CAKEWALK SONAR 6 PE (Windows DAW) - NOW WITH CONCLUSIONS!

[Anderton]

Session Drummer 2 actually has very little to do with the MIDI FX-based Session Drummer in previous versions of Sonar. The original was basically a way to string together MIDI files into a drum part, whereas Session Drummer 2 (SD2) is a drum machine that can serve as a tone module, respond to “canned” MIDI sequences to lay down a quick backing track, and even allow a small measure of real-time improvisation. Some have compared SD2 to Groove Agent, but SD2 doesn’t have GA’s “intelligent” pattern generation of tracks and fills; it’s up to you to provide the intelligence.

SD2 is divided in three parts. Click on the attachment to see the basic layout. The top-most section is where you select SD2 programs, choose MIDI patterns, or populate individual pads with sounds (“instruments”) if you want to create your own kit, or modify an existing one.

The middle strip consists of virtual “pads” for the 10 drum sounds, along with the all-important cute little icons for each drum. You can change these icons, by the way, as well as the overall look if you’re feeling adventurous – in fact, you’ll note that I’ve increased the background contrast, color saturation, and hue compared to the stock “look” to make for a “brighter” overall look. Okay, it’s not particularly tasteful, but it does get the point across. We’ll cover how to make these cosmetic changes later on.

The lower section is a fairly conventional mixer for the 10 sounds, with mute, solo, volume, pan, width (more on this control later), and tune.

Before going any further, though, a few people have remarked in forums that SD2 comes without documentation. That’s actually not true, although like the Pentagon I, SD2’s manual is not part of the online help. There are two ways to call it up:

1. Click on the instrument itself (e.g., the logo, the mixer section, or the like) and type F1. Note that this won’t work if you click on the title bar or some part of the window; you have to click on the instrument itself.
2. Go C: > Program Files > Cakewalk > VstPlugins > Session Drummer 2 > Documentation > SessionDrummer2.chm, and double-click on it.

[Anderton]

An Instrument is the basic sound you’ll hear when you hit a pad. SD2 includes a bunch of samples – kicks, snares, cymbals, percussion, toms, and hats. But you can also load your own samples in the WAV, AIFF, or Ogg Vorbis formats (mono or stereo, 8-32 bits, any sample rate – SD2 doesn’t care). You can also load multisamples in the .SFZ format (we’ll cover how to make your own multisample files shortly), as well as simply drag samples on to the pads.

One thing that’s not obvious about the pads is that in addition to the clicked pad being outlined in orange, the velocity varies depending on where you click on the pad. The lower you click, the lower the velocity.

A Kit is a collection of instruments with accompanying mixer settings; S6 comes with four kits using 350MB of samples. A Program, the highest member of the SD2 food chain, is a Kit along with 8 MIDI patterns.

[Anderton]

SD2 comes with several Programs, so let’s check them out. You open up the Program browser by clicking in the Prog field (clicking on the PROG triangle instead brings up program management options; one of them is load, and you can use that instead if you want). You load a kit by double-clicking on it. Click on the attachment to see the browser in action.

Once the kit is loaded, you can click on the pads to audition sounds. However, each pad can represent several sounds, of which only one is the “audition sound” (e.g., you hear it when you click on the pad).

To audition the MIDI files, first you need to click on a pattern (A-H), then click on the SD2 transport play (arrow) button. The files that come with SD2 tend to be short, so if you want to get your creative juices go, it’s a good idea to click on the loop button (the infinity symbol) so you don’t have to keep re-triggering the patterns.

You can also load MIDI files into the pattern buttons using a similar browser concept as loading programs: You just click in the MIDI field (or click on the MIDI triangle and select Load Pattern), then navigate to the desired MIDI pattern. SD2 comes with its own patterns, which you can find at C:Program Files > Cakewalk > VstPlugins> Session Drummer 2 > Contents > Patterns. However, a really great place to find additional patterns is at C: > Program Files > Cakewalk > Sonar 6 > Sample Content > MIDI Groove Clips > Smart Loops, where there are a bunch of files created by Frank Basile. (You can find additional MIDI loops under C: > Program Files > Cakewalk > Sonar 6 > Pattern Brush Patterns, but these don’t seem to be designed with SD2 in mind. You can drag them into a MIDI track to trigger the drums, although you may need to reassign notes to have them actually do something useful.)

You can’t drag MIDI loops from the desktop or other location into SD2’s MIDI file slot locations, but you can drag the MIDI notes from the file used in a slot to a MIDI track. To do this, click on the one of the file slots (A-H) to select it, then in the MIDI field, you drag the dificult-to-see Note symbol with the + sign into the MIDI track. Frankly, I don’t see why you can’t just drag from the slot instead of dragging the note, but…whatever.

Also regarding patterns, it’s convenient to be able to select patterns on a random-access basis by clicking on file slots and having them play. But note that you can’t record these selections as automation or note data; you still need to drag the file data over to MIDI tracks individually. In case you wondered whether this is just a question of enabling the ability to record MIDI data generated by software synths (a new feature in S6 designed to accommodate instruments like Groove Agent), this isn’t the case. Even after enabling MIDI output for SD2, nothing showed up in any track as MIDI or automation data.

Fortunately, there is another option that accomplishes pretty much the same thing: The patterns can be triggered from an external MIDI keyboard, and you certainly can record the MIDI keyboard notes. The eight patterns are triggered by MIDI notes 27-34, with note 24 providing the stop playback function. (Incidentally, note that there’s an error with the documentation provided for SD2: Although it gives the right note numbers for triggering the various patterns, the note names are wrong. The “Stop pattern” command is C2, and the patterns are triggered by the notes D# through A#.) This makes improvisation with patterns a relatively simple affair.

[Anderton]

As alluded to earlier, it’s worth noting these are not your normal pads. For one thing, some respond to more than one MIDI note. Pad 3 (nominally for hi-hats) can have a different sound on five different notes (22, 26, 42, 44, and 46 in case you wondered), as can pad 10 (perucssion). Out of these, one is chosen as an “audition note” – the one that will play if you click on the pad. You can find all the information about which notes trigger which sounds, and the various audition notes, in the documentation – it’s under the first section (“To Load a Program”) in the chapter “Loading Programs and Instruments.”

The collection of acoustic-oriented sounds that comes with SD2 is okay, but not munificent. Fortunately, you can load your own samples. To do this, you right-click on the pad where you want to load the sample; you’ll see the available notes for the pad, and the currently selected sample shows up in the PAD field. Click on the attachment to see how the different notes show up for a pad, as well as the Load and Unload instrument options.

Now it gets a little complex, because when you load a single sample (either through right-clicking or by dragging over a sample), that’s the only sound that will play back when you play any of the notes available for that pad. For example, with the hi-hat example given above, if you load a tom sound into the pad, any of the notes associated with the pad will trigger the tom sound – that’s it. You need to create a multisample-friendly SFZ file to take advantage of these additional notes.

After making any tweaks, you can save in a variety of ways. If you click on “Pad” in the Pad field, you can save a Kit. If you click on “Prog” in the Prog field, you can save a Program. And in the dimly-understood world of “What the heck is that Presets thingie at the top of the window good for?”, you can save a “Preset” (VST .FXB file). This seems to save the same thing as a Program – kits, MIDI patterns, the whole ball of wax.

[Anderton]

As we’ve seen, SD2 can load individual samples, but it’s more interesting – and challenging – to create multisamples with velocity control. To do this, it’s necessary to understand how to program the SFZ file format. If you’re a Sonarian, though, this will serve you in good stead as you will also be able to create sample sets for other Cakewalk instruments, like Rapture and Dimension Pro. So let’s diverge a bit from the “review” path, and move into “tutorial-land” for a bit.

Although programming in SFZ-speak is uncomfortably like computer programming, don’t worry! It’s not that difficult. One of the great things about SFZ files is that you can open them in notepad, and do some reverse engineering. This makes it easy to create templates into which you can simply drop sample names.

However, one crucial aspect is making sure your folders and paths are in order. For example, suppose you want to create a multi-sample with three different kick samples, taken from a sample CD or DVD (in these examples, I’m be using the ones from Bunker 8 Drumatic Percussives collection of samples).

1. Go C: > Program Files > Cakewalk > VstPlugins > Session Drummer 2 > Contents > Kits. Here you’ll find numbered folders named with particular drum sounds, like Bass Drums, Snares, etc. With each of these, you’ll find one or more SFZ files, with accompanying folders of samples to which these SFZ files point.

2. Create a folder within the Kits directory. I called it “1001 - Dance Kicks.”

3. Create a folder within this folder that contains the samples you want to use for your multi-sampled drum sound. I used the Atomic_Jah_Kick_Lo.wav sound from the Bunker 8 collection, along with two variations I created (Atomic_Jah_Kick_Mid.wav and Atomic_Jah_Kick_Hi.wav). These added progressively more “grit,” created using PSP’s Vintage Warmer plug-in, to the original file. I named the folder “AtomicJah.”

4. Now open a file in Notepad. Give this a name that resembles that of the folder containing the samples (e.g., “AtomicJah.sfz”). Make sure you use the .SFZ suffix instead of the usual .TXT.

5. Now let’s start writing the code. Comments are handled by adding // in front of a line (this is like the REM tag in front of lines written in BASIC – you can put anything after that, and the computer won’t recognize it as part of the program). Adding comments is very helpful if you want to document a particular sound, and believe me, you do! That way when you come back to the file later, you’ll remember what you did. Here’s my comments field:

// --------------------------------------------------
// Atomic Jah Kick Drum Sample Set
// From the Big Fish Audio Bunker 8 Drumatic Percussives sample DVD
// “Dance Kits 01” folder
// --------------------------------------------------

// Dance Kick Drum 1

[Anderton]

6. Next, it’s time to specify the key note to trigger this multisample, and the loop mode – which being a drum sound, will be one shot. This line is preceded by the label. Here’s how you would enter the line:

key=35 loop_mode=one-shot

7. Now specify which velocity range a sample will cover by specifying the low velocity (lovel=) and high velocity (hivel), and the sample path used for that range. This line is preceded by a label. Note in the example below that “sample=” gives the name of the folder holding the sample (which again, should be in the same folder as the accompanying SFZ file), with a “\” indicating the path to the sample itself. Like so:

lovel=0 hivel=100 sample=AtomicJah\atomic_jah_kick_lo.wav
lovel=101 hivel=119 sample=AtomicJah\atomic_jah_kick_mid.wav
lovel=120 hivel=127 sample=AtomicJah\atomic_jah_kick_hi.wav

[Anderton]

8. As mentioned earlier, Session Drummer 2 allocates a second “slot” for an alternate kick drum that’s triggered by MIDI note 36. For this, I used the “AtomicJahSub” sound. So, the final SFZ file looks like this:


// --------------------------------------------------
// Atomic Jah Kick Drum Sample Set
// From the Big Fish Audio Bunker 8 Drumatic Percussives sample DVD
// “Dance Kits 01” folder
// --------------------------------------------------

// Dance Kick Atomic Jah
key=35 loop_mode=one-shot

lovel=0 hivel=100 sample=AtomicJah\atomic_jah_kick_lo.wav
lovel=101 hivel=119 sample=AtomicJah\atomic_jah_kick_mid.wav
lovel=120 hivel=127 sample=AtomicJah\atomic_jah_kick_hi.wav

// Dance Kick Atomic Jah Sub
key=36 loop_mode=one-shot

lovel=0 hivel=100 sample=AtomicJahSub\atomic_jah_kick_sub_lo.wav
lovel=101 hivel=119 sample=AtomicJahSub\atomic_jah_kick_sub_mid.wav
lovel=120 hivel=127 sample=AtomicJahSub\atomic_jah_kick_sub_hi.wav

Now, that wasn't really so bad, was it?

At this point all you need to do is go to the Pad parameter, and select “Load Instrument.” Navigate to the SFZ file you created, and your brand new sound will be loaded into Session Drummer 2.

Note above how we populated both slots for the kick drum pad. If you wanted to populate all five slots of the high hat, you would use a similar approach.

[Anderton]

Okay, as promised, here's how to change the look of SD2. Remember, you must use this power only for good!

Go C: > Program Files > Cakewalk > VstPlugins > Session Drummer 2 > Resources. There, you'll see a bunch of .BMP files; these are the individual elements (background, buttons, pads, etc.) that make up SD2's graphic look.

If you want to change something, I suggest first changing its file name to something like "Background_orig.bmp" so you can always return to it by simply deleting "_orig." Then open that file in a Paint program, do your thing, and save under the original name (otherwise, SD2 won't recognize the file). Next time you open up Sonar and Session Drummer 2, it will reflect any changes you've made.

[Anderton]

Here's a non-frivolous (at least I think so!) application for changing the look. I got tired of trying to remember which SD2 pads corresponded to which notes, and which was the audition note. So, I decided to modify the pad graphic so that when the drum wasn't being hit, a "cheat sheet" gets displayed on each pad that shows the note numbers to which it responds in blue, and the audition note in yellow. (Incidentally, I also found out that contrary to the documentation, the audition note for the Pad 1 is 36, not 35.) Click on the attachment to see the modified pad graphics.

Note that these aren't displayed if the pad sound is unloaded (if there's no sound, why would you want to see what it responds to?) or if the pad is receiving a note (because if it's receiving a note, you've probably already figured out what to feed it).

[Anderton]

...and just in case you're sitting there going "Wow, I wish my SD2 had that super-nifty feature!", you're in luck. Download the attachment to get the zipped pad graphics for Pads 1-5. Replace the existing PADx.BMP pictures in the Resources folder with the new ones, and next time you load Sonar, you'll see the new pad graphics.

Note: If the downloaded file has a .PHP extension, change it to .ZIP before trying to unzip it.

[Anderton]

And here are the zipped graphics for pads 6-10.

Note: If the downloaded file has a .PHP extension, change it to .ZIP before trying to unzip it.

[highpressur]

I just bought Sonar 6 PE so i'm just starting to scratch the surface, so many questions....


ok i can't get session drummer to make any sounds.

could someone walk me through.

what midi things do i have to click or enable?

i've got it open, got a kit loaded, tried the groove templates, push on the pad and it lights up but no sounds.

i'm using emu 1616m withou a midi controller. thanks

[Anderton]

1. Open a program, not a kit or an instrument.
2. Click on one of the MIDI patterns (e.g., A, B, C, etc.)
3. Click on the play button (right arrow).

Hear anything now?

[highpressur]

Originally posted by Anderton 1. Open a program, not a kit or an instrument. 2. Click on one of the MIDI patterns (e.g., A, B, C, etc.) 3. Click on the play button (right arrow). Hear anything now?

Ok it's playing now. I think it was because I checked the enable midi out box, not to sure. Thanks

[Anderton]

I had a chance to really put AudioSnap through its paces this weekend. I'm preparaing a performance for NAMM, it's called "Blues and Beats," and basically involves doing a sort of mashup/remix of funky New Orleans kind of stuff. Well, you can't get much funkier or New Orleans than the Neville Brothers...

After isolating several sections of their tune "Hey Pocky Way," I needed to add some other loops but of course, none of them had the same loose, vibey kind of timing as the Nevilles. So I choose one of the Nevilles' loops and made that the "master" that contributed its transients to the pool, and quantized the other loops to the pool. I also used AudioSnap to match the tempo to the loops.

By and large, it was much more painless than I expected. The added loops are all 4 measures (mostly stuff from the Discrete Drums library and my own AdrenaLinn Guitars library), and they pretty much quantized without problems. There were typically around two or three places that didn't sound quite "right," so I'd go in and tweak those individual transient markers, usually quantizing them to a grid.

I was pretty much dreading this, but it turned out to be nowhere near as time-consuming as I expected (although rendering some of the finished clips with the iZotope algorithms can take quite a bit of time). So, thumbs up on AudioSnap in a real-world, time-critical application.

[rtintner]

Although I see how to put the appropriate samples, etc to the Pads given note response range with SFZ files - is there a way to change a pad's "note response range - e.g., to make the snare pad respnd to more than just three MIDI notes?

[Anderton]

 

 

Not that I know of. I've only found how to change the drum sounds assigned to those notes...sorry.

[fh1028]

Any chance of posting the entire modified graphics set for your fantastic looking SD2?

http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forums/attachment.php?s=&postid=20219173

also just have to say the review/tutorial is a wonderful idea.
Thanks you ALL,
Fred

[Anderton]

 

 

If I can make it fit the max attachment size, I'll do it later this evening. It's just the background graphics given a contrast and saturation bump, then colorized, all in Paint Shop Pro. The Pads files have already been posted.

[fh1028]

I tried it myself and it's at
http://home.comcast.net/~fbhdaw/sdbackground.zip
slightly different color.
I'll leave it up for a week (my space is limited)

Thanks for the idea

Fred

[Anderton]

Yup! That looks pretty much like what I did. I hadn't forgotten about you, BTW, but the graphic exceeds themaximum attachment size, and what with the upgrade, I haven't yet found the admin options to increase the size.

[Really!]

Sonar 6.2 to released next week ... some awesome new features. Check it out: http://www.cakewalk.com/Events/NAMM07/default.asp

Really!

[Anderton]

In case you wondered why I've taken so long to post more material, I knew that Sonar 6.2 would be coming out at NAMM but I wasn't supposed to say anything about it until the official announcement. Well now it's out, I'll be downloading it, and carry on with describing the new features as well as seeing if ACT is any easier to implement.

I'm really jamming on doing NAMM videos, though, so progress will be a bit slow until my videos are done. So be patient, sit back, and we'll scope out 6.2 together.

[Keyrick]

Sonar 6.2 to released next week ... some awesome new features. Check it out: http://www.cakewalk.com/Events/NAMM07/default.asp Really!

 

 

I've got it and I'm not impressed. It won't work with my FW1884 and sometimes it crashes upon booting. Three times last night it crashed just opening the software! I'm going back to Sonar 4 until they get the bugs out of it.

[Mr. Ease]

I've got it and I'm not impressed. It won't work with my FW1884 and sometimes it crashes upon booting. Three times last night it crashed just opening the software! I'm going back to Sonar 4 until they get the bugs out of it.

 

 

I guess you will have been on the Sonar Forum already (I guess you have a different user name) but I really think you should persevere and get 6.2 running. It does sound as if it's a "local" problem on your PC. Have you done any "DAW" optimising on XP? This might cause you one or two problems depending on what you might have removed.

 

EDIT: Sorry Keyrick - I have now re-read the thread on the FW1884 and see you have been there already. Let's hope Bob Damiano can come up trumps by talking with the guys at Frontier! Good Luck..