The Power in Cakewalk SONAR (Quick Pro Guides)

Excellent tutorial book & videos. 1st class.

The title pretty much says it. The video tutorials on the included DVD are a nice bonus and good for quickly refreshing the information in the book.

An excellent intro and tutorial.

I have Sonar X1. It shipped with a pitiful handbook which was a complete waste of time and a pdf manual which was over 1800 pages long. While no doubt pretty complete apart from cursory explanations of midi instruments one has the strong impression that this reference tome had been incrementally changed over time without ever having been rewritten. This is understandable as nobody would willingly attempt to rewrite such a monster. Indeed I read that Sonar X3 has a reference manual pdf of well over 2000 pages which backs up my thesis. In the old days of Cakewalk ProAudio, the fore-runner of Sonar, the manual was manageable even though it was a few hundred pages long. Nowadays it is not. If you want to look something up you have to trawl through a search in Adobe Reader and you might eventually get to where you want to go. Or not. So Sonar must be very intimidating to new users because there is simply no easy way to get into it. Furthermore it is often made more difficult by odd choices of default, such as the Custom tab for track view which does not include input or output options. It took me an age to work that one out. Curiously, thus is also an omission in this otherwise exemplary book which assumes that such actions are performed via the inspector pane rather than the track pane (probably fine for newcomers but not necessarily for people reared on ProAudio 8).Sonar is an excellent but complex DAW but it is surely not beyond the wit of man to produce a manageable handbook for basic operations. And this book does just that and very well too. Of huge importance is the large number of illustrations and very readable type and layout. The Garrigus book, by comparison, is very deficient in this regard although clearly more detailed.As a refresher or introduction to a fantastic bit of software I cannot recommend this highly enough. Indeed, Cakewalk should license it for inclusion in the Sonar box.

For those who are beginning to explore the world of DAWs (digital audio workstations) the choice of software and the technology can be very daunting. There is a mountain to climb. Cakewalk is very much underrated in my sphere of using orchestral samples. The first key point is that Cakewalk is free and it is a full professional version. The second key point is that you can learn very quickly ( by reading this excellent handbook and playing the DVD tutorials) how to use Cakewalk. The third key point is that by becoming proficient in using Cakewalk, you will have saved yourself a lot of money (compared with the cost of pro versions of other DAWs) and be able to produce music at least of equal quality to musicians using other DAWs.This book is an essential tool to learning how to master Cakewalk quickly. It is worth every penny.