The Cakewalk Blog

Published on May 12, 2013 by Chris Hadfield
A revised version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

Uploaded on Feb 20, 2012 by Larrivée Guitars
Additional video of Chris Hadfield visiting the Larrivée Guitar factory in Vancouver, Canada – builders of the Space Station guitar. He talks about challenges of playing in the weightless environment and recording original music in Space and also mentions using Cakewalk Software to record.

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The interesting and never-boring Texas-native front man of MURDER FM, Norman Matthew, will be guest appearing on the Cakewalk blog every other Monday (NorMondays) delivering music production tips, tricks and conditional evilness.  As a seasoned producer/songwriter/instrumentalist, he will be delving into his bag of production wickedness to shed some interesting light on how he approached sounds, songs and life in general;)

MURDER FM’s dark, edgy, and sleek style has been creating a buzz in the music industry domestically, and is quickly becoming a huge hit internationally.  Norman Matthew and the band have established a cult-like following, propelling two of the bands’ videos “As Beautiful as You Are” and “Machine Gun Kisses “to the Top-Ten list on (more…)

Recently and fortunately, I had the opportunity to attend MuskMesse in Frankfurt Germany where I demonstrated the powerful workflow of SONAR X2a.  Similar to The NAMM Show, MusikMesse brings gear junkies like you and me into one centralized location to discover all the new products for anything-music-creation.  The one constituent factor I noticed that sets MusikMesse apart from The NAMM Show is the undeniable international presence; both on the company side, and the consumer side.

I was able to discover some great new products as well as meet some great new artists.  One artist that I was looking forward to meeting was composer/producer (and SONAR X2 user) Jochen Flach who is doing some great things on an international level based out of Germany.  I was excited to meet Jochen after becoming a fan of his compositions as the music he is creating on SONAR X2 is nothing short of innovative and captivating.

As a member of DYNAMEDION – Germany’s leading game-audio company, he was awarded back in 2009 for the best game soundtrack (for the game ANNO 1404).  In addition to usages in games, his music is being used for international promotion-campaigns for movies, TV-series, TV-shows as well as for soundtracks.  You can find his tracks on numerous releases for the movie-trailer business of several major companies – all composed in SONAR.

I got a chance to sit down with Jochen in a somewhat controlled environment at MusikMesse and had a great conversation with him about music production, and why he chooses SONAR for his complex music compositions.

Download the SONAR X2 Producer trial today and find out why more and more award winning producers and musicians from around the world are switching to SONAR. The trial is fully-functional for up to 30-days and includes the award-winning Skylight User Interface and the innovative ProChannel.

You can study Berklee’s renowned music production techniques directly from their renowned faculty members, in a collaborative online community of like-minded musicians. Learn to operate SONAR X2 Producer like a pro from anywhere in the world. Sample a free lesson in SONAR, as well as other areas of music production, guitar, music theory, and more.

Learn more

Are you ready to rock? Last week, over sixty campers said yes, and so did we, when Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp opened its new facility just off the Strip in Las Vegas, NV.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp lets musicians live out their rock and roll dreams by being a part of a rock band that’s led by a real rock star. They get to jam and learn from these rock star counselors as well as record their performances, living out their fantasies both on stage and in studio.

The ‘Camp’s new digs featured a performance room with a twenty foot stage, a thirty foot green screen, and ten rehearsal/ recording rooms. Each rehearsal/ recording room was outfitted with all the gear a rocker could wish for, including a Roland GA-112 guitar amp, Roland RD-700NX digital piano, an HP Z1 or HP Z220 workstation, HP ZR30w monitors, dual Roland Octa-Captures running in VS Expanded mode, and SONAR X2 Producer.

The HP Z1s and HP ZR30ws have extremely high resolutions of 2560×1440 and 2560×1600, and if you’ve never seen SONAR on a display like that before, its worth clicking the picture to the left to get a bigger view. That’s a lot of console strips!

But the fun didn’t stop there.

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SONAR X2′s AudioSnap engine and tempo analysis features give you unprecedented non-destructive rhythmic and tempo control over your audio. Employing sophisticated transient detection technology, the AudioSnap engine automatically analyzes all recorded and imported audio files for rhythmic content to determine where the beats are in the music.  (more…)

SONAR X2 Producer users rejoice. Now you can get awesome guitar tones and effects from clean and spanky to crushing metal with the new TH2 PRODUCER amp modeling plugin by Overloud!  (more…)

Last week was our fourth installment of CakeTV Live, which we broadcast bi-monthly, live, from Center Staging in Burbank, CA. In this latest episode we showed over 450 live viewers the new features of SONAR X2. In case you missed it, the webinar is now available for viewing on CakeTV (or right from this web page, below).

During the webcast we did our best to cover all of X2′s new features like Smart Grid, ProChannel FX Chains, and R-MIX SONAR. However, there were a few new features that we didn’t have time to demo that we think are worth mentioning.

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I will never forget witnessing a demonstration of R-MIX software for the first time.  Fast-forward a bit, and I will also never forget being in a meeting where I discovered that R-MIX was going to be incorporated into SONAR X2 Producer. Music production light-bulbs started going off in my head imagining what I was going to be able to do with multiple instances of R-MIX inside SONAR (see video below.)

What is R-MIX? 

Technically speaking it is an audio manipulation plugin that is powered by Roland’s newly developed V-Remastering technology in conjunction with VariPhrase — lets you see the components of a stereo mix as color-coded clouds of energy and harmonic matter as the track plays.  Speaking as a musician, the only way I can describe it is by calling it “visual sound,” and it is truly impressive as well as creative.

Like many of you, we’re all fired up about SONAR X2. And we’re pretty sure you’d like to know more about what makes it so delicious. So, take a closer look at the newly refined, ever smarter, SONAR X2.

What’s an FX Chain?

FX Chains are an answer to a long standing feature request; to have FX bin presets, or a way to recall an FX bin on an existing track in SONAR. In SONAR X1 Producer we introduced FX Chains, which are essentially an FX bin, or group of FX, saved as a preset.

In SONAR X1 Producer Expanded we upped the ante and upgraded the feature to version 2.0 which added assignable controls and a custom user interface to FX Chains. Later on in the free X1d update we added a Mod Matrix to FX Chains allowing up to four parameters to be mapped to a single control on an FX Chain, which I wrote about in an earlier blog post.

In X2 we’re including FX Chains in SONAR X2 Essential and Studio, as well as Producer. But In SONAR X2 Producer we’ve taken FX Chains one step further having added them to the Producer exclusive feature, the ProChannel.

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