Anyone familiar with cakewalk "studio instruments"

Dave-the-Pub-muso

Howdy all. Anyone worked with this program? I'm thinking of buying it to replace my old roland sound canvas. Are the sounds any good? and does it come with it's own MIDI player/sequencer?

All info appreciated.

Shot.

[deleted]

Hi Dave. I have the Sonar 9 program. I still have to play around with the sounds a bit more, but they haven't struck me as bad. I find the Cakewalk foum quite helpfull. You can get to it from the Cakewalk website.

I'm not that familiar with the program yet, but it does 'soft synths' if that's what you're asking. As far as I can see it has GAZILLIONS of gadgets, so if it's not soft synths you're after it'll probably one of the other ones.

AlanRatcliffe

Studio Instruments is the same kind of idea as Edirol's Super Quartet, and only has drum, bass, electric keys and string section sounds. So it's not going to replace a GM/GS module, which have a wider range of instruments (although probably lower quality). One advantage it has is the pattern sequencer which is great for throwing something together quickly.

If you want an upgrade to a Canvas (which one BTW?), You need to look at Native Instruments Bandstand or even the Edirol Hyper Canvas (which is a bit of an upgrade over a SC-88, but not a huge one).

Renesongs

Cakewalk Sonar comes bundled with Cakealk TTS (True Tone Synthesizer ) which is essentially a re branded Edirol Hyper Canvas which was a huge upgrade on Rolands Virtual sound Canvas 55/88. Follow the marketing and you will see that the TTS is better than the SC 55/88, but why? SC 55 samples are 44100 by 16bit, TTS is 44800 by 24 bit. SC maximum polyphony is 24 notes TTS is 128 notes.

In practice I bought a Sound Canvas 55 in 1991. It was the central hub of all my arrangements and orchestration. It fell into disuse shortly after Cakewalk Sonar bundled TTS into their software. Sadly I sold The SC a couple of years ago because it was gathering dust in my cupboard.

majestikc

Viccy has gone forward into the future and acquired Sonar 9......

Sonar 8.5 has JUST come out.

The sounds in cakewalk studio instruments aren't that great, you can get better sounding drums,piano's and bass guitars etc from Reason if you have it, otherwise I'm sure there are better ones for around the same price, especially these days.If I'm not mistaken, Cakewalk Studio Instruments are quite old.

doc-phil

It's funny this thread should come up now; I tried Studio Instruments yesterday at a friends place, and to be quite frank, it sucks!! I played around with the drum plugin mostly, and the drum samples sound so so bad... I suppose it could pass marginally if you wanted to use it exclusively for jazz/soul/funk beats, but anything other than that I wouldn't recommend it. I tried dialing in some metal/hard rock beats and it sounded terrible. I looked briefly at the strings plug-in and while the actual sounds of the bass, cello and violin seem fine, the program doesn't seem to offer much when compared to other programs like Edirol Orchestral for example.

I didn't try out the bass or electric piano VST's so I can't say anything about them.

I wouldn't recommend Cakewalk studio instruments, but that is just based on my n00b opinion, it may work for some people. ?

Graeme

"Studio instruments" is pretty crap. I've been a Cakewalk user for years & bought SI on special. Never used it. The sounds are not at all good. As a few people have stated: For reasonably good general Midi sounds Cakewalk TTS will do the job.
D

Dave-the-Pub-muso

Cool, thanks for all the feedback guys! Looks like TTS it is...

[deleted]

Viccy has gone forward into the future and acquired Sonar 9......

Yes it would seem I'm dyslexic in the vertical axis too, it's Sonar 6/ LE what ever. It's very confusing since the tutorials are for a different one that I've got, so I end up not knowing what it is most of the time.