Preset Heaven!

It's 1 AM Christmas day... and I'm up randomly playing around in Photoshop because I decided I wanted to make my own custom FX Chain Preset GUI for Sonar X1 FX Chains that I've made.

I modeled the input and output FX Chain sections after Waves Dorrough meter GUI's.  The top is modeled after a guitar amp head, I just quickly modified the original Preset background to get a darker feel that still had some color to contrast with the guitar amp head look.

The background panels I modeled as best I could in the 1-2 hours I spent on it.  Native Instruments Transient Master was sitting in the first slot of my FX Chain and so I emulated it's GUI's look and feel with some creative liberties due to the limitations of the FX Chain GUI functions.

The middle section emulates the Waves Non-Linear Summer, It got weird as there are 4 plugins in my chain and only 1 knob is assigned any macro control to the Sony Oxford Limiter.  The knob labelled enhance literally only controls 1 macro of the entire plugin's functionality; but that's ok because I only want to use that particular feature of the limiter plugin, as I have Ozone 5 Advanced Maximizer as the last stage in my chain.

Both Sony Oxford and Ozone 5's GUI's are really different from the other plugins as they're not visually integrating the look of hardware (not that it's a bad thing).  So for the Sony one I actually modeled the knob's panel area after some retro compressor hardware I found images of online, the smooth matte gun-metal surface with wood trim seemed like a really cool vibe for an Oxford processing plugin. 

Finally, Ozone's maximizer I sort of have an awkward setup for because the buttons were more of afterthought that seemed like simpler things I might want to macro control at some point but really aren't necessary.  Any real fine tuning to the plugin should be done by launching it's own window but the once that fine tuning was dialed in the only thing the macro is concerned about is adjusting the Limiter threshold "Limit Level".

Now, the Panel BG actually seems pretty cool on it's own and remains functional no matter what plugins you want to put on there, so I decided to share it with all you Sonar lovers out there!

My Zip file actually contains several of the pre-made backdrops made by Cakewalk and some of the community, with one minor change; I've sorted the image files into their respective folders for easier navigation.

Click on the image below for the zip file.

There you have it folks.  For more information on how to customize FX Chains check out Cakewalk's article.

I MAY share some of my FX Chains presets in the near future.  For now though, I'm actually enjoying making custom backgrounds!