First Look: Cakewalk's Sonar 4

Being able to record on a hard disk drive has radically changed how pop records are made. As critic Ted Friedman noted in an astute column from 1993, "Pop music-making in the 1990s has more to do with filmmaking than jamming in a garage: every song is a collection of tracks laid down by assorted musicians, edited together by producers, and fronted by charismatic performers."

He's certainly been proven right: recording commercial music is like filmmaking these days. But as I've discussed elsewhere, a fun byproduct of that is that these changes have filtered down from Hollywood and London's commercial studios to benefit those of us who record music at home, often working alone (sort of like the pajamahadeen of the Blogosphere).

In commercial studios, since the early to mid-1990s, Digidesign's Pro Tools has been the primary hard disk recording platform. It's so ubiquitous that in his recent book and online diary, "Mixerman" the recording engineer, refers to it as "Alsihad"--in other words, "it's alls I had to work with".

Cakewalk's Sonar hard disk recording debuted around 2001 as their flagship PC recording program. While it certainly gets its share of professional usage, its ability to run on the Windows platform has made it the Rolls Royce of home recording.

With each new version they've added additional features, and the latest version, which debuts this month, is no exception.

Several New Additions

Perhaps the first key new feature is a "freeze" function to reduce processing power. It's not uncommon to use several effects on an individual track, such as phasing, chorus, digital delay and other plug-ins. Or to use something like Izotope's Ozone plug-in. It was originally designed for mastering a completed recording, but increasingly, it's being used as an effect--actually a suite of effects--on an individual track.

The upside is that it can add a world class sheen to key individual tracks like a lead vocalist or soloing instrumentalist. The drawback is that it sucks the computer's processing power like a magnet.

In situations like that, the Freeze function will re-record the track with the effects added, and then disable those effects. Don't like the sound? Then simply hit "unfreeze", and it will restore the track to its original condition.

Another new feature of this version of Sonar is its Roland software synthesizer. When I first read that Cakewalk was building-in a Roland software synth, I was afraid of something very cheesy sounding. Instead, there are numerous extremely respectable sounds here. There are a few examples that a software synth like Reason can beat, but I can foresee many times for songs that require straightforward bass, keyboard, choral and string samples, I can now do everything within Sonar. And unlike Reason, the Roland TTS-1 has "bend" button that can be programmed, meaning that it syncs much more accurately when bent notes are played on a guitar synthesizer hooked up to Roland's GI-20 guitar synth to USB breakout box-which should make guitar synth users (like me!) very happy.

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

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