I'm glad everyone seems to like it; I had some fun collaborating on this one. You asked for it so here are some of the secrets!

1. Marc sent me his audio and midi tracks. I didn't want to make this a full-on collaboration, e.g. with me adding vocals or guitar parts, as the main ingredients were pretty well all in there, and I wanted it to stay Marc’s song.
2. I imported the tracks into Sonar, lined them up with Marc’s opening clicks, snipping and moving some parts which didn’t seem to be totally in the right places all they way through.
3. Drums: There's one overriding ingredient with a 'funk' track - drum groove. Marc said he was looking for the highly infectious groove in 'Why Did You Do It' by Stretch, a UK 1970s band. I love that hit also so googled for a midi file so I could see how the drum part worked. It's a very simple part but needs to be just right. I then copy and pasted a couple of the bars across the whole song, used Sonar's superb built-in drum plugin, Session Drummer 3, and that was almost that. I added short fills and cymbal crashes in the right places (pre-verse, etc). Funk drummers don't go 'all round the kit' for their fills.
4. Bass: the second most important funk ingredient. This was on one of Marc’s midi tracks and had some great lines so all I did was tighten it up a bit with the kick drum (not 100% though) using Sonar's quantize function. (Did you play that bass part in Marc? If so, it was first class.)
5. Vocals: Marc had recorded four different vocal tracks to make layers, although one or two would have been fine with some EQ here and there. (Marc's voice is better than he thinks it is...) I used Melodyne plugin to correct some of the pitchiness on one or two notes, and as the vocal tracks were all the same melody I used two to make artificial harmonies by pulling some of their notes around in Melodyne to thirds or sevenths, etc.
6. Brass: I thought the second half of the song needed a bit more interest so I used my Fantom X6 synth to play in three midi tracks of trombone, trumpet and high trumpet playing the same licks. In one of those eureka moments I suddenly knew that these licks had to start the song, as well as coming in later, so copy, paste, done!
7. Synth solo: Marc played in an excellent solo which he’d used an organ sound for. I left the (midi) notes as they were but used a lead synth sound instead, which comes in now with more impact.
8. Pad: Marc had an audio track of a pad sound right before the synth solo and I just used Sonar’s envelope automation to make the held chord pan rapidly across the soundscape. Ear candy!
9. Tambourine: added in the second part of the synth solo. If I was playing this live, that’s where I’d pick up a tambourine and give it some!
10. I then did a few total remixes, making sure the drums always stayed proud, then applied Sonar’s ‘Boost11’ tool to squash things and bring up the loudness on the final product.
All of the above actually took about three days in terms of worked hours, as I've left out all the dead ends and experiments that failed, etc! But every minute was fun.

John

Songs web site
YouTube Channel
BIAB 2019
Cakewalk by BandLab
Studio One 4