NICK DIKA: So I'm going to use this vocal track to show you a new tool that we built in to Sonar Producer Edition called V-Vocal, and what V-Vocal is, it uses Roland's Variphrase technology. In Cakewalk, we packaged it up in a really cool user interface that integrates directly into Sonar. It allows you to do things like pitch correction. You can either automatically adjust pitch or manually adjust it. You can also completely rephrase vocals, change their timbre, and do dynamics editing.

So to use that, I just simply go into a track that contains a vocal part. This also by the way works on other monophonic parts like bass lines very well. So if I select a clip here, I can right click and send this into V-Vocal. You can have as many V-Vocal clips running in your project as you want, and when I open this up you'll see immediately V-Vocal has found all the pitches of the notes that were sung in, so if I just solo this out so we can hear it...

[NICK DIKA PLAYS SOLOED VOCAL TRACK INSIDE V-VOCAL]

...so you get an idea of what that vocal originally sounded like, and the notes here in yellow are the actual pitches being sung. So, you can see that the vocalist is pretty much on pitch but she's kind of got a lot of modulation in her voice. Maybe you want to clean this up a little bit. I can either select individual notes or I can select the entire part. There's some automatic correction features here. You can adjust the sensitivity down here, and then just simply hit the correct button, and it will lock those notes closer on to the original or exactly onto the note that you want. You can also adjust by scale, so if you know what key your song is in, you can adjust that way. You just back out of that. You can also undo everything you do in V-Vocal. It's non-destructive editing, which is also a very important part of the way it works. But within the individual notes here, I mean these pitches are more or less on. If I want to adjust the modulation on a part, for example this last word here has a lot of vibrato on it. If I choose the LFO tool, I can actually get rid of all that modulation or part of it very simply.

[NICK DIKA ELIMINATES VIBRATO OF SOLOED VOCAL TRACK INSIDE V-VOCAL]

And if you take too much of that modulation out, it's going to start to sound a little robotic so that's why you have so many tools in here to go in and kind of tweak the sound exactly the way you want it. You don't want everything to sound completely flat and too robotic, so you can go in and do things like rephrasing the actual timing characteristics of the part as well, so I can click on these different points in the waveform and I can drag these anchor points around

[NICK DIKA ADJUSTS TIMING OF SOLOED VOCAL TRACK INSIDE V-VOCAL]

So you can hear I've stretched out that one word and I've left all of the other words sort of the same timing. You see a very easy way to edit vocals, and it's all contained within one, easy-to-use interface that's built into Sonar. Again, this is only with Producer Edition.

Also, I have dynamics control. If go to the dynamics window here, I can choose the pencil tool and easily draw out peaks and clipping points within that waveform. If I want to boost the section up, I can also do that. You can see the waveform redrawing as I go. Now let's just integrate it into my project being you can see I have a clip here that's yellow -- or, I'm sorry -- orange, and it says "V-Vocal Clip" on it, and behind that Sonar actually works with different layers within tracks so you can keep multiple takes or edit parts together more easily. So I actually have the original vocal take here, so V-Vocal has saved that for me automatically on the same track; it's just muted out, so I can always get back to that original performance, and it's completely non-destructive.