Glad you guys are doing so well with this. I'm not exactly a newbie here but I've been out of it for a while. I'm 74 and I''ve been using Cakewalk and Sonar since 2007, and Studio Vision before that. (Bad luck for me getting into Daws that were subsequently decapitated by Gibson.) Meanwhile though, I had a disastrous hard drive crash followed by the Cakewalk crash, and one of my own, a minor stroke. So i'm a little slow on the uptake.
I've been dicking around with Midi channel assignments for a couple of days, to no avail. I. E. NI suggested that I set everything to Omni. Nope I set everything to channel one , used simple instrument track yada yada. So seeing as how you guys are doing so well with this, maybe you could let me know how exactly you've got this set up, if it's not too much trouble. Just so you know that I'm not a complete idiot, here's some stuff I did in Sonar in2017: https://soundcloud.com/clintswank?fbclid=IwAR1maWsT-Y9FM9O0dp25ZqUBFl3eQOQFgxwNLjxx3LDNqCu1M6A1Td3JfX0