However, while ACT certainly looks simple in Cakewalk's in-house videos, I personally found it extremely challenging to actually program into my keyboard, and apparently I'm not alone. It was only when I read this document that it all made sense, and in fact, was fairly easy. Once programmed, it is a very flexible method for controlling Sonar. Not to mention a lot more fun than constantly bouncing back and forth from my synth's keyboard to the QWERTY-version attached to my PC.
Built-In Plug-Ins
Somewhat like Microsoft and Windows, Cakewalk has attempted to bring some of the more popular aftermarket applets in-house, or craft built-in alternatives to them. For fine-tuning vocals, Sonar 5 introduced Roland's V-Vocal pitch correction plug-in into the equation, as an alternative to Antares' benchmark Auto-Tune. V-Vocal appears to be more deeply integrated into Sonar than Auto-Tune would be, and its GUI appears to be a bit more flexible. It certainly sounds like it does at least as good a job of pitch correction as Auto-Tune, and yes, it's capable of the infamous "Cher effect" as well.
Another plug-in that appeared in the previous incarnation of Sonar was its Perfect Space Convolution Reverb, which adds the usual room and reverb sounds, along with a variety of surreal effects, like the "maraca swirl" and "bathroom with helicopter flyover". (Which sound exactly like their names, incidentally.) And each of these reverbs can be reversed, for further sonic surrealism, a sort of blending of the role of reverb and synthesizer.
Fix It In The Mix
Way back in Sonar 3, Cakewalk added its current mixing board GUI. The first versions of Sonar had virtual mixing board that was serviceable, if slightly inflexible. The current board allows the audio to be routed just about anywhere. New busses can easily be created to sum multiple audio channels. In other words, if you have six vocal tracks between your lead and backing vocals, and you'd like them all to have the same effects and use a single fader to alter their volume, they can be summed to their own buss by merely creating a new buss and then toggling each track's audio signal to point to it.
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