Third Take

The last Cakewalk deal was too good to pass up, and I finally upgraded to Sonar 8.5. I’ve only spent about two hours with it, but they were happy hours. Part of the setup included migrating my settings from Sonar 6, and, for the most part, they were migrated. I had to disable my motherboard soundcard again, and I don’t think 8.5 is seeing my old drum maps, but everything else seems to be fine.

The new plugins sound amazing. I’ve played with TruePianos, Guitar Rig, and Z3ta+. I didn’t expect to use Guitar Rig, but after hearing it, I’m considering selling my SansAmp PSA-1. I even tried it using “input monitoring” and didn’t have any latency problems. The built-in tuner is very convenient.

For the most part, I haven’t had any trouble finding commands or options in the new version. It seems to be the same Sonar, but better. I couldn’t help but smile when I changed my project temp and it automatically stretched my audio clips! Maybe that feature existed in 6, but I never found it if it did.

I downloaded the free Orca softsynth a while back, but never did anything with it. I don’t do a lot with MIDI or softsynths, but last night we were looking for a weird sound to add texture to a song and I remembered Orca.

Read more

Chrisma on the Cakewalk forums turned me on to these free Modern Plugins, containing everything from compressors and equalizers to more exotic things called black dragons and monsters.

They certainly look nice, and appear to sound pleasant as well. I haven’t tried to use them in a real mix yet, just played around with a few on some scratch tracks. But you can’t beat the price…

Toontrack has released EZplayer Free and you can download it, for free, if you make an account at their website.

What is it? It looks like the MIDI clip organizer from EZ Drummer in a standalone plugin, allowing you to organize MIDI clips and play them back through a variety of samplers – EZ Drummer, Drumkit from Hell, BFD, and more. You still need to have a sampler and a host program, but now I guess you can easily map MIDI clips from one sampler to another.

My guess is that this is Toontrack’s next step in their plan to take over the world. They already have a couple samplers – EZ Drummer and dfh – and are building a formidable sample library with the EZXs they continue to release. With EZplayer, now they can start selling MIDI libraries, not only to EZ Drummer customers, but other sampler users as well. It also makes it easy to sell samples to someone who already has MIDI patterns.

I had mentioned before that I’d tried to install the Auto-Tune 5 demo in x64 and it refused to install, and that my email query to Antares was never answered. Well, two months later, I finally received an answer when this strange little email drifted into my SPAM folder. Read more

I found a wonderful little plugin called GSnap from GVST. It is an auto-tune effect, much like Antares AutoTune, except it is free. It comes with presets for “Subtle” and “Not So,” and is adjustable to all points in between. I have had good results with it so far, and would highly recommend it. Read on for my experiences with it and other pitch-correction plugins. Read more