Third Take

After you’ve set yourself up for a successful recording, it’s time to press record and capture the (hopefully) great performance. Unfortunately, even the best performance can be marred by sloppy recording technique. Here are three tips to help you get a cleaner track. Read more

A lot of home studio recorders seem to mix as they go. After a tracking session, I like to put a rough mix together and hear how the tracks are working. I also think there’s a lot of utility to doing some preliminary mixing before you record additional instruments - especially in the case of drums. Fixing minor timing issues with AudioSnap before recording other instruments can have a huge impact on the overall “tightness” of the track.

However, I often get into a situation where I’m reluctant to change the panning and levels of some elements in my preliminary mix to set up the monitor mix for tracking a new instrument. Muting isn’t a problem, but if I’m recording bass next and the player wants to hear more kick drum, I hate having to upset the drum mix I spent several hours perfecting. As a solution, I’ve begun using Sonar’s excellent routing tools to create something I’m calling the Monitor Bus. Read more

If you want to export MP3s with Sonar, and don’t want to pay $19 for the Cakewalk encoder (or it doesn’t work on your system), there is a free encoder called LAME that can be integrated into Sonar. This tutorial will show you how to configure Sonar to encode MP3s with LAME. Read more

Most of us get into home recording because we want to record ourselves or our band. We soon realize that there is a steep learning curve, and making a recording that sounds “professional” is hard. If you are just starting out, your biggest obstacle is not lack of gear, software, or plugins, but lack of knowledge. You can make a good recording on minimal equipment, but if you don’t know how to work effectively, it can be very frustrating. There is nothing worse than getting several hours into a project and realizing that a mistake you made at the beginning has doomed your recording. Here are a few techniques to help you get off to a solid start. Read more

Electric guitar is one of the easiest instruments to record. Maybe it’s because I’m a guitar player and I know what I want a guitar to sound like, but I’ve never had a lot of trouble getting good electric guitar sounds recorded. Even so, there is a difference between good and great - here are five tips that have improved my recordings. Read more

Are you tired of setting up EZ Drummer every time you start a new project? Sonar makes it easy to create a project template that will load your EZ Drummer setup when you create a new project file. This tutorial will show you how to configure EZ Drummer with multi-track output and save it as a Sonar template. Read more

Sonar’s stereo buses are great tools when it comes time to mix your project. The concept of buses is rooted in the world of analog mixing consoles, but Cakewalk has redefined the bus into something even more powerful than aux sends or subgroups. Sonar simply has stereo buses, and you can have as many of them as you want, and route them however you want. To understand the power behind this concept, take a look at how buses are used in three common scenarios: Submixes, Effects Buses, and Parallel Compression. Read more

Acoustic guitar is one of the most difficult instruments to record. I haven’t come close to mastering the art, but I have figured some things out along the way that I think are worth passing on to other home recorders. Some of these are sure to be controversial, and other people may have had great results with other techniques. However, after reading everything I could find and applying it in my own home studio, this is what has worked for me. Read more

AudioSnap, a new suite of features in Sonar 6, contains several powerful tools for manipulating the timing of audio. There are two main directions you can take with AudioSnap - snapping the global project tempo to existing audio, and quantizing audio, either to the project grid or other audio. It is this last idea, quantizing audio to other audio, that is the most exciting.

A drum part with timing issues forced me to delve into AudioSnap for the first time. At first, I was frustrated because the results sounded terrible; the natural decay of the cymbals was ruined, and the hats were not closing on the right beat. It was then that I discovered the existence, and importance of, the different AudioSnap algorithms. Read more