Working with lyrics

Sonar lets you create, edit, and display lyrics, the words and syllables associated with notes in a track. Lyrics can be the words to a song, the text of a vocal passage, a narration to be read along with the music, cues of some type, or text totally unrelated to the music. Each word or syllable in the lyrics must be associated with a note in a MIDI track. Each MIDI track can have its own lyrics.

Although lyrics can logically be associated with digital audio data, you cannot actually place lyrics in an audio track. If you want to create lyrics for an audio track, you must create an auxiliary MIDI track to hold the lyrics.

You can enter and edit lyrics in several ways:

Using the Lyrics mode in the Staff view

Using the Lyrics view

Inserting lyric events in the Event List view

The Staff view is usually the preferred location for entering lyrics, since you can see the notes with which the lyrics are associated. The Lyrics view can also be used for entering or editing lyrics, but its main strength is that it can display lyrics in a larger, more readable format. You might use the Lyrics view to display song lyrics during recording and playback, so performers can see the words and sing along. You can make the font size in the Lyrics view as large as desired, so that the lyrics can be read at a distance from the monitor. During playback, the current line in the lyrics is enclosed in a box and the current word is highlighted.

Lyric events are similar to text events. Like any other event, they occur at a particular time. They contain text, just like general-purpose text events, but generally they contain only a single word (or syllable of a word). As events, Lyrics can be edited in the Event List view (see The Event List view).

 

See:

Adding and editing lyrics in the Staff view

Opening the Lyrics view

Adding and editing lyrics in the Lyrics view