Sonar 8 – Fancy New Plug-ins

Another year, another new version of Cakewalk Sonar. The Sonar 8 upgrade mainly features new plug-ins. After all, Sonar is a mature Digital Audio Workstation, and it’s getting more and more difficult for Cakewalk to wow the market with improvements to the basic Sonar engine. This blog takes a look at some of new plug-ins as well as a couple of features added to the Sonar software.

Yet Another Drum Mangler

The pop music world seems to be fixated on ways to create new and interesting drum sounds. While other musical content can create the short bursts of sound known as transients, drums are certainly the most common. So if you’ve EQ’d and compressed and otherwise mangled a drum kit and it still doesn’t sound right, try transient shaping. Transient shapers aren’t really new, the Waves Trans-X and the Sony Oxford Transient Modulator have been around for awhile. Now Cakewalk has decided to add a transient shaper, the TS-64, to their 64-bit plug-in line-up and make it available as a part of the Sonar 8 upgrade.

The term “transient shaper” may sound exotic, but if you’ve used a compressor, you’ve used a simple transient shaper. Take a look at these two graphs. A compressor reduces any transient that goes above a specified threshold by a defined compression ratio, thus “shaping” the transient. However, the reduction is symmetrical, both on the upside and the downside. A transient shaper, on the other hand, provides for different amounts of expansion or reduction depending on the particular phase of the transient. The TS 64 defines three phases for a transient—Attack, Initial Decay or Weight, and Decay—so you can adjust these phases independently.

Cakewalk also maintains that their transient shaper is better than the competition because it provides linear phase processing. Phase distortion is fairly common in EQ, multiband compression, and similar types of audio processing, so presumably linear phase processing is better. The real question is: Can anybody really hear phase distortion? As with the debates about linear phase speaker systems, true audiophiles say they can hear an obvious difference. As for the rest of us….

Warm and Fuzzy

Sonar also added two plug-ins that are based primarily on amp simulation, the Cakewalk built TL-64 Tube Leveler and Native Instruments Guitar Rig 3 LE. For those of you unfamiliar with the principle, amp simulation is a digital recreation of certain characteristics of analog tube amplifiers, primarily overdrive, also known as saturation. Whereas overdriving digital amplifiers results in harsh distortion, audio engineers discovered early-on that overdriving tube amplifiers produces harmonics that most people find pleasing. Mildly overdriven amps produce harmonics that are usually described as “warm”. Increase the overdrive some more, and you start to get a heavier distortion which has been the backbone of electric guitar sounds for many years.

The TL-64 is a “warmer” that you can use in the final output of your mix or mastering session. Warmer’s are a fairly common plug-in. The old Cakewalk plug-ins include one called, Amp Sim, and Voxengo has a freebie available. Izotope Ozone includes one as part of its mastering suite, and plug-ins like the BBE Sonic Maximizer and the PSP Audioware MixSaturator are popular as well. All of these basically generate additional harmonics, but each has its own recipe for warmth. Thus this is definitely a case where just listening is the only real way to judge whether the TL-64 or something else makes your mix sound warmer.

Guitar amp simulators have become very popular in recent years, and many DAW’s include one. As I mentioned, the same principle of simulating an overdriven tube amplifier is being used here. However, in this case the overdrive is heavy and produces noticeable distortion which has come to be associated with classic electric guitar sounds. Although amp simulation is the key effect, there are several other components to a realistic electric guitar sound — speaker cabinets, stomp boxes and other FX processors. The Native Instruments Guitar Rig 3 includes not only an amp simulator but digital models of these other components, and is comparable to such products as IK Multimedia’s Amplitube and Wave’s GTR. Guitar Rig 3 can be used as a standalone application and comes with other components such as a recording tape deck, a metronome and a tuner. The main difference between the LE version included in Sonar and the full-blown product are the number of amplifiers (2 instead of 12 for example), speaker cabinets, and FX processors.

Big Acoustic Sounds

In the past Cakewalk has always included a generous complement of virtual instruments with Sonar. However, by and large they have been oriented toward electronica and drum sounds. This time Sonar includes two virtual instruments with high quality acoustic content, Dimension Pro and TruePianos Amber.

Sonar 7 included the Cakewalk Dimension LE which is a scaled down version of Dimension Pro. From a purely functional standpoint, the main difference is that Dimension Pro includes an FX bank plus the capability to manipulate ADSR (attack-decay-sustain-release) envelopes. However, the real difference is the expanded sample library. Technically, the Dimension Pro is a synthesizer because you cannot map samples. However, as we discuss in our Digital Producer course, like a lot of high quality acoustic virtual instruments these days, a better description would be “sample player”. The sample library has 8 gigabytes of content with an impressive collection of brass, saxes, pianos, and classic keyboards.

More Slicing & Dicing

Sonar 8 also includes a drum synth, Beatscape. On the surface, Beatscape looks like a conventional drum pad controller. However, the philosophy of Beatscape is quite different. Whereas normally pads trigger a single sound such as a bass or snare drum hit, each pad in Beatscape is a separate REX player. For those of you unfamiliar with REX, it is a file format developed by Propellerheads Software which is very popular for drum loops. Audio files are chopped up into slices based on the transient peaks of the audio and thus the files can be time stretched to match the tempo of a project. There are many commercially available REX loop libraries, and Beatscape also includes a sizeable library of grooves. Equally important, Beatscape has the capability of slicing and mapping ordinary WAV files.

As we discuss more fully in our Digital Producer course, REX as a Timestretching technology is fairly dated, and has been surpassed by audio warping methods such as Sonar’s Audio Snap. However, REX and REX-like files remain popular because of another feature. Each slice is automatically mapped to a MIDI note. Thus you can create different MIDI sequences for a single REX file. The display at the bottom of Beatscape toggles between the Step Editor and a Keyboard which correlates to the mapping of the slices.

The Laundry List

As I mentioned, the core Sonar 8 product includes a long list of enhancements, but most of them are pretty minor. One notable exception is the instrument track. In the past in order to use a virtual instrument you had to create both a MIDI and an audio track. Now there is a combined track which handles MIDI clips but also has the features of an audio track. If you use a lot of virtual instruments in a project, this feature is a big help in reducing the clutter in the track view. Sonar is curiously late in the game with this feature. Other DAW’s — Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic, and Live — have used instrument tracks for quite awhile. The Sonar developers did add one nice related feature that other DAW’s do not have, the ability to combine existing MIDI and audio tracks into an instrument track.

For the record here is the complete list of enhancements, including all of the minor ones. We have an in-depth presentation of the major enhancements in our new course, Sonar 8 – Know It All ! Our Digital Audio Workstation Shootout ratings have now also been updated to reflect the enhancements in Sonar 8.