Three weeks ago I finished the drums for “Painting Abstracts” and moved on to the piano. I’m using Modartt’s Pianoteq Play instead of Truepianos this time around: for some reason it just seemed to work better. Both VSTs have a fine selection of “pianos” to choose from, but Pianoteq’s “K1” model seemed best. There’s a jazzy middle section coming up, however, that might prove the selection and see whether it sticks.

Last weekend I took a break from Abstracts and worked on “Strange Finale”, loading it up into Cakewalk’s SONAR X1 Producer and seeing how it behaved. Before long I was completely comfortable with the newly revised “smart” tool in the MIDI editor, and only once did X1 crash, taking out my recent edits.

Much has been written about the mad, crazy, and user-annoying changes between SONAR 8.5 and SONAR X1 so I won’t re-hash them. Suffice to say, I am not a fan of X1, and I’ve been cautious about using it full time for my projects. It’s a very buggy release, but in Cakewalk’s favour, they have been releasing regular patches to deal with the most troublesome niggles.

I just wish I could get SONAR X1’s “smart” editing tools into 8.5’s robust and stable UI.

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In other news, lousy blog spammers still get through the captcha gate on this blogengine site, but it seems managable. I’ll keep comments open for a while longer.