I attended a Sonar Masterclass session today at Nevada Music. I have always believed that no matter what training you receive you always come away with something and today was certainly no exception. Of course it is always better if firstly the subject matter is something you are interested in or passionate about and secondly it is not work-related.

The session lasted just under an hour and covered all the juicy bits of Sonar 8.5. After a brief introduction to 8.5, we started to look at Session Drummer 3 on what looked like a 32" monitor. The sound came through a couple of Roland Wedges, so the drums looked and sounded awesome. We saw how easy it was to :- create patterns with Session Drummer using the sequencer, change velocities of the drum parts,  and add a small amount of swing for example to the bass drum to give more of a "human feel" and less robotic sound. We then looked at the differences between using layers on a track rather than putting individual drum parts on different tracks. The obvious advantages were the savings in effect resources. With the track layers you could apply the effect to the one track but still have access to each drum part in each layer.

We touched briefly on the Matrix. The Matrix seems a strange beast to a lot of people but today for the first time I saw what a powerful arrangement tool this can be. I don't really see myself as a "loop" person but watching this demonstration has given me push to have a go. I like the idea of simply grabbing loops from your PC and dropping them into the matrix. The example that was used in my opinion was very effective. There was a musical loop going to start with that just had a bass drum beat. The second loop was a different riff but had only a hi-hat going. it then went back to first loop. As I sat and listened, I was very surprised by how good it sounded having just the bass drum and then just the hi-hat etc. As a drummer, this is not something I would have necessarily thought of. Simple? - yes but very effective.

Cakewalk by Roland have a great DAW for your PC called SONAR.Have you thought about or already purchased the new SONAR 8.5 upgrade? There are NO words to describe this user-made video (except for ‘totally awesome!’). Just watch it and you’ll see:

Sonar 8.5 Funny Video

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