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How can you improve a MIDI + Audio sequencer that’s already as comprehensive as Sonar? Cakewalk have added some impressive new plug-ins, but they’ve also gone back to basics to take MIDI editing to new levels of flexibility.

Derek Johnson

An overview of the new features in Sonar 7.

It must be something about the festive season. Cakewalk have now established an update groove where new versions of their flagship, Sonar, are released in time for SOS’s December issue. This seems to ensure that all Sonar users can treat themselves to a little year-end cheer with a Santa’s sack of new features for their favourite sequencer.

When examining software that’s just hit an increment of ‘7’, not to mention making its seventh SOS appearance, you just have to make assumptions rather than start from scratch. If you aren’t familiar with the basics of Sonar, the ‘Sonar History’ box lists the back issues to dig up or reference on the SOS web site.

The very short story is that Sonar is a mature digital audio workstation that merges MIDI and audio sequencing, a hefty suite of virtual instruments, audio effects and MIDI processing. It offers unlimited audio and MIDI tracks (your PC allowing), the excellent Audio Snap rhythmic and tempo control system, solid video integration, surround mixing and a powerhouse of audio and MIDI manipulation and processing options that rival and often better the competition.

It’s a stable environment built on solid code that can be customised to suit almost any way of working. While Sonar has quite a foothold in so-called ‘urban’ music production — due perhaps to its clip- and loop-based operation, and also to its big library of ready-to-go audio and MIDI material — it is not just an electro workhorse. Through-composed, mega-multitracked scores for film or TV can be accommodated just as easily.

More Of Everything

I think it’s fair to say that Sonar 7, while an impressive update, isn’t what you might call a paradigm shift. Like all the major DAW platforms, it already handles everything from MP3 files to high-bit-rate audio, integrates effects and virtual instrument plug-ins, and offers video functionality and loop-based composition. Cakewalk know when they’re onto a good thing, so for the most part, improvements are incremental rather than radical.

The most surprising novelty, perhaps, is in the area of MIDI handling. Working with MIDI has seldom been so flexible, on any platform. There are new ways of doing almost everything — and some might even make experienced users do a double take. A new Step Sequencer view has also been added. It’s like an analogue sequencer morphed with a step-input editor and a window you might find on a Roland MC50, and is the most fun I’ve had with a DAW for a while.

Buying funky plug-in developers RGC Audio a couple of years ago gave Cakewalk some great virtual instruments; Pentagon I is a killer synth that’s been bundled since v5, and v7 brings us their Z3ta+ 1.5 as a freebie. Add LE versions of Cakewalk’s own Rapture and Dimension (the latter bundled with Garritan Pocket Orchestra) and the DropZone quick-and-easy sample player to what is already provided (don’t forget Session Drummer from v6), and you barely need to bother with any other plug-ins.

Effects processing has been beefed up, too: a proper mastering EQ and compressor — as well as an amazing peak limiter — are now part of your Cakewalk rack, and side-chaining has finally been added to many of the supplied effects. And that’s not to mention external insert points, allowing you to easily add real hardware signal processing to your Sonar sessions.

A crossover between audio and MIDI concerns the really rather good V-Vocal Monophonic vocal processor that’s based on Roland’s Variphrase technology: it now offers pitch-to-MIDI options that border on the unbelievable.

Moving out of the system, there are new file formats to export to, integrated CD ripping, built-in audio CD burning, and a very useful ‘Publisher’ tool, upgraded from the module supplied with Project 5, that takes oa lot of the pain out of putting your mixes onto the Internet.

This instance of the new Step Sequencer view is being used to create a pattern for a TR606 drum-machine patch in the Roland-derived Groove Synth plug-in. Note how drum names appear in the note column; normally, note names would be displayed.

The High Stepper

You might think, more or less correctly, that MIDI handling was pretty well sorted in Sonar. After all, its great-granddaddy (Twelve Tone Systems’ Cakewalk) started life handling just MIDI, in pre-DAW times. But that doesn’t mean a new way of looking at things won’t yield results. In the case of Sonar 7, the results amount to probably the most significant part of the update. Where other platforms keep massaging audio and plug-ins, Cakewalk have gone back to basics.

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