Reference Guide

220 Controlling playback
Changing track settings
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 742.
To assign an initial bank and patch to a track
1. Open the Track Inspector or Console view and select the MIDI track you want to configure.
2. Select the desired settings in the Bank and Patch controls.
3. To search for a patch containing specific text, click the Patch Browser button in the Track
Inspector. You can also open the Patch Browser by right-clicking a bank or patch control in the
Track Inspector or Console views.
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.