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Piano Roll view

Staff view

Loop Construction view

Loop Exploorer view

Events List view

Piano Roll view allows you full editing of MIDI notes, velocity, and controller information. You can move notes, change duration and pitch by dragging with the mouse, or right click to bring up a dialog box where you can scroll or enter values. Controller info can be drawn with the mouse on the bottom half of the view.

Staff view gives you editing capability over one or more MIDI tracks using standard notation. Notes can be added or edited, percussion parts can be built, guitar chords can be entered and the Fretboard pane displayed and edited from here. Entire scores or individual parts can be printed from the Staff view.

From the Loop Construction view you can create new Groove clips and edit existing Groove clips. A clip that has been Groove-afied contains the original tempo and key information. This is covered in more detail in the next section.

Loop Explorer view allows you to preview wav files for import or the eventual creation of Groove clips, and existing Groove clips can also be previewed. Files can be dragged and dropped into the project.

Events List view gives you sequential, detailed information on a particular MIDI track. Highlighted tracks will appear in the Events view, while selected clips within a track will come up as highlighted within the Events view along with other events in the track.

Loops & Such
Working with loops is everyone's favorite pastime (isn't it?), and Sonar has integrated loop construction technology into the program. It's pretty easy to bring in an audio clip in the form of a wav file and turn it into a Sonar "Groove Clip." Sonar will also allow you to import an Acid loop. Additional formatted Groove Clips are available on Cakewalk's website, www.cakewalk.com.

Bring a 1 measure loop (for example) into a track, and double click on it to bring up the loop construction view (previous versions of Cakewalk would bring up the audio view by double clicking). Clicking to enable loop construction will cause the program to analyze the clip and "slice" it appropriately. The loop construction tool will also tell you the original tempo of the loop.

What's cool, is that if the clip does not contain pronounced transients, it will slice it into strict eighth notes (eighth note are the default, with whole notes to 64th notes being the range). If the transients are distinct enough, it will slice according to the attack of each note. Any slice is easily moved to be more exacting, or you may use the "Transient Detect" slider to adjust the sensitivity of the slicing.

If your audio clip is not yet edited into an exact measure, you can click and drag either end to change the length of the clip. Once this is done and the Groove Clip is constructed, turning off the "snap to grid" feature will allow you to drag the clip to the beginning of the track and establish the first note as the downbeat. From the track view, you can click on the edge of this enabled loop and drag it as far as you wish the clip to loop. Nice.

Obviously, one of the main functions of a loop tool would be to allow the user to easily adjust the tempo and pitch of the audio clip, according to the track. The loop construction view will detect the root note of the clip, and allow you to either follow the pitch of the project or work independently of it.

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