Sonar Platinum has quite a few nifty new features as of Jamaica Plains update. Some of which includes Auxiliary tracks and patch points. Essentially, these allow any audio based track to become extremely flexible. At any point you can take an audio track and treat it like an Aux track, routing tracks to other tracks; even busses to tracks. I decided to play around a little with their project template Showcase CA-X Amps Platinum. If you’d like to create an instant parallel amp sim for a huge stacked sound, open up this project template and follow along.
(Disclaimer: I'm currently using the latest Kingston update, running Sonar Platinum 64-bit on Windows 10 Pro 64-bit platform).Once the project is open, you could highlight all the tracks and select the hardware input of your interface your guitar is plugged in to and then enable input echo on all so you are auditioning your guitar sound simultaneously through the processing. You could even only arm one track, record your performance and then duplicate the clips to the other tracks so that they all play the same thing.
The problem with this route comes when you plan to start comping together the perfect guitar track from all of your performances. You want to hear instant feedback of what it sounds like through the amp sims and get a feel for how your editing affects the entire stacked sound. So, you could also just arm and record to every track, and use clip grouping to make it easier to edit. Clip Grouping can still create some headaches especially when you haven’t learned how to finesse individual clip edits while grouped.
The approach of all tracks recording their own clips can easily waste hard drive space recording redundant clips of the exact same guitar performance. So instead, let me share my approach to creating a stacked sound without all that hassle.
First, create a new project from the Project Template – Showcase – CA-X Amp Platinum.
Once the new project is loaded from the template, You should see all of the tracks color coded and grouped by the particular style they belong to.
Create a new audio track and label it Guitar DI. Be sure to enable input echo.
With the newly created audio track, highlight it and select the input that your guitar is plugged into.
Now, configure the audio track’s output. Select New Patch Point.
Now in the track folders below, left click on the top audio track to highlight it, and hold SHIFT and left click on the bottom-most audio track, and in the prochannel view on the left, hold CTRL while selecting your new input. In the list that pops up, select your new patch-point track. It doesn’t really matter which channel we select as it’s all going back to mono, so just select (Patch Point 1: Left (mono).
You can rename the patch point something easy to identify. Go to select the track input again, and under the drop-down for Patch Point 1 the following option should say Rename Patch Point.
In this case, I renamed my patch point Guitar DI AUX.
Lastly, enable input echo on the track folder so that all tracks can receive the live audio signal from Guitar DI track.
You now have all the highlighted audio tracks acting like Auxiliary tracks. To verify that the tracks have changed inputs to accept audio from the patch point, their track icon should have changed to the icon as seen in the screenshot below.
This way you can arm and record just 1 guitar performance track to feed the stacked amp simulation tracks and mix, tweak, and design to your hearts content. Only one recording track is necessary, and can allow for much easier editing when trying to build comps from all of your takes and still hear the processed sound through each of the aux tracks in real-time.
Did you like this quick tip? Want to see more? How have you used aux tracks in Sonar Platinum? Share your thoughts in the comments below and add to the conversation!