There are many very good online courses; at reasonable cost, and surprisingly, some are even free - and from some very reputable educational institutions as well.

For awhile, even Berklee College of Music was offering a free online course in Basic DAW Production. I never took the course myself, but I do know someone who did, and she said that she learned quite a bit; that it was well-organized, intuitive, and without being complex to the point of frustration. I've heard her projects since she took the course a few years ago, and I can personally attest to the fact that her work shows vast improvement.
(I don't know if that particular course is still available, or if it's still free ... you'd have to do a search. I think it was originally offered through "coursera" (?) ).

As with any reputable educational opportunity, be it online or in person, what you get out of it will only ever be as much as what you put into it.

Glad to hear you are taking advantage of the technology, GG. Learning is a wonderful thing... we should never stop. There's no such thing as "too much knowledge". ;)

PS... what version of Sonar had you been using up until you made the switch to S1?

FWIW
-d.

I'm current on Sonar and have their last release "Lexington".
Been on Cakewalk product since the DOS MIDI days in the 80's. when they were not even doing audio. Seen and been on every version of Sonar they got .
Heck, I was cleaning out the basement and found the manual for "Cakewalk Pro Audio 6.0" that's a long time ago....

As I have a few computers to play with, I still have my main Sonar box and added a Studio One box. I've got a few MOTU boxes
And some extra PCI 424 cards.. So it's easy to add a DAW in if I just want to play.

What was overwhelming was the sample and sound libraries offered by Studio One
I think installed after unzipping it was close to 34 Gigs! No kidding the library is huge.....
Anyhow, as I could get an upgrade fairly cheap, I pulled the trigger....

We'll see how S1 is after a few months, once the novelty of a new DAW wears off
and I actually get a couple of rounds of production through the workflow...

the one area I was really impressed with is the Mastering window ... you can drag and drop all the songs into the mastering window in the play order, It will automatically place 2 seconds between cuts and you can apply processing at the song level independent of other songs. once you have it "right" youncan burn the cd... (or other formats MP3).

You can even drag and drop the song order around....

Anyhow, pretty pumped to try something "new"..

The online courses are lots of fun, I've started the 10 week guitar boot camp and What I've picked up in the first 13 lectures for my playing skill level was pretty golden. And well worth the money...

Don't know anybody that's gone through anBerkley course yet , Have seen the blues master preview and I was impressed by the instructor and delivery.

Guelph_Guy, post: 435100, member: 47293 wrote: What was overwhelming was the sample and sound libraries offered by Studio One

I give you a heads up Guelph_Guy ...if you get on the Presonus website, you can access even more sample libraries and goodies...for free
Plus, there is a multitude of add-ons you can pick up, just view your S1 feed when you open S1...heaps of good stuff to choose from.;)

Guelph_Guy, post: 435100, member: 47293 wrote: "Cakewalk Pro Audio 6.0" that's a long time ago....

I got ya beat. Somewhere in my house is Cakewalk for DOS 3.0 LOL... but I'm not kidding.

I was a long time Sonar user myself - but walked away from it when I had the opportunity to try Samplitude. I've already explained why in many posts, so I won't go into it again here... but the only things that matter are, if you like the platform you are working in, if it gives you the best workflow for what you do, if you know it well enough to get around it in your sleep ( and I think I did that many times, LOL) if it's sonically honest, and if it allows you to be creative and productive, then you should use whatever you feel is best for you.

:)

DonnyThompson, post: 435104, member: 46114 wrote: I got ya beat. Somewhere in my house is Cakewalk for DOS 3.0 LOL... but I'm not kidding.

I was a long time Sonar user myself - but walked away from it when I had the opportunity to try Samplitude. I've already explained why in many posts, so I won't go into it again here... but the only things that matter are, if you like the platform you are working in, if it gives you the best workflow for what you do, if you know it well enough to get around it in your sleep ( and I think I did that many times, LOL) if it's sonically honest, and if it allows you to be creative and productive, then you should use whatever you feel is best for you.

:)

Sonar has been good for me , no complaints .. I am on the Platinum release ..,I think I said Lexington but that's the build ..

But, If you have not used any other DAW for a number of years , you don't have a yardstick to measure what's out there... When I got cakewalk products, it was pretty much the only advanced MIDI product for the PC and back then I was on an IBM 286 or 8088 back then ... The other was CueBase on an Atari 1040 STE
(my bud had that package , I was so jealous)...

I've stayed with CAKEWALK for 20+years I think .... mid 80's .. never entertained any other products because what it was... worked, when I did search the market there was still not ALOT of PC product available. I learned it, got workflow, and was reluctant to change to any other product, I was lazy to learn any other product.

Many years ago bought a delta 1010 which came bundled with Ableton Live , messed with it but couldn't get my head around the interface/workflow .. so off to the side it went ...
(Now Ableton 9.5 is alive and well in the house with a push controller and a controller keyboard that my daughter uses.)

Purchased a Yamaha THR10 Practice amp a few years back it came bundled with CueBase AI 6.. It was the lite version , put it on my tablet and ran it from there. Could take the Yamaha practice amp which had a USB audio interface and my tablet to a friends place set it up and record some ideas . WORKED GREAT. But was still not comfortable with Cubase and didn't spring from lite to professional ....

I'm glad that companies will give you a 30 day demo now a days and the internet has made the ability to download and evaluate product a godsend...

I've been on other boards/forums where people are whining and complaining about DAW software and personally at the end of the day they have made no real effort to explore the software. One guy was complaining that the manual was too big at 36 pages WTF !...
Seems they think its going to mix and master songs for them with no requirement on their part ....totally brainless.
My favorite one is why do my recordings sound like (insert distasteful word here).... my DAW sux... Then you find out that the guy been using their daughters Fischer-price "mister mic" microphone..... (no kidding).

Cheers GG

Sean G, post: 435103, member: 49362 wrote: I give you a heads up Guelph_Guy ...if you get on the Presonus website, you can access even more sample libraries and goodies...for free
Plus, there is a multitude of add-ons you can pick up, just view your S1 feed when you open S1...heaps of good stuff to choose from.;)

yes, I saw that pop up in the S1 viewer , There's tons of stuff , gonna take a while to work through it

Anyhow, my adventure continues, ain't learning grand?...

When and if I retire, (and my hearing holds) up, I couldn't want for more. Having recording as a hobby has been great adventure and I've learned so much from everybody on here just browsing the forums. I'm glad this site was created... thank you all..

WELL.. I just completed "music theory for electronic musicians part 1", A 37 lecture course with videos, Pretty much a review of scales/ chord construction /progression and working in Ableton Live. As my daughter is the Ableton Live person I had the benefit of using her DAW to work through the course.

1. I would say it's a good starter course if your musical foundation is weak. They use the piano roll editor (pretty much a mainstay of any DAW now a days) to teach scales and chord construction and chord progression theory. Good for new comers that want to learn some fundamentals. The instructor is really solid..
3. Additionally, it forced me to spend more time in ableton..
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Okay, as I'm not really an Ableton guy, I decided to work through the same course my daughter is on "electronic music production in Ableton live"..
I just completed it today about 60 short lectures from 3 minutes to 20 minutes so I though I'd let some in this thread know it was fun... As for the recording mixing , mastering it's primarily all itb.. but the mixing side was pretty straight up , eq, compressor, sidechain,automation ... and mastering was multiband and limiter and mid/side... Overall a good review and if you had no experience mixing mastering it would be a pretty good starter for those who had never done it before. It would most likely translate over to other daw 's pretty easy.. So as a $ 10.00 promotional special, I got my moneys worth...

I have a friend, a keyboard/Sax player who uses Ableton, and he creates some pretty wonderful sounding tracks. I used him for both real sax and for E-wie sax ( wind synth), as well as vocals, on a recent album I produced, and he delivered great sounding tracks for the project. But, he was also using a nice input stage - an Amek channel for his pre, and some nice mics, which also make a difference, but Ableton obviously suits his needs for track delivery.

With modern DAW's these days, I don't believe there's much difference in the recording quality as long as your input gain-chain is of good quality.

The difference(s) for me comes with the mixing stage, and how the platform is coded to handle plugs and stereo rendering on the output. I use Samplitude because I felt that my previous DAW, which was Sonar, was skewing the sonics in that regard. But as far as straight recording, and exporting dry tracks as .wav files, I think they're all about the same.

Yes, sounds like samplitude got the summing programming spot on , I've heard good things about samplitude.. I'm fortunate to have a few DAWS to work with, each computer is configured the same for hardware ,memory and storage. One unit has sonar, one unit has Ablation, and the third has studio one.. The 4 has some scratchpad apps, cakewalk music creator pro...

At some point , I may add Samplitude to the DAW Farm here...I'm pretty curious about that app and I understand that sonically at the summing stage it's superior to what I have..

HOWEVER, I'm going to have to up the quality of my gear in order to leverage the benefit of samplitude...

Homecare you doing Donny?

Homecare =how are ..darn autocomplete

Trying to hang in there as best as I can.

Thanks for asking ;)