How do I force Sonar to use a given lane when manually entering new MIDI data? (SOLVED)

[Starship Krupa]

Situation:

I'm working on a song where I recorded a synth bass part by playing it in in real time, then tidying the performance.

I got another idea for a bassline, so I recorded another one, repeat tidying.

Now I have 2 existing lanes, and yet another idea for a bassline, which I would like to enter entirely by using my mouse in the PRV rather than playing it on the controller.

The problem I'm running into is that I can't figure out how to enter these notes into a new, third lane. When I enter notes, the appear in clips overlaying the clips in one of the existing lanes (always the same lane).

I've tried creating a new, blank lane and clicking its header to select it before flipping over to the PRV, and that doesn't work. Rearranging the existing lanes and empty lane changes nothing. All clips in both existing lanes are muted. Just for laughs, I tried unmuting the clips and any new notes still went into the same existing lane.

Of course the path of least resistance would be to record a couple of random notes using my controller, which would create a new lane. Then I could delete the random notes in the PRV and continue on my merry way.

But I dislike not understanding things, so what am I missing here? What's the correct procedure for this?

Obvious workaround suggestions like creating a whole new track, entering the new part, then copying the clips to the existing track are discouraged. I've already figured out multiple ways to get around the issue, I'm trying to satisfy my curiosity about how it's supposed to work. There must be some logic to how Sonar's choosing what lane my manually entered notes will go into.

Edited February 12 by Starship Krupa

[David Baay]

8 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

The problem I'm running into is that I can't figure out how to enter these notes into a new, third lane. When I enter notes, the appear in clips overlaying the clips in one of the existing lanes (always the same lane).

Usually T1 in my experience, but can vary depending on the editing history of the track. The workaround is to move any clips out of that lane to the new lane and let CW put the new notes where it wants. I'm pretty sure I reported this issue in the distant past but haven't been persistently bothered by it since I record most of my MIDI in real time with Create New Lane always enabled.

[Starship Krupa]

46 minutes ago, David Baay said:

The workaround is to move any clips out of that lane to the new lane and let CW put the new notes where it wants.

Yes, that would work too, as well as the other workarounds I've described, but it still amounts to observing where Sonar is adding new notes and then shuffling existing data around to make room for it.

What I'm trying to learn is what logic Sonar uses to decide where newly added notes are going to go, and if possible make them appear in an otherwise empty lane.

[David Baay]

I don't think there's any 100% predictable or easily controllable behavior. Pretty clearly developers did not consciously address how the PRV would interract with lanes when manually entering new events, and some enhancement will be needed to give users positive control. Ideally you would be able to clearly identify and specify the target lane from within the PRV.

[Starship Krupa]

9 hours ago, David Baay said:

I don't think there's any 100% predictable or easily controllable behavior.

Interesting. So a workflow that is common for me, enter a part by playing, then add notes to it later, is uncharted territory for Sonar. They get entered, but there's no official rule as to which lane.

One way I think would work would be if newly added notes were added to whichever lane is currently selected in Track View.

Unless someone else speaks up, I guess the process is to play a couple of notes in from the controller to make the new lane the active one and go from there. Or as you suggest, enter a few notes to find out which lane Sonar wants to use, then move the existing data out.

Or just create a whole new track.

I guess the assumption is that for a given track, either the user is going to be entering notes manually or they're going to be playing them on a controller.

[User 905133]

5 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

. . . a workflow that is common for me, enter a part by playing, then add notes to it later, is uncharted territory for Sonar. They get entered, but there's no official rule as to which lane.

Since your workflow (tweaking notes in take lanes) is very different from my various workflows I have been trying to understand how you use the take lanes.  For years I have used tracks as lanes but never took to exploring the use of Take Lanes.

Several years ago I used an exploratory workflow on several songs-in-progress where I created a basic orchestrated progression (bass, drums, rhythmic chords, and pad chords) and used take lanes to trying layering all sorts of melody lines to try to make a pop/rock medley.  

Before that I never tried editing (adding / tweaking notes and other musical elements) on the take lane level.  Since it was personally intuitive editing on the track level using such tools as the staff view, the event list, cutting and pasting, etc. I never took to using take  lanes. They have some characteristics that would have taken far too much mental energy for me to try to understand what was going on with them (e.g., weird breaks when loop recording, strange issues when saving and restoring soloed/muted lanes, etc.).

Not 100% sure, but when I was  using the exploratory song-in-progress take-lanes-based workflow, I might have tried tweaking notes as well as editing take lanes, but since it wasn't personally intuitive, I went back to my tried-and-trusted methods (tracks as lanes). I don't recall if I tried combining sections of different takes within the take lanes subview.  I might have tried and then just went back to my personally successful methods.

Since then, I seem to recall reading some forum discussions of methods for using, selecting, and combining takes.  I would be interested in hearing the details of how others successfully use take lanes.  I have never doubted that for some users they can be very helpful. So, I would be interested in hearing from others as to how they use the take lanes subview.

16 hours ago, David Baay said:

I don't think there's any 100% predictable or easily controllable behavior. Pretty clearly developers did not consciously address how the PRV would interract with lanes when manually entering new events, and some enhancement will be needed to give users positive control. Ideally you would be able to clearly identify and specify the target lane from within the PRV.

I don't use the PRV (personal preference), but this ^^^ might also benefit workflows which use other tools.

Quote

One way I think would work would be if newly added notes were added to whichever lane is currently selected in Track View.

Unless someone else speaks up, I guess the process is to play a couple of notes in from the controller to make the new lane the active one and go from there. Or as you suggest, enter a few notes to find out which lane Sonar wants to use, then move the existing data out.

Or just create a whole new track.

I guess the assumption is that for a given track, either the user is going to be entering notes manually or they're going to be playing them on a controller.

I occasionally listen to and jam along with some of those old song-in-progress projects (esp. "Ray" -- so nicknamed because it is based on a Ray Manzarek style electric piano "bass" line). The next time I will try to make some time to explore what I was doing in combination with additional methods others present.

Edited February 8 by User 905133
erroneously word deleted ("make")

[David Baay]

28 minutes ago, User 905133 said:

So, I would be interested in hearing from others as to how they use the take lanes subview.

I use them mostly when recording the first few passes of a new piano improvisation as MIDI.  Unless I've already played through it many times before I decide to record it, I tend to hit a lot clams or improperly voiced chords and go down blind alleys (or too well-trodden paths) of harmonic progression, and may still be working out rhythms while (hopefully) capturing moments of inspiration and 'happy accidents'. As mentioened, I always have Create New Lane enabled in record options and usually also Sound on Sound at his point. After recording 16-64 bars of that 1st take and saving it (with 'Raw' or '1st Take' in the title), I'll typically do one of two things:

If it was a fairly solid take, I'll record a rough melody/lead over the 'groove' into a new lane, and I'll often do several of those, stopping, rewinding, muting the previous clip and recording another melody or harmony take into another lane.

If the initial 'groove' recording is too rough for that, I'll mute that take and do another one, maybe practicing a bit in between to be able to play things I liked from the first take more smoothly. If a take is really bad/useless, I'll undo and re-record, but if it has anything potentially useful in it, I'll keep the lane and just mute the clip. Occasionally I'll do some some loop-recording of melodies/leads to get down a lot of ideas quickly but more often I just stop and rewind for each take or work with a 'groove' take that's long enough (either by recording or copy-pasting) for me to improvise for many bars.

I generally do all of this without a click, just playing freely. Somtimes my playing is pretty metronomic all by itself, but some pieces lend themselves to a deliberately free tempo.  At some point, I'll re-save the 'Raw' project the way it is and start snapping the timeline to the MIDI, using Set Measure/Beat at Now, so I can start editing, quantizing and maybe smoothing out the tempo variations, re-saving periodically with a suffix like "Snapped thru 17;01, Quantized thru 8;03" (semicolons because colons aren't allowed in file names). Once I have the timing nominally tightened up, I'll often go back and re-record a more structured melody/harmony into a new lane with better timing (because the tempo is flattened and the groove is partially quantized), borrowing themes and riffs from the earlier takes - basically comping by re-recording.

Bottom line: I don't  generally use lanes for 'comping' in the classic sense, more as a sort of warehouse for alternative takes and ideas and for quickly layering melodies and harmonies over a 'groove' at the composition stage. I develop and polish pieces mostly by re-recording, just using those early takes as a reference rather than copy-pasting and comping a finished track from bits and pieces of different lanes. Eventually melodies and harmonies will often be re-recorded on new tracks with a different instruments, but I may keep the piano melody to play in unison with the new instrument(s). I may do the same to record a bass line on piano, but more often I'll fire up a dedicated bass track for that. In any case, I almost never completely discard those early takes; I'll just save the project with a descriptive suffix in the name and clear out unused takes from the new version or maybe archive them in a hidden track if there's still a chance I'll want to use them later.

I often use lanes to build  up initial drum tracks in the same way on a single Instrument track before they get moved to dedicated per-output Instrument tracks later on for mixing.

[Starship Krupa]

2 hours ago, User 905133 said:

I would be interested in hearing from others as to how they use the take lanes subview.

There's the obvious one, which is taking multiple tries at recording, either looping or one at a time, each of which generates a lane. Then when you think you have a good one, you stop recording. Then make sure the best take is unmuted and the lesser ones are muted.

I'm referring to audio takes here, there is a distinction, audio and MIDI differ from each other in some ways.

So each instrument gets a track, and different takes get lanes beneath that track.

Or there's comping, where you have enough takes to use parts from 2 or more to stitch together a good one, and you stop recording and set about using the various editing tools to do that. There's the Speed Comping workflow, which can be really swift when what I'm doing is recording full takes and stitching together the best parts, and then there's a more manual workflow where I kind of use it like a word processor or image editor, copying, cutting, pasting.

I usually end up doing it the latter way, with clips getting copied, moved around, etc. So for instance I'll use the best take of the verse and/or chorus and copy and paste it.

Having multiple lanes to work with allows me to create one or more empty lanes to use as scratch space, so instead of having to paste things into the same lane one after the other, I can paste into an empty lane. And then what started out as an empty lane ends up having all the clips I want in the proper order.

If you're not moving anything around, you can also just leave clips where they are and mute the ones you don't want to use and leave the ones you do want to use unmuted, assuming they don't need crossfades.

If you were to look over my shoulder for 15 minutes, you'd get it straightaway.

So for instance there will be a Bass track with multiple lanes, each of which has a different take of a bass player playing the song. Let's say I did 3 tries.

Take 1 is entirely too sloppy to use, so I just delete the lane. Take 2 is mostly good, but there's a glaring mistake in the 2nd chorus.

If the 2nd chorus from Take 3 is good, I can use that, or if Take 2 has another chorus that will work, I can try copying and pasting a section of Take 2.

Another aspect of using lanes is in situations where I'm recording an instrument with multiple mics, usually a drum kit. A track for each mic, and then the multiple takes go into lanes. Any comping or editing is done with the clips grouped so that each of the bits eventually used will be from the same take.

I can't really imagine doing this using multiple tracks. The biggest advantage to having all of the takes of a given instrument in one track is that when it comes time to mix, all of that audio (or MIDI) can use the same effects, level, pan, etc. I don't know how this would be accomplished with each take being on its own different track unless eventually all of the good bits get pasted from multiple tracks into one.

With MIDI, for each instrument again, there's a track. If I am recording the MIDI live from a controller, each attempt to nail it will get a lane, and things proceed similarly to audio comping.

Lanes can also be handy even when all notes are entered in the PRV. I sometimes find it easier when copying and pasting multiple measures at a time to do so in Track View. Sometimes when say, a bass part has 3 variations, 2 within the verses and then the chorus, I'll give each variant its own lane. This can make it easier to keep things sorted when I want to extend the song, I can do the copying and pasting of the measures that are variant 1 individually from those operations on variant 2 and so forth. I can also do things like muting the entire lane to mute one of the variants, maybe try different variants and audition them by muting and unmuting the whole lane, etc.

This is why I (and others, like David) would like it if the option to hide muted clips in Piano Roll also applied to muted lanes. Because as it stands, in order to hide unused takes from the PRV, you must mute the individual clips. If a clip is in a muted lane, it won't be hidden by choosing that option.

From a composing standpoint, I may want to try different parts in different places, and having an extra empty lane can make it easier to keep things in order when moving parts around. Again, I could show you this in a matter of minutes and it would make sense. It's much more difficult to describe the process.

Doing all of this using separate tracks for each take seems unwieldy to me. Seems like there would be some visual overhead involved in having the takes spread across multiple tracks, and it would especially make comping more difficult.

I do understand being put off by using take lanes. The editing tools make certain assumptions about workflow that may be different from how the user is used to working or expects it to work. Such was the case with me when I first started using Cakewalk 7 years ago. But then the devs made some changes that made it easier to override some of the mechanisms for when I want to just cut, copy, paste and stitch.

I did eventually learn the Cakewalk comping workflow, and it lives up to the "speed comping" name. When the project I'm working on lends itself to that workflow, I can really fly, but before I figured it out, I made some messes with it. With great power comes great ability to turn one's project into chutney. The workflow doesn't necessarily work best for every comping situation and I was happy when the devs made it easier to do more basic operations without it getting in the way.

I suspect that the bulk of antipathy toward the take lanes system may have come from these advanced comping features being so front-facing. Before the changes were made, I often had the feeling that CbB was fighting me, that it was assuming I wanted to do things a certain way that was different from the simple cut, copy, paste, and move operations I was trying to do.

Figuring out where the different hotspots are and what I get when clicking on them took some time. At first I didn't realize that there were different hotspots on clips that would yield different results depending on where I clicked and that was WAY frustrating.

[Starship Krupa]

1 hour ago, David Baay said:

I don't  generally use lanes for 'comping' in the classic sense, more as a sort of warehouse for alternative takes and ideas and for quickly layering melodies and harmonies over a 'groove' at the composition stage.

This is a great way to put it. Especially when composing with MIDI, lanes allow for all kinds of scratchpad stuff, alternate ideas, etc.

I kept my description more editing oriented, but these days, the editing process has aspects of composition.

And I must remember when discussing this stuff: working with recorded audio tracks and with MIDI tracks are two different, yet similar, beasts.

[Starship Krupa]

I did a bit of experimenting and determined that if you start the track by playing in real time, notes added manually will be added to the first lane that you recorded.

The workaround for entering subsequent notes in their own lane is to create a new lane and add a clip to it. Then you can enter notes into that lane.

The way I'd like it to work is that you can create a new lane and then record arm it, and subsequently new notes will be entered into the armed lane.

[David Baay]

3 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

The workaround for entering subsequent notes in their own lane is to create a new lane and add a clip to it. Then you can enter notes into that lane.

I don't see how that works once you have all the lanes populated and want to add more notes to some lane. For example, I have a test project with 10 populated lanes that always puts new notes into T2 when you draw in the PRV.

But I found my own workaround: Lock Data on the clips in all the lanes, leaving only one unlocked, and that's where new data will go.

[Starship Krupa]

1 hour ago, David Baay said:

I have a test project with 10 populated lanes that always puts new notes into T2 when you draw in the PRV

I at least think that it will write to a lane of your choosing if clips in all other lanes are muted and the track is selected and highlighted and editable in the PRV.

I'll try it again with more lanes and see what happens. I only created 3 lanes when I tested it before.

Was T2 the first lane that you played into when you started the track?

[David Baay]

5 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Was T2 the first lane that you played into when you started the track?

No. Actually, I created the project from another experimental one that had all the notes of a short piano piece in separate tracks by pitch. I dragged those clips to lanes of a track one by one, starting with the track that already had the lowest notes in T1. I think it defaults to drawing in T2 because that clip has the starting note at 1:01:000 and all the other clips start later.

[sjoens]

Not sure if this helps but thought of it:

[azslow3]

PRV must be lanes aware to conveniently use lanes with MIDI.  PRV in Cakewalk is not. May be some day they implement that in Sonar...

[Starship Krupa]

21 hours ago, sjoens said:

Not sure if this helps but thought of it:

It helped a great deal, actually.

Although I prefer to work with "Create New Lane" selected, I usually use templates modified from the stock ones, which have "Reuse Existing Lane, Unless Takes Overlap" selected. I'd forgotten to change it before I saved this one. Hence the expected unexpected results.

I'm still testing it, because I've seen other strangeness with how Sonar is handling MIDI in lanes, but for now, if anyone's having trouble with getting newly drawn MIDI to draw in its own lane, make sure that you have "Create New Lane" ticked under Preferences/Project/Record.

The way it works is that after you've finished playing your takes, open the lanes. Your takes will be in clips in lanes. Should be one lane and one clip for each take.

In order to drawn new notes into any given lane, click on the upper half (the Smart Tool will be in Move mode) of the currently unmuted clip (which should be in the last recorded lane), and press "K" to mute it.

Then click on the clip you wish to edit and press "K" to unmute it.

At this point, in PRV, you should see the notes from the clip you unmuted. You will be able to freely add notes, delete them, or perform other operations on them and have those changes apply to the clip rather than creating new clips or having your changes appear in the wrong lane.

To add notes in a completely new lane, first make sure that all of the existing clips are muted, then draw them in the PRV. A new lane will be created with the new data appearing in a new clip. Note: sometimes I had to collapse the lanes and reopen them for the new lane and clip to appear, but they did appear.

That last step only works once. If you wish to create subsequent new lanes and enter/edit notes in them, the only way I could find to do it was to create a new lane, arm it for recording, record a couple of notes in it and go from there as you would with any already-recorded take. Open up PRV and the existing "scratch" notes you played will be visible, and any editing will be written in the new lane. 

For the people in this topic who are unable to enter notes in the lane of their choice, I'm not sure what's going wrong. Do you have the lanes open so that you can see which one has the unmuted clip(s)?

I tried this both in Comping and Sound on Sound recording modes.

Along the way I found some oddness in the way that Sonar reacts to new clips being recorded in the same track (my old hobgoblin, Sonar creating unwanted splits in the clips), but my army has had to retreat from that hill in the past and and I won't charge it again until I have better ammunition.

[User 905133]

(1) @sjoens I also found the post helpful (which is why I "liked" it yesterday), even though I haven't yet had a chance to explore it.

(2) The last time I tried understanding how take lanes work, I ran into an issue that I ultimately decided to abandon until a future date.  So, since today is indeed a future date from way back in 2022, I looked up a post about the issue I was having, mainly for my own benefit, but also in case others stumble onto any insights regarding soloed takes when projects are saved and reloaded.

On 6/11/2022 at 1:12 PM, User 905133 said:

In short, when it comes to saving projects with non-last take lanes soloed, there are issues when the project is reloaded.  Also there are issues with displaying non-last takes in staff mode.

Additional info. on the priority of the last take would be appreciated. 

On 6/12/2022 at 1:37 PM, David Baay said:

I use lane-soloing frequently to 'promote' the best take  (or bounced mix) which is often not the last take/bounce. I have not seen any issues with this. This should probably be a new thread, but I'm curious what you're seeing.

I have way too much to do and too little time, but exploring the points raised in this thread are now on my "to-do" list WRT using take lanes. @David Baay & @Starship Krupa  Thanks for the details about your methods for using take lanes.   

 

 

[David Baay]

3 hours ago, User 905133 said:

In short, when it comes to saving projects with non-last take lanes soloed, there are issues when the project is reloaded.  Also there are issues with displaying non-last takes in staff mode.

Pretty sure I have many projects in that state, and have not noticed any issue with CbB/Sonar persistieng the lane-solo state. Possibly this is related to whether you're configured to have new takes on top, as I am...?

As for Staff View, given all its limitations and odditiies, I would never have thought to try getting it to deal with multiple lanes though I suppose it should. I usually create dedicated "for Notation" tracks (with left- an right-hand piano parts separated for the Grand Staff since a single split point doesn't usually cut it) that I hard-quantize with manually 'filled' durations so I'm less dependent on Sonar's display options to get the notation to appear half-way correct.