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Bome's Mouse Keyboard and
Cakewalk's Sonar are
a perfect combination, especially
if you don't have an external keyboard, or when you are on the move
with a laptop. Bome's Mouse Keyboard is a help to play melodies into
Sonar. This tutorial explains how to connect Bome's Mouse Keyboard
with Sonar 3.0, and how to play DXi (or wrapped VST) instruments with
it.
1. Get and install a virtual MIDI driver
There are several virtual MIDI drivers available.
I suggest one of the following drivers:
Install one of them. Follow the installation instructions provided by the
respective author. After successful installation, you'll have a set of
virtual MIDI devices.
Virtual MIDI port drivers allow MIDI data to be sent directly from Bome's Mouse Keyboard to the MIDI IN port of a
MIDI enabled application. Normally, Bome's Mouse Keyboard will accept the direct input of a connected MIDI device,
while outputing to the virtual port driver. It is also possible for Bome's Mouse Keyboard to accept input from
one virtual MIDI port and output on different virtual port to allow Bome's Mouse Keyboard, e.g. to translate the
MIDI communications between two software programs. Bome's Mouse Keyboard may NOT have the same virtual
MIDI port driver specified for both input and output, as this will cause a MIDI loop.
| Note: The next version of Bome's Mouse Keyboard will
ship with built-in virtual MIDI support, so that you can select
Bome's Mouse Keyboard directly as MIDI INPUT in, e.g., Sonar. |
2. Set up Bome's Mouse Keyboard
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First, select a virtual Midi cable as Midi Out in
Bome's Mouse Keyboard like you see in the picture. Your virtual MIDI
device may also be named "MIDI Yoke Junction: 1" or "LB1", depending
which virtual MIDI cable you installed.
| Note: Select none as MIDI IN. If you selected the same
virtual MIDI port as MIDI IN, it would be reserved and Sonar could not
access it!
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| A good idea is to put Bome's Mouse Keyboard in
Always On Top mode, so that it's always visible on your screen. |
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3. Set up Sonar
In Sonar, I open a new project:
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For this example, I choose an empty project:
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Bome's Mouse Keyboard sends MIDI messages.
So I create a new MIDI track which will receive everything that is
played in mouse keyboard:
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| By default, Sonar opens all MIDI IN
ports for the MIDI tracks. I still like to verify, so let's have a look:
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Here you can see Sonar's MIDI Devices
screen. Make sure that the MIDI Yoke input you selected above is
selected in the Inputs: list on the
left. This will ensure that Sonar will receive the MIDI messages
from Bome's Mouse Keyboard.
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Now let's set up a software synthesizer!
Sonar 3 ships with a variety of soft synth instruments, and you can add
as many as you like... To use a DXi Instrument, select that menu item
from the Insert|DXi Synth menu:
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Now all that is left is to connect our MIDI
track to the DXi Instrument. For that we input from the MIDI channel
strip:
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IMPORTANT
There is an option in Sonar that you need to disable to hear anything when
playing Mouse Keyboard:
In the menu Options|Audio|Advanced,
uncheck the option Share drivers with other programs.
Otherwise you'll not be able to hear anything when focus is on Mouse Keyboard.
Thanks to Ricky Hunt for asking me to add this info.
4. Make music!
Now playing on Bome's Mouse Keyboard will
play the DXi Instrument in Sonar! There's nothing anymore
that stops you from recording great music!
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This tutorial was written by Greg Riker (based on the tutorial for Cubase).
Thank you very much!
Go back to Bome's Mouse Keyboard help overview.
Go back to Bome's Mouse Keyboard. |
