Music Creation using SONAR

Cakewalk’s SONAR software is one of the most professional and reliable tools for music creation. This three-course SONAR-based certificate program provides musicians, engineers, and producers worldwide with an accomplished SONAR knowledge base using Berklee’s renowned production techniques.

In Desktop Music Production, instructor Michael Bierylo introduces you to the art of music production on the PC using SONAR. You’ll start with learning production techniques and principles that apply to any recording situation, whether digital, 4-track, or full studio. With hands-on lessons and projects, you’ll move through the challenges of setting up your own home studio, and be introduced to concepts and techniques like signal flow, signal processing, equalization, digitization, basic audio mixing, and MIDI. By the end of this course you’ll possess the skills to edit and create your own synthesizer sounds, use samples and sample loops, mix multi-track audio projects, and make a final master of an audio project suitable for distribution.

No matter how good a song is or how accomplished the musicians playing it are, the wrong mix can leave an otherwise beautifully crafted song sounding unprofessional and unpolished. The next course in the program, Critical Listening, will teach you to identify the production elements that contribute to a well-balanced, artful and professional-sounding mix. Through weekly training drills, analysis of classic recordings, and comparative studies of different mixing styles, you'll learn to identify the basic aspects of a mix: width and depth, frequency range, dynamics and the specific mix technique used to arrive at a given result. You’ll learn what mix approaches work for what genre, when to break these rules, and how to properly set up your listening station for optimal results. You’ll learn how signal processors, EQ and reverb are used, and learn to identify different instruments, distortion types, and production tricks by sound alone. Finally, you’ll learn the trademark tricks and sounds of famous producers, and learn to do what they do – take ideas from existing recordings and use them as a reference point as you zero in on your own perfect sound.

In the final course in this program, Producing Music with SONAR, you learn the ins and outs of this powerful software, and will refine and expand on the production skills you have been learned in your previous two courses. Throughout the course, you’ll learn to complete all aspects of a multi-track recording using MIDI, audio, loops and plugin effects using SONAR’s Producer Edition. Each week, you'll study a new creative tool within the program, and learn Berklee's expert approach to using it in music production. Every lesson builds upon the last, with the end goal of completing a final mixed and mastered stereo recording that will be evaluated by your classmates and instructor. By the end of the course, you will have a professional understanding of SONAR software, and a firm command of recording, audio editing and mixing techniques, the benefits of using other software applications with SONAR as a host.