Making Music With Sonar

From Sonar

Home Page * Getting Started * Workflow * Tips, Techniques and Tutorials * Errors and Workarounds * Making Music * Composing, Arranging & Songwriting * Optimizing Your DAW * Recording Gear * Included Components * Third-Party Effects * Third-Party Virtual Instruments * Computer Systems and Components * Free Downloads * External SONAR resources


Contents

General

Recording

Miking

Vocals

Acoustic Instruments

Electric Instruments

Softsynths / Software Samplers

Hardware Synths

Room treatment

The space in which you listen to and record music can have a profound effect on the frequencies that you hear. Depending on your ears and your budget there are certain things you can do to improve the acoustics of your work space.

No Cost and Low Cost Options

The first and easiest method is to go to the different rooms you have available to you and clap your hands or sing as you walk around the room. The dimensions, floor covering, and furniture present will have an effect on how things sound. Also try listening to music in each room. Walk around the room and notice how the sound changes. All rooms emphasize and demphasize certain fequencies. They also have different reverberation characteristics. Try and start out in a room that sounds the best to you.

In the event that you can only work in one room, you need to look at some other options. The first thing to do is the clapping/singing test mentioned above. Get a feel for how things sound as you move around the room. Chances are some spots will sound better than others. Make a note of that and consider those areas when you want to set up a microphone or listen to a mix.

You should try to set up your studio so that the furniture and your workstation are symetrically distributed throughout the room. This is not a hard and fast rule, but you will often encounter fewer problems if you can space yourself an equal distance between the walls on either side of you. Depending on your workspace, this is not always possible.

[Many rooms are rectangular in nature. If you can, position yourself at the longer end of the rectangle. This positioning can alleviate some of the destructive interaction between sound waves (standing wave interference) that occurs in smaller rooms.

Changing Room Acoustic Characteristics

Once you have arranged your room to the best of your ability, you may still struggle with how music sounds in your space. Perhaps you will notice uneven bass response, or annoying early reverb reflections. If you decide that you want to try to improve the acoustics of your room, you will need to spend some money. You are about to venture in the world of acoustical treatment. This is wide subject and it is full of conflicting opinions and advice. Instead of trying to summarize the best practices on this wiki, it would be wise to follow some of the links below and do some reading.

  • A good place to start is Ethan Winer's Acoustic Treatment Article. It is specifically geared toward recording and mixing audio. Winer is a contributor to the Sonar Forum and also runs a company called RealTraps that manufactures various forms of acoutstical treatment.
  • While focused more on home theater, acousticaltreatment.net has an introduction to the various types of treatments available.
  • Auralex, another company that manufatures foam treatment products, has a website called Acoustics 101. It goes into depth about issues of studio construction that are more suited to those looking to build a room for themselves, but it also addresses issues of room treatment.

Mixing

After I compiled the Compendium of Mastering Articles and Compendium of Tape Saturation Plugins, I was asked to start a Compendium of Mixing Articles by dcastle. Now that this is a wiki, they will quickly get out of sync, but that means there will be good stuff in both places.

General Mixing Articles

  • SONAR FAQ — there's no better place to start than our very own FAQ
  • SONAR wiki by Scott Sadowsky — the latest place to share tips, advice and other information relevant to Sonar users.
  • The Computer Music Guide to Basic Mixing — The secret to professional sounding mixing is to try, try and try again. But before you get going, make sure you stay on the right track with the Computer Music guide...
  • Charles Dye's Hard Disk Life or DigiZine's Mixing Revealed by Charles Dye — not a singular skill at all, but a culmination of a number of individual techniques. Techniques that each on their own didn't make for great mixes, but when added together created huge, dynamic, and powerful ones. Techniques that breathed life into the mix, gave it emotion, and made the artist sound like a star

Specific Mixing Articles

Mixing Books

  • Sonar 3: Mixing & Mastering by Craig Anderton — This easy-to-read, practical book will improve your arranging, mixing, and mastering skills by showing you how to take full advantage of the powerful features in Sonar 3. In addition to a basic introduction in sound engineering, you’ll learn an astounding array of pro-level tips and tricks that will help you make better-sounding music. Furthermore, the enclosed CD-Rom includes audio examples and more to help enhance the learning experience
  • "The Mixing Engineer's Handbook" by Bobby Owsinski — Secrets of the top recording engineers revealed at mixdown! Learn the evolution of mixing, regional mixing styles, the six elements of a mix, rules for arrangements and principles of building your mix! Learn the secrets of EQ and ?magic frequencies? along with adding effects, EQ?ing reverbs, sonic layering of effects, calculating the delay time and much more! This book extensively covers stereo mixing with an expansive chapter on mixing in 5.1 surround. Plus, it includes an incredible third section filled with interviews with the top engineers in the field such as George Massenburg, Allen Sides, Bruce Swedien and over a dozen more!
  • "The Art of Mixing" by David Gibson — This colorful book uses extensive visual representations to explain how to create every style of music mix. It's an in-depth exploration into the aesthetics of what makes a great mix in a simple, visual manner. Gibson has mapped out everything that can be done to create various effects in all standard mixes, including details on most styles, from bluegrass to big band, new age to heavy metal, classical to hip-hop, jazz to rap, and alternative rock to techno.

Online Mixing Resources

  • Bruce A. Miller is building a free online recording and mixing course at BAM Audio School. As of October 2006, it is still a work in progress and is far from complete. However, it does contain some useful insights and techniques and is being actively updated.
  • Recording School Online — Online classes with downloadable video: Digital Effects $49.00, Mixing $68.00, … Mastering $1,500.00 — but I have no idea how good or useful they are.

Mastering

A one-stop list of all the external articles on mastering with emphasis on SONAR (Cakewalk's only mastering tool) from the Compendium of Mastering Articles by dcastle.

Mastering Discussions

Great Classic Mastering Articles

  • Bob Katz Digital Domain articles — Bob Katz wrote these articles on digital and analog audio between 1990 and 2002. Much of Bob's book, Mastering Audio contains concepts from these articles. The book is a newly written, holistic work—an organized look at mastering from A to Z. We have retained the older articles here at the website as a public service. As time marches on, we may remove an article from the site if the information has gone out of date.
  • Mastering The Mix — So you've got your phat tune down and you've got your audio mixed to perfection, but it still doesn't quite have the same sparkle and life as the commercial songs in your CD collection … it's time to master your song

Here is a great article over at iZotope about mastering with their "Ozone" mastering tool, but it covers a lot of good general information also:

  • Ozone Mastering Guide — You’ve just finished recording what you think is a pretty good song in your project studio. The playing is good, the recording is clean and the mix is decent. So you burn it to a CD and proudly pop it in your CD player. But when you hear it played after a “commercial” CD, you realize that something is wrong.

Here are some great articles on t.c. electronic primarily about their MASTERING6000 product, but full of useful information about audio and mastering in general:

  • "Level Control in Digital Mastering" by Søren H. Nielson & Thomas Lund — Music mastering is becoming a battle for maximum level rather than a quest for audio quality, because counting consecutive samples at OdBFS is not an adequate restriction of level.
  • "0DBFS+ Levels In Digital Mastering" by Søren H. Nielson & Thomas Lund — This paper examines the sonic consequences when 0dBFS+ signals are reproduced in typical consumer equipment. The performance of a variety of domestic CD players exposed to such signals are presented and evaluated.
  • "The Secret Of The Mastering Engineer" by Bob Katz — Mastering is an art and a science. In this acclaimed booklet, Bob Katz shares good advice about monitoring, metering and processing. About listening to the music and supporting it as the road to Nirvana — from one of the true yogis of our industry.
  • "Compression Applications" by Maureen Droney & Howard Massey — A description of compressors and their applications. Practical advice about parameters and how compressors can be used on single and complex sources.

Here is an article in the Universal Audio WebZine describing how to use UAD-1 plugins for mastering, which might be applicable to others:

Electronic Musician has published some great introductory articles recently

  • GOING IT ALONE An excerpt From Master of the Universe — Letting your ears be your guide is the primary point in mastering. The process — the songwriting, the performance, and the mix decisions — is mostly, if not purely, emotional, and objectivity is hard to come by. That is especially true for those of us who are songwriter, performer, and engineer all at once. Mastering sets aside the decisions, compromises, fatigue, joy, and angst that come with the creative process, and evaluates the sound of a project in its entirety.

Mastering Books

  • "Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science" by Bob Katz — Mastering Audio explains leading-edge audio concepts in an easy-to-grasp, holistic manner, including an ear-opening investigation of the mysteries of jitter, dither and wordlengths, high sample rates, distortion, headroom, monitor calibration, metering, depth perception, compression and expansion, equipment interconnection and much more. Mastering Audio is for everyone who wants to increase their mastery of digital and analog audio: musicians, producers, A&R, mastering, recording and mixing engineers, and students.
  • "Sonar 3: Mixing & Mastering" by Craig Anderton — This easy-to-read, practical book will improve your arranging, mixing, and mastering skills by showing you how to take full advantage of the powerful features in Sonar 3. In addition to a basic introduction in sound engineering, you’ll learn an astounding array of pro-level tips and tricks that will help you make better-sounding music. Furthermore, the enclosed CD-Rom includes audio examples and more to help enhance the learning experience.
  • The Mixing Engineer's Handbook by Bobby Owsinski — Secrets of the top recording engineers revealed at mixdown! Learn the evolution of mixing, regional mixing styles, the six elements of a mix, rules for arrangements and principles of building your mix! Learn the secrets of EQ and "magic frequencies" along with adding effects, EQ'ing reverbs, sonic layering of effects, calculating the delay time and much more! This book extensively covers stereo mixing with an expansive chapter on mixing in 5.1 surround. Plus, it includes an incredible third section filled with interviews with the top engineers in the field such as George Massenburg, Allen Sides, Bruce Swedien and over a dozen more!

Mastering Links

  • Wikipedia Audio Mastering — Steps of the process typically include:
    1. Sequence the recorded audio as it will appear on the final product.</li>
    2. Correct any problems with the audio, such as volume level, tonal balance, or undesireable artifacts.</li>
    3. Transfer the audio to the final master format.</li>

And, if you think that mastering is all about getting the loudest possible sound on your CD, please read The Death of Dynamic Range, which is a brutal exposition of the history of compression on CDs, and a fitting closing article in this compendium.

Pressing / Copying / Distributing

Internet Distribution Sites

The following sites are mentioned as a service to SONAR users. We make no endorsement of their quality, integrity, reliability or any other aspect of their services.

For Download

These sites allow you to put your music online (typically as MP3s) so that others may download it, either for free or using some sort of per-song or per-album purchasing model.

For Purchase On CD

These sites act as online distributors for physical music CDs.


Home Page * Getting Started * Workflow * Tips, Techniques and Tutorials * Errors and Workarounds * Making Music * Composing, Arranging & Songwriting * Optimizing Your DAW * Recording Gear * Included Components * Third-Party Effects * Third-Party Virtual Instruments * Computer Systems and Components * Free Downloads * External SONAR resources































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