Craig Anderton

Thanks for the tip! I'm a big fan of using de-essing in front of amp sims, so I'll have to give this a try. Waves makes great stuff. Have fallen totally in love with the Abbey Road Chambers reverb

The point of Sonarworks is to give you an accurate representation of the "flat" sound. A lot of headphones "hype" the low end or high end, so it's natural that when you disable Soundworks, the sound will change. All you really need to do to monitor with the sound you like is add some EQ to the master bus, after Sonarworks, that boosts the high mids and highs. Consider trying a high shelf with a couple dB of boost, starting at around 3 kHz.

That's the kind of sentence that makes me wonder if it was a good idea to sell my 8-track tape recorder...

The thing about Cakewalk being free is that no matter what DAW people like to use, it's almost certain CbB will have features their DAW doesn't have. So it's worth downloading and becoming familiar with it. For example, I don't know of any program that can do the "drag a piece of music to the tempo track to analyze the tempo changes" function, or does virtual instrument upsampling (or mix recall). The biggest issue with CbB has always been reliability. For example I needed to do something with Waves plug-ins last night, and simply could not get all of them to show up (and for the ones that did, CbB insisted on showing only the 32-bit version). I'll keep trying, but had to switch over to another DAW that handles them without difficulty to complete the task. So I think it's important the developers keep trying to nail down the loose ends, and make the most of what's already in there, before adding too much bling.

Well guess what! I'm wrong...you can edit while recording in the PRV with sound on sound mode, just like the step sequencer. What threw me off was that if you enter or edit something, even if it's later than the current now time position, it doesn't play back until the NEXT iteration of the loop. I tend to program long drum loops to allow for variations, so with something like a 16-bar loop, I'd be entering notes or editing notes but not hear the changes. However if I waited until the loop went around again, they would indeed play back while recording, and I could edit them. So the PRV still isn't as immediate as the step sequencer or conventional drum machine-type pattern creation, but it does work if you're willing to wait for the loop to repeat so you can hear what you did. I don't recall this as being the behavior in the past - perhaps it was changed in an update? Also bear in mind that sound on sound mode doesn't persist from project to project, it always seems to default to comping mode.

So how do you edit it while recording? I'll play with it some more, perhaps my opinions are based on when I tried to do this with older versions, but couldn't.

I should have specified the MIDI piano roll view. The problem is you can't hear what was previously recorded when dealing with the piano roll view. You can use the step sequencer, but that's a different animal compared to the piano roll view. Sometimes I still miss Master Tracks Pro...

Regarding the first point, someone might not have the patience to research what's available, download trial versions, and install multiple pieces of software. But also note that a program like Reason is about more than instruments. For example, there's still no way in CbB to build up a drum machine pattern using MIDI recording and overdubbing. Reason can do that with Redrum, and you can either export the audio and bring it into CbB as a loop, run Redrum as a VI within CbB, or send the MIDI sequence into CbB and use it to trigger a different VI. So I see using a program like Reason as serving simply as a suite of virtual instrument plug-ins, but if you get into it more, you can take advantage of sequencing features unique to Reason. And there are other features, like the Combinator (allows creating sounds that would be time-consuming to put together with conventional plug-ins). As to the second point, I'm not really sure $400 will buy a DAW with the same kind of instrument roster (and content) as Reason, or at least, none come to mind. But again, the context is someone downloads CbB for free, loves it, but wants more instruments and effects for same. Switching to a different DAW with more instruments wouldn't be the answer if they love CbB. Also note that the latest version of Reason not only includes the Europa synthesizer, which by itself is pretty fantastic, but also includes a VST version of Europa that you can use independently of Reason. I'm sure adding Reason via ReWire wouldn't be the best solution for everyone, but I do think it would be the ideal solution for some people. I find it really convenient to save a Reason document as a complete backline, and then be able to bring it into a DAW with a couple clicks (compared to loading a bunch of VSTis). Different strokes for different folks and all that, but I do think people should be aware of the possibilities, because it might be exactly what they need.

The list is actually more impressive than what Noel indicates. In addition to writing in my Sound on Sound column about elastique pitch stretching and Scan in Sandbox, I also covered updates Noel didn't mention, like the Clean Audio Folder enhancements, note draw duration buttons, aim assist enhancements, the streamlined export function that simplifies exporting stems, and some of the other improvements that have been made. So, I don't think there's any need to convince SOS's editors that Cakewalk's updates deserve coverage, because it's already happening on a monthly basis. And as a writer, it certainly is convenient that Cakewalk still keeps doing updates - there's always something to write about However, I don't always write about enhancements. For example, I just submitted a column on how to do VCA fader-like functions using CbB's existing feature set.

I hear you, Jim. But with a 64-bit engine, I've found that changing levels on a normalized signal doesn't really seem to have any impact.

Absolutely! Amp sims come to mind, so do compressors, which depend so much on input level.

True...at least this time it wasn't because I was late getting the column in But I will say CbB takes a lot fewer breaks than some of the other DAWs, because when the column isn't in an issue, people write to SOS and say "I sure hope you're not getting rid of the Cakewalk column."

Unfortunately, you are correct about "so many others have." One thing many magazines do that does defer to advertisers is not running reviews of so-so products. However, I can't disagree with that decision. The number of pages is so limited, a magazine is much more interested in highlighting products that are worthy of consideration. Also, it's hard to convince reviewers to spend weeks dealing with something they find meh, when they'd much rather review something more interesting.

Normalization is still an essential process for narration (and often vocals) when doing phrase-by-phrase normalization, because of being able to assign to keyboard shortcuts and move super-fast compared to using clip envelopes. You also don't get the artifacts involved with dynamics processing. CbB's normalization is particularly useful because it doesn't force 0 as the limit - you can normalize to any level. The best workaround is to create a macro that bounces a clip to itself, and then normalizes, with one shortcut.

Good questions, to be sure. The Intro version used to support ReWire, but no longer does. The full version costs $399, but what you get for that is impressive. Remember, my context is someone who has downloaded CbB, but now needs plug-ins. Reason works out to under $25 per virtual instrument, and there are also the 20 effects you can put on those instruments. As to learning two DAWs, that's a misconception when it comes to ReWire. Think of ReWire as turning a DAW into a plug-in. All you really need to do is figure out how to get MIDI to an instrument, which basically involves choosing it as a MIDI output in CbB, and clicking on the instrument you want to hear in Reason as you record. All the instruments default to mixing down to a stereo channel in CbB's mixer, but with a little more effort, you can expose Reason's individual outputs and assign different instruments to different outputs. It's really not very different from using a multi-timbral synth like SampleTank. Of course, if you want to take advantage of Reason's pattern sequencers and such, you need to learn those.

With Sound on Sound, that is total B.S. They run plenty of reviews from companies that don't advertise. You're also overlooking a very important fact about demographics. Advertisers advertise in a magazine because they believe the readers are the target demographic for their product. Similarly, magazines want to review products that are of interest to their readership. The two often coincide. Having edited magazines, the single, most important factor in success is to have readers. Otherwise, a magazine is of no value to advertisers. We'd often run articles that we felt would appeal to the readers, regardless of whether a company advertised or not. It brought up the number of readers for those companies that did advertise. Sound on Sound supports CbB every month, by publishing my column (which has run since Sonar was introduced). These cover the incremental improvements in a way that a once-every-few-years review cannot. This also proves my point regarding Bouwer's comments. Not only does BandLab not advertise CbB in Sound on Sound, it costs the magazine to cover CbB because they pay me to write the articles. But, they believe covering CbB every month is important to their readers.

Very sorry about that, I certainly stand corrected about Reaper! When I googled, I found several articles (like this one), and also the wiki.cockos.com documentation, that described using Reaper as a host, but none describing Reaper as a client. Then again, I didn't search on "rewire synthesizer" or "rewire slave," only "rewire client." Also, I had tried using Reaper as a client once and it didn't work. However, I do recall that at one point, Propellerheads were really late delivering a 64-bit library for ReWire. So there were several months (maybe almost a year?) where you couldn't rewire anything with 64-bit DAWs. Perhaps that's why it didn't work for me. FWIW the new version of ACID that Magix overhauled can also be a client.

It is definitely not a Cakewalk issue, Sonar always had a good ReWire implementation. I think the main issue is that companies don't really answer Larry's question above: "Why would I want to know?" Describing the nuts and bolts of how to do it doesn't make sense without giving the big picture as to why. But, this void is what gives me writing opportunities! I think it's going to be a fun article to write, and I hope it will help people understand that ReWire has some really legit uses. Before the Matrix View, I did a lot of rewiring of Ableton Live into Sonar. I also was an early adopter of Reason, and with Sonar having one of the better ReWire implementations, it really filled a gap in plug-in land back then. I still find Reason's virtual instruments to be really cool, which is why I think they'd be an ideal match for someone who's starting off with CbB, but doesn't have a vast collection of VST instruments. Again, thanks everyone for the comments.

This is very useful feedback, because even though it's only two responses, my sense is that they're representative. The bottom line is that ReWire lets you treat an entire DAW as a plug-in. Larry, the reason "why you would want to know" would be more relevant if you didn't have Platinum, because CbB has very limited software synths. But by writing one check and getting Reason, via ReWire it would essentially become a "super plug-in" within CbB. You'd have a basic sampler along with a quite sophisticated one, a killer modular synth, killer normalized synth, unique Graintable synthesizer, "drum designer" on a level similar to Studio One's Impact XT or NI's Battery, TR-808-style drum machine, virtual analog synth, eight-track REX file playback machine, something similar to the Cakewalk Sound Center for more conventional sounds, and a whole bunch of effects. All of these would feed into CbB's mixer, just as if they were conventional soft synths, and be triggered by CbB's MIDI tracks. Kurre, I feel your pain but the reason it didn't work is because Reaper and CbB are both host-only. ReWire needs a host, and a client to ReWire into the host. Some programs are host only, some client only, and a very few are both (Ableton Live is the only one that comes to mind). So an article on what ReWire is and how to use it would have saved you time. I'm beginning to think this is worth pursuing, so thanks for your feedback. FWIW Sweetwater also seems to think that most users don't understand the advantages of ReWire...if people knew how ReWire worked, the ones who don't like CbB's staff view could use Presonus Notion, a notation program that also works as a client. Granted, ReWire can't be as tightly integrated into a program as something that's in the program's DNA, but that's how Studio One gets around needing to incorporate notation.

I had a thought for my Sound on Sound column on CbB...it's great that CbB is free, but it doesn't include the instruments that were in Platinum. Given the money you save from not having to buy CbB, and the uncertainty over when/if any instruments would be re-introduced in a Cakewalk store, it seems like it would make sense to buy Reason, ReWire it into CbB, and use it as a synth/sampler/drum computer backline for CbB. Although it might seem using ReWire is obvious, there are some fine points and those would be the subject of the column. Thoughts? Worth doing?

Not necessarily; depending on the nature of the stretching process, you can stretch pitch and time simultaneously (i.e., tape-style varispeed), just pitch, or just tempo. This is the ideal option, for sure. Starting a song solely with MIDI instruments allows creating the overall arrangement and making tempo changes early on, without having to deal with audio. After the basics are down, then the overdubbed audio can follow along more easily. However, I pretty much need to record to a click so that tempo-synched effects (especially delay effects) don't create artifacts when they try to follow tempo. Then I stretch the final two-track with fairly subtle changes, and don't have to be concerned with sync issues.

Try freezing tracks.

Another option is to complete the song at the slower tempo, mix it, then stretch the stereo two-track to the desired tempo.

Windows drivers or ASIO? With Windows drivers, if the "what you hear" option is enabled, you can easily send the audio engine into feedback.

"The grass is greener where you water it" - Neil Barringham