Sound Shaping – Cakewalk Sonar & Hauptwerk VSTi
Well, I got my hands on Cakewalk Sonar 8 (Producer Edition) and I have the ‘free’ version of the Hauptwerk Virtual Pipe Organ. I don’t myself have the proper hardware to play the virtual organ directly, so I thought it might be fun to put these two products together and see what I could come up with.
I had n
ot used Cakewalk in many many years, and was pleased to see it’s quite easy to use. All the basic stuff is where one would expect it to be, and while the main toolbars seem quite cluttered, navigating was not terribly difficult. I had also hoped to use the East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestras, but was unable to find where the plugins had been installed to – so that was no good.
Sonar is pretty straight forward like any multitrack editor. Of course, in this case we’re working with MIDI files, so there’s a lot more that can happen under the hood. I installed and activated the Hauptwerk plugin, and found a copy of Léon Boëllmann’s Toccata from his Gothic Suite (one of my favorites), and set to work. As I had a very limited organ sample set in Hauptwerk, I had to re-use several of the MIDI tracks on the pedal, great, and swell but I think I came up with a passable (if not erratic) mix.
Hauptwerk provides the interface one expects here too, very similar indeed to the stand-alone version.
Finally, a sound is worth 1,000 words, so here is my (admittedly quickly done) mix of Boellmann: Toccata
(Pardon the bells, but I did mention it was the free version of Hauptwerk!)
