Using Sonar for Drums

I am new to Sonar and to PC mixing/editing. I am now trying to figure out how to use Sonar to make drum tracks. My question is this: After using the Session Drummer to arrange patterns, how do I convert that to an audio track. I can hear the drums when I playback in Sonar, but when I convert to wave file, they are gone. Any help would be appreciated.

I'm not familiar with Sonar, but if it's like most programs, you'll have to export the track as Audio first.
You should read the manual though, cause there's probably a bunch of settings you'll need to know first like isolating the track properly, importing the audio back into the program, whether you want it at 24 or 16 bit etc..

Thanks schmange. I'll take a look at exporting when I get home. If anyone has experience using Sonar for this type of function, I'd love to hear your input as well. Thanks.

Sorry this is a bit vague however I recently got rid of SONAR.

To bounce / export you need to convert the Midi to audio after assigning an "Instrument" to each midi track / pitch. The ease of this will depend on several things not least how good your sound card is and wether it has a polyphonic midi synthesizer (sound module) built into it.

This is easy with GM type sounds but harder if you are using a non-GM external sound module (like a Boss DR770 drum machine).

If you are using an external sound module you will need to re-record the midi as audio, mix and bounce (export).

Have you checked out the midi tutorials in the Help section of Sonar ? You may find a very detailed answer there.

Ok, I'm at home now and I've been trying these suggestions. Maybe I'm just missing something obvious here but I've played around with the MIDI settings and Instrument settings and I've still had no luck. I have one MIDI track with session drummer selected. When I double click the session drummer i have 2 patterns selected that show up at the bottom. when i hit play, i hear the drums just fine. when i go to file>export everything is grayed out and i cannot export. I've looked through the help files and i've tried different MIDI and Instrument settings and nothing seems to help. Can anyone help me out? If I'm doing something totally wrong, don't be afraid to call me an idiot and tell me what i'm doing wrong. I really like Sonar so far except for this one problem and would really like to be able to make this work. Thank you for your help.

You need to turn the Midi into audio.

Have a look in the Sonar tutorial in the "Help" section and it will show you all about it.

Sorry I cant be more help however with out having your system in front of me it is difficult to give you specific instructions.

YEAH!!! I finally got it to work.
If anyone out there is having the same problem, what you have to do is open up your sound card volume control, go to the recording section and select midi as the record input. Then you just arm a regular audio track for recording and hit record. Works like a charm. Thanks guys for your help. You were right, I did finally find it in the help file. Most of the MIDI sections were about recording MIDI using the piano roll view and stuff though. Thanks again.

Excellent well done mate !!

Happy recording !

I used the session drummer with Pro Audio 9 for awhile until I discovered Drag and Drop Drummer. The sound is soooo much better, plus it's already in .wav format.

Drag and Drop Drummer? I've never heard of that. Is there a demo version available that i could try out?

Not sure if they offer a free download....
Here's a link to a review:
http://www.pcrecording.com/dddreview.htm

looks like a cool program. i tried the link on the review page but it was just some search page. i think the link i tried was dddrummer.com.

Yeah, that search page came up for me too. I guess dddrumer.com is not up anymore. Anyway, the cool thing about it is that the loops were actually recorded in a studio by a real drummer. In addition to loops, it has individual drum hits so you can construct your own drum beats. It's the real deal, which is why I like it so much. I just create my own beats, add a little reverb and it comes to life....

Hey JFREK,how are you making your drum maps?Have you found a better way to make them than pointing and clicking each note/beat?It takes me HOURS to make a drum track/map with the mouse.

I'm buying the Edirol PCR-80 midi controller this month...it better work for making drums or else*pointing finger at edirol* :mad:

I might buy toontracks 'drumkit from hell' or something too.Hate the GM drums!

I drag in the drums to create a measure, then I just copy and paste that measure. Now I have 2 measure's which I copy and paste to make 4 measures, and so on until I get to where I want to add a fill or change the beat, then repeat the process. Still time consuming, but well worth it in my opinion. A lot faster than building the whole song one drum hit at a time...

If the beat is more complex, then I may create 4 measures (or however many measures it takes before the beat starts over), and copy those 4 to make 8.