Reference Guide

215
Changing track settings
Controlling playback
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 controls in the Console view and Track Inspector 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 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 settings, the patch of the highest-numbered track will be used for all the
tracks.
In some projects you want the sound played by a track to change while playback is in progress. You
can accomplish this using the Insert > Bank/Patch Change command. When you start playback in
the middle of a project, SONAR searches back through the track to find the correct patch to use—
either the initial bank and patch or the most recent bank/patch change. Note that the Console view
and Track Inspector only show the initial bank and patch, even while a different bank and patch are
being played back. The only way to see and edit a bank/patch change is in the Event List view. For
more information, see “The Event List view” on page 718.
Note: 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.