MIDI Production

Widetrack wrote on 1/13/2008, 5:21 PM
Out of curiosity, does anyone here produce music that includes MIDI tracks, either with standalone hardware synths/samplers or with soft synths?

I've needed to do this lately, and have taken to using Cakewalk SONAR. It's overall an excellent piece of software, but, as whenever I try something other than Vegas, I find the workflow frustrating by comparison.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Comments

Kennymusicman wrote on 1/13/2008, 5:25 PM
Yes - I run Cubase/Nuendo all the time - and find the working methods very similar :)

Widetrack wrote on 1/13/2008, 5:27 PM
Does Cubase include and soft synths?

kdm wrote on 1/13/2008, 6:16 PM
Cubase 4 does include some soft synths. What are you looking for specifically? Sonar Producer 7 has a nice set of soft synths.
Widetrack wrote on 1/13/2008, 6:25 PM
not really looking, just wondering what else is out there.

and yes, Sonar's are very cool. session drummer2 is terrific, and i need to get more loops for it. One of their synths--Rapture--has about the best B3 i ever heard from a synth. Z3ta has great, fat, electronic lead sounds. Lots more i haven't explored yet.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/13/2008, 6:59 PM
> just wondering what else is out there.

If you haven't looked at Sony ACID lately you really should give ACID Pro 6.0 a look. It's got a totally new MIDI implementation and its integrated with Vegas in that you can have a wave file that was generated with ACID on the Vegas timeline and then right-click on it and open the ACID project. When you are done rendering in ACID and you come back to Vegas and it replaces the file with the one you just re-rendered automatically. This is a really nice workflow that you can't get from SONAR. Also ACID is very similar to Vegas so the workflow will already be familiar to you.

~jr
Widetrack wrote on 1/13/2008, 9:52 PM
JohnnyRoy:

Sounds like its worth a look. does it support VST soft synths that you know of?
JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/14/2008, 5:16 AM
Yes, not only does it support them but it comes with a special version of Native Instruments Kompakt sample player that is loaded with a nice array of sampled instruments.

~jr
Laurence wrote on 1/14/2008, 6:14 AM
I use and love Mackie Tracktion. I like Acid 6 as well, but I Tracktion is by far my favorite. The things you can do with audio timestretch and transpose are just amazing.

For softsynths I have begun to forgo my collection of softsynths and just use Reason 4.