Instruction Manual

204 Controlling Playback
Changing Track Settings
use this feature, the name of the output will change to reflect the instrument
you have chosen.
To Assign a Track to an Output
1. Click the Output dropdown of the track you want to assign.
2. Select the output you want to use.
To change the output setting for more than one track at a time, select the
tracks you want to change and choose Tracks-Property-Output.
Note: Outputs that are used by the External Insert plug-in (see External
Insert Plug-in) cannot be assigned to track and bus outputs. The only
exceptions are master buses that have other instances of the External
Insert plug-in routed to them.
Choosing the Instrument Sound (Bank and
Patch)
Electronic keyboards and synthesizers often contain hundreds or
thousands of different sounds. Each sound is known as a patch. The name
comes from the early days of synthesizers, for which you physically rewired
(using patch cords) the oscillators and modulators to produce different
sounds. Patches are normally organized into groups of 128, called banks.
Most instruments have between 1 and 8 banks, but MIDI supports up to
16,384 banks of 128 patches each (that’s over 2 million patches).
The bank and patch settings in the Track view control the initial bank and
patch of a track during playback. Every time SONAR starts playback at the
beginning of a project, the bank and patch settings for the track are set to
these initial values. Many instruments have descriptive names for their
banks and patches. SONAR stores these names in an instrument definition.
If you are using an instrument that supports General MIDI, your patch list
will contain the 128 sounds that are defined by the General MIDI
specification.
Note to experts: Different MIDI instruments use different types of
commands to change banks. SONAR supports four common methods for
changing banks. For information about the bank selection method you
should use with your MIDI gear, see your MIDI equipment’s documentation.
Tip: If your bank name is too long to fit in the bank field, hold your cursor
over the bank name. A tooltip appears with the complete bank name.
Note that a single MIDI channel can only play one patch at a time on each
instrument assigned to that channel. Therefore, if two or more MIDI tracks
are set to the same output and channel but have different bank and patch