asrx
def1nition said:
I have a similar problem but my hardware only has stereo outputs I ussually just put the track together on my hardware and take my ASRX to the studio I caould record each track separately into the program but that's too time consuming.
def... let me share with you a trick I've learned w/ the asr-x and Sonar3.. this is kinda hard to explain so bear with me. Ask questions if I stop making sense.
I'm using a rm1-x to sequence the asr-x and a sound card w/ only a stereo line input. We spent a LOT of time on our first single trying to figure out how to dump the whole beat into the DAW at once... we tried sequencing the whole song out and then running through it 12 times, we tried dumping the midi into another machine to arrange it and then running through 12 times, and a bunch of other stuff, but nothing worked and it all took so long... even though I had the 8 output expander for the asr, I couldnt afford an 8 input sound card at the time... (still can't)
What I finally figured out is this little trick. Set Sonar to record stereo and set it to the tempo of your sequencer. Start recording in sonar and then press play on the sequencer. You dont need to start them at the same time. Lets say you have a 4 bar loop in your sequencer. What you want to do now is play 4 bars of each track by itself, without stopping the sequencer (this is the trick). What I do is mute everything except the first track, play 4 bars of it (usually the kick) and then move on to track 2, muting track one in the process, and so on down the line. Once you've played everything on its own into the DAW and recorded it, stop recording. Now what you do is line up the first beat with the start of the track. Do this by turning off snap and cutting away anything before the first beat. Zoom in a lot so you get it right on... Then drag that whole recording so that it starts right at the beginning of the track. Here comes the cool part. Now turn snap back on and place the cursor at the end of the 4th bar. You should have only track one's kicks in the first 4 bars, and track 2, lets say snares, immediately following. Now hit "S" to split the track. This cuts what you've recorded into 2 parts, rigth at the cursor. Drag the rest of the track you recorded down to an empty part of the track window, a new track will be created for it, and you now have 4 bars of kicks in track one of sonar and everything else you recorded on track 2. Line track 2 up with the start of that track. Put the cursor at the end of beat 4, Hit "S" again, drag the rest down, etc. Do this until you run out of recorded beat... What you have now is one loop from every track from your sequencer on seperate tracks in Sonar. Because you didnt stop the sequencer, because the midi timing in sonar is good enough, and because you lined up the first beat right, everything falls into place and syncs up. Now all you have to do is select all of these tracks and convert them to groove clips, then arrange and mix the whole song in Sonar.
Using the method, I can go from rappers picking out a beat, to having it tracked out in sonar and ready to start laying vocals in about 5-10 minutes. I can arrange things while they are rapping, and I can make changes to the song structure on the fly without having to rerecord everything if they change their minds about how long a verse will be, or they want breakdowns here or there... Hell, half the time they dont even know what the structure will be before they start laying vocals. I can even change the tempo (slightly) without rerecording because sonar can timestretch kinda like you can w/ ACID (not quite as good as Acid though...)
If you're gonna be taking it to another studio w/ protools or whatever to record, you can bounce multiple tracks out of sonar at once and put those on cds as wav files, but thats another trick for another post, if anybodys interested...
Hope this helps..
Christian.