Hey Gang, here's my inital asessment of Sonar 3 Producer edition.
I've just recently upgraded my computer to a P4 2.8 Ghz, 800mhz FSB, and 1 gig of ram. Sonar 3 arrived much to my surprise on Friday: I ordered it last Monday.... So hats off to CW for the quick delivery.
Anyway, installation was painless, and I was up & rocking in no time. Migrating 2.2 projects to version 3 went "ok." There were some issues with several EQ plugins bieng stuck to one side of the stereo image, but deleting the plugs & reloading them sorted that out.
There's alot of ground to cover here, so I'm trying real hard to remember everything.... I've been busy as hell in the studio for the last two days, as I've got 2 separate albums on the go by 2 different bands.
Interface: The coolest thing is the ability to customize just about everything. From metering styles to the console layout, you can pretty much set it up EXACTLY how you want it. Very cool. After about 10 minutes of muttering "where the fuck is this?" I got the hang of the new layout. I got rid of the "exploded fader view" in the main track layout, as well as the peak values, as I thought it took up a little too much screen space.
In the console view, you can explode/implode the sends/bussing section, which IMO, is great. You can also do a narrow/wide channel strip, for those projects that just keep adding tracks. Again, great feature.
You can view the per-channel EQ as a graph, as "data," you know, cut/boost, Q, and shelf/bell... or, you can double click the graph and bring up the main EQ window. BTW, it's the good old standby Ultrafunk EQ, at it's third revision, I think, so it's an extremely useful tool. You get 6 'bands' to play with. I think CPU cycles are only taken by which bands are active, (someone correct me if I'm wrong) so it's easy on the resources. Again, this is great, as you can have one on every channel you're working with.
The EQ itself is VERY useful. You get 6 shelves/bells, with all the usual tweakability. One cool thing I noticed, it's similar to the Waves Renniscance EQ in it's shelves.... That is, if you cut some low frequencies, the frequencies immediatley above the cut will be boosted slightly, depending on the Q setting. Sort of like an old Pultec. Again, this can be extremely useful for blockheads like me who refuse to use boosting EQ. (Go ask George Massenburg about that one. Best advice I've ever got in this game.)
Ok, so we've got a totally tweakable interface, and a great EQ on every channel. Howabout the new effects?
Well, the Lexicon really sounds like a Lexicon. Big & cheesey. If you're into that sort of verb, this plug will make you happy.
Myself, I'm not into reverbs that much, so I tend to stick with the Waves R verb or True verb on drums in my mixes, and that's about it for me.
The Ultrafunk suite, is fucking great. IMHO, this alone was worth the price of the upgrade. The compressor simply rocks. It's a freakin' chameleon. It has your standard "modern" pre-sets, as well as some excellent "vintage" simulations. The DBX 160 pre-set works wonders on toms, the 1176 for kick, snare, & bass guitar, and the LA2A has to be the smoothest software comp on vocals ever. You can smash the living shit out of a vocal and it just will not get sibilant. The LA2A setting also works great on room mics for drums.
This comp is an extremely powerful tool: You can set it for an "auto release" to avoid pumping effects, a 'variable knee' so you can get the perfect blend between modern and vintage compression, as well as a make up gain with a brickwall limiter/satuator on the output. It's very similar to the Waves' Ren compressor, but to be honest, I think it's more versatile.
As for the other effects, the reverb is pretty good, the phaser is great, as is the modulator. The gate is outstanding. You can set it to be frequency dependant. Wonderful for kick & toms. Especially with it's lookahead feature, not to mention a 0ms attack time that actually sounds good.
I can't say enough good things about the Ultrafunk plugs. It's a bloody shame that Sonditus went out of business, as they sure gave some higher priced plugin packages a serious run for their money. Cakewalk scored a brillaint coup by snatching these plugs..... Not to mention them grabbing Power Technologies' plugs a few years ago. NOBODY has made a better digital chorus. "FX Chorus" is still my favourite chorus plug to date.
Ok, so how does it work in a real tracking session?
Brilliantly! I've been doing vocals & guitars for 2 different band the last few days.... and Sonar3 has run absolutley great. With 2.2, I've had some problems with my Mackie Control locking up and refusing to unlock until a hard reboot. This is no longer an issue with Sonar3. I've recorded all 9 faders moving at extreme speeds and S3 hasn't so much as burped.... it's about time. One less thing to worry about.
Now I've used CW since pro audio 7. I run a Delta 1010 as my main I/O supplemented with a Delta 66 for extra inputs/headphone feeds, and an Apogee Rosetta as my "gold channel" running into the 1010's spdif input. In all my years running CW products, I've never used input monitoring. I've always used the Delta's control panel mixer, with it's zero latency monitoring. The only thing is, it's kind of a pain to cut live drums with, because you can never get the phones loud enough as the drums are so dynamic.
So I noticed this funny looking button next to the record enables in the track view. This is the "echo input" or "input monitor" enabling button. Well, knowing I had just upgraded my machine and had a shitload of RAM to spare, I thought, "what the hell."
I set my machine for a whopping 1.2 ms latency, and hit the enable. What do you know? It worked. It worked great.
In session, I was running a few songs with about 18 tracks going, and monitoring a live guitar input as well. The client couldn't tell the difference. The system would stall out once I started moving faders with the Mackie control... so I had to increase the latency to 2.9 ms. Again, the client couldn't tell.
So this got me thinking: S3 has all these crazy new bussing features... Why not set up some live inputs for dual mixes? One for the control room, and one on an AUX bus to feed my headphone amp? (An Alto, BTW. Cheap, clean, and melt-your ears off loud)
Now, remember I had problems getting the drummer's headphones loud enough... enter the Ultrafunk compressor on the AUX bus. I tested this out this morning. At 1.2 ms latency, with 4 mics using live input monitoring, with the compressor set up pretty aggressivley. Not only was it damn loud, I couldn't hear any noticeable delay. This is going to be a HUGE help the next time I track a drummer.
Overall, I'm very pleased with S3. I haven't had any serious problems with it yet, and I haven't even touched half it's
capabilities. I do metal bands, mostly, so I don't use Midi or Soft synths very much. I did try out that grand piano sample, and it was impressive. Hopefully I'll get to use it on a project one day.
I'll be sure and update this thread as I press on with my projects this week.
-0z-
I've just recently upgraded my computer to a P4 2.8 Ghz, 800mhz FSB, and 1 gig of ram. Sonar 3 arrived much to my surprise on Friday: I ordered it last Monday.... So hats off to CW for the quick delivery.
Anyway, installation was painless, and I was up & rocking in no time. Migrating 2.2 projects to version 3 went "ok." There were some issues with several EQ plugins bieng stuck to one side of the stereo image, but deleting the plugs & reloading them sorted that out.
There's alot of ground to cover here, so I'm trying real hard to remember everything.... I've been busy as hell in the studio for the last two days, as I've got 2 separate albums on the go by 2 different bands.
Interface: The coolest thing is the ability to customize just about everything. From metering styles to the console layout, you can pretty much set it up EXACTLY how you want it. Very cool. After about 10 minutes of muttering "where the fuck is this?" I got the hang of the new layout. I got rid of the "exploded fader view" in the main track layout, as well as the peak values, as I thought it took up a little too much screen space.
In the console view, you can explode/implode the sends/bussing section, which IMO, is great. You can also do a narrow/wide channel strip, for those projects that just keep adding tracks. Again, great feature.
You can view the per-channel EQ as a graph, as "data," you know, cut/boost, Q, and shelf/bell... or, you can double click the graph and bring up the main EQ window. BTW, it's the good old standby Ultrafunk EQ, at it's third revision, I think, so it's an extremely useful tool. You get 6 'bands' to play with. I think CPU cycles are only taken by which bands are active, (someone correct me if I'm wrong) so it's easy on the resources. Again, this is great, as you can have one on every channel you're working with.
The EQ itself is VERY useful. You get 6 shelves/bells, with all the usual tweakability. One cool thing I noticed, it's similar to the Waves Renniscance EQ in it's shelves.... That is, if you cut some low frequencies, the frequencies immediatley above the cut will be boosted slightly, depending on the Q setting. Sort of like an old Pultec. Again, this can be extremely useful for blockheads like me who refuse to use boosting EQ. (Go ask George Massenburg about that one. Best advice I've ever got in this game.)
Ok, so we've got a totally tweakable interface, and a great EQ on every channel. Howabout the new effects?
Well, the Lexicon really sounds like a Lexicon. Big & cheesey. If you're into that sort of verb, this plug will make you happy.
Myself, I'm not into reverbs that much, so I tend to stick with the Waves R verb or True verb on drums in my mixes, and that's about it for me.
The Ultrafunk suite, is fucking great. IMHO, this alone was worth the price of the upgrade. The compressor simply rocks. It's a freakin' chameleon. It has your standard "modern" pre-sets, as well as some excellent "vintage" simulations. The DBX 160 pre-set works wonders on toms, the 1176 for kick, snare, & bass guitar, and the LA2A has to be the smoothest software comp on vocals ever. You can smash the living shit out of a vocal and it just will not get sibilant. The LA2A setting also works great on room mics for drums.
This comp is an extremely powerful tool: You can set it for an "auto release" to avoid pumping effects, a 'variable knee' so you can get the perfect blend between modern and vintage compression, as well as a make up gain with a brickwall limiter/satuator on the output. It's very similar to the Waves' Ren compressor, but to be honest, I think it's more versatile.
As for the other effects, the reverb is pretty good, the phaser is great, as is the modulator. The gate is outstanding. You can set it to be frequency dependant. Wonderful for kick & toms. Especially with it's lookahead feature, not to mention a 0ms attack time that actually sounds good.
I can't say enough good things about the Ultrafunk plugs. It's a bloody shame that Sonditus went out of business, as they sure gave some higher priced plugin packages a serious run for their money. Cakewalk scored a brillaint coup by snatching these plugs..... Not to mention them grabbing Power Technologies' plugs a few years ago. NOBODY has made a better digital chorus. "FX Chorus" is still my favourite chorus plug to date.
Ok, so how does it work in a real tracking session?
Brilliantly! I've been doing vocals & guitars for 2 different band the last few days.... and Sonar3 has run absolutley great. With 2.2, I've had some problems with my Mackie Control locking up and refusing to unlock until a hard reboot. This is no longer an issue with Sonar3. I've recorded all 9 faders moving at extreme speeds and S3 hasn't so much as burped.... it's about time. One less thing to worry about.
Now I've used CW since pro audio 7. I run a Delta 1010 as my main I/O supplemented with a Delta 66 for extra inputs/headphone feeds, and an Apogee Rosetta as my "gold channel" running into the 1010's spdif input. In all my years running CW products, I've never used input monitoring. I've always used the Delta's control panel mixer, with it's zero latency monitoring. The only thing is, it's kind of a pain to cut live drums with, because you can never get the phones loud enough as the drums are so dynamic.
So I noticed this funny looking button next to the record enables in the track view. This is the "echo input" or "input monitor" enabling button. Well, knowing I had just upgraded my machine and had a shitload of RAM to spare, I thought, "what the hell."
I set my machine for a whopping 1.2 ms latency, and hit the enable. What do you know? It worked. It worked great.
In session, I was running a few songs with about 18 tracks going, and monitoring a live guitar input as well. The client couldn't tell the difference. The system would stall out once I started moving faders with the Mackie control... so I had to increase the latency to 2.9 ms. Again, the client couldn't tell.
So this got me thinking: S3 has all these crazy new bussing features... Why not set up some live inputs for dual mixes? One for the control room, and one on an AUX bus to feed my headphone amp? (An Alto, BTW. Cheap, clean, and melt-your ears off loud)
Now, remember I had problems getting the drummer's headphones loud enough... enter the Ultrafunk compressor on the AUX bus. I tested this out this morning. At 1.2 ms latency, with 4 mics using live input monitoring, with the compressor set up pretty aggressivley. Not only was it damn loud, I couldn't hear any noticeable delay. This is going to be a HUGE help the next time I track a drummer.
Overall, I'm very pleased with S3. I haven't had any serious problems with it yet, and I haven't even touched half it's
capabilities. I do metal bands, mostly, so I don't use Midi or Soft synths very much. I did try out that grand piano sample, and it was impressive. Hopefully I'll get to use it on a project one day.
I'll be sure and update this thread as I press on with my projects this week.
-0z-
), and I'm sorry, but I won't accept the blame for being able to crash any program. A hard crash is unacceptable. Come on Cakewalk guys. Fix it!