When I first recorded Jack of Shadows, I had to solo each MIDI track in turn to record to a Tascam DA-88 at Priority One studios in Del Mar. Now of course software DAWs can do most of what took hardware ten years ago. So I soloed each MIDI track and recorded the audio from my SC-880 back into Sonar.
I always find it much easier to work with audio in Ableton Live than in Sonar, so I thought, with only a few hours before the experimedia deadline, I would import all the audio tracks into Live.
The problem with the original tune is that it accelerates from a tempo of MM=146 to 170 over its length. Working with MIDI for a piece like that since the note alignments, pitches and timbres don't change with tempo. But once I recorded the tracks in Sonar, then the tempo changes were "burned into" the audio tracks.
Importing them into Live causes additional confusion since the Live tempo track would have to be exactly the same as the Sonar tempo track for everything to line up. So after a wasted hour or two I gave up on the Live approach.
I went all the way back to the MIDI tracks and only render the audio at the very end. The original Sound Canvas patches mainly come from my Roland SC-880, with some audio loops and patches from Cakewalk's Dimension Pro softsynth.
This seemed to work the best. Sonar is actually a pretty good tool for manipulating multitrack audio as well as MIDI: it's fast and clean.
