythm section needs to groove. Sometimes the 2s and 4s need to be a hair ahead of the beat, some times behind. Same for eighth notes. Big triplets need to be dragged in most cases. Melodies often drag part of a phrase and then rush to catch up or vice versa. Sometimes a certain beat of a song needs to be rushed or dragged for emphasis. In many Latin American forms of music the congas need to be played laid back behind the beat. Sometimes in jazz the ride cymbals need to be a hair pushed. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. I've played professionally since the 1960s in a variety of genres and venues. When I started sequencing MIDI back in the Atari/DOS/MotorolaMac days I tried quantizing and hated the sound. Where's the groove? Where's the soul? Where's the vox humana? I realized I had to play the parts in live, in real time, and use the feel that I'm used to by playing with some of the finest musicians I've ever heard. Of course there are many exceptions. And although you can generalize about certain things like 2&4s being laid back in the blues, the reality is no two songs are alike. If you know the song well, play it like you feel it. One more thing, as I mentioned earlier, some "dance" forms of music and/or individual songs from the disco era on need to be quantized as that is their sound. Of course, there is more than one right way to make music. My way may not be best for you. Insights and incites by Notes

Ooo this sounds promising!!! But this would also require a Daw software provider to take advantage of the feature. Plug for CbB to show controller support some love!

EDM

I think this is still the standard, but they've also come out for a standard wiring of 3.5mm TRS jacks for MIDI (maybe 2.5mm too). But an adapter would be simple enough to get.

I hope they keep using the old 5 din MIDI connector.. I'm sure many of use still use synth / sound modules with that MIDI connector (non USB).

Isn't General MIDI 2 nearly 20 years old now? I think the spec came out in 1999. MIDI 2.0 is a different beast, and looks pretty cool. I especially like the MIDI CI part, where controllers can actually tell your DAW what their capabilities are.

I believe that accessing patches in GM1 and GM2 is the same, just that GM2 has more standard patches - 256 vs 128. Both use the MSB (Most Significant Bit) and LSB (Least Significant Bit) system you described. If you have a GM1 device and feed it GM2 data it will respond to the messages it recognizes. GM2 CC# messages may be ignored or be handled differently. The additional GM2 instruments fall under the same instrument families found in GM1 so you'll still get a piano or drum kit, just possibly not the same kind. For example GM2 has 9 different drum kits vs the 1 found in GM1. The GM2 spec standardized handling of control messages for a variety of parameters, for example: Filter Resonance (Timbre/Harmonic Intensity) (cc#71) Release Time (cc#72) Attack time (cc#73) Brightness/Cutoff Frequency (cc#74) Decay Time (cc#75) Vibrato Rate (cc#76) Vibrato Depth (cc#77) Vibrato Delay (cc#78) Not saying the GM1 devices didn't have the ability to control these kind of settings through MIDI just that the handling (CC#) wasn't consistent across manufacturers. More information at: https://www.midi.org/specifications-old/item/general-midi-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_MIDI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_MIDI_Level_2

Yes, I think GM2 was based on Roland thing called GS. It adds 128 additional standard patch names in a second bank of sounds. I have an Edirol SD-90 that is compatible with GM2, GS and XG (which I think is a Yamaha extended bank). I don't remember exactly how to access them. I have access to up to 16 variations of any GM1 voice by using a MSB (Most Significant Bit) and LSB (Least Significant Bit) in the MIDI stream going to the synth. I suppose GM2 and the others would be accessed in a similar way. But they are just patch maps and not additional sounds so I've never bothered with it. GM1 is nice because I can do a MIDI sequence using GM patches, and when another person receives it, the patches will have the same name. They of course might not sound the same, because each synth has it's on variation on what they think a tenor sax, trumpet, clean guitar or fantasy sounds like, but at least it will be recognizable. If every GM synth doesn't recognize GM2 it's not going to work.. Insights and incites by Notes

Maybe they just left off the word 'General' on the case? I've always liked the SC 8850, but never owned one. Wikipedia Roland SC-8850 "The SC-8850 was the first sound module to incorporate the new General MIDI Level 2 standard." From the SC-8850 manual: http://cdn.roland.com/assets/media/pdf/SC-8850_OM.pdf GS appears to be proprietary Roland format:

MIDI 2 not GM2. You're talking about General MIDI 2 which is an instrument mapping/handling spec. https://www.midi.org/specifications-old/item/general-midi-2 Nothing should change about the workings of your Sound Canvas; Your device will be detected and handled as a MIDI v1. GM2 will remain as is.

https://www.soundclick.com/html5/v4/player.cfm?songID=13827679

With one of my kids under the weather, and another working, there was not a whole lot of partying going on at my place tonight (which suited me just fine anyway). So, I set myself a New Year's Eve challenge this year - compose and record a short tune to celebrate the New Year, and get it posted by midnight. Didn't quite make it -- missed by 40 mins -- but got 'er done. It's a medievalish kind of ditty, and rather rough, full of mistakes and is very much a work in progress, but I like how it turned out. "A Folk Song for the New Year" is dedicated all the folks out there who are hoping for a year of peace, renewal and happiness. Happy New Year, everyone...