It’s June now so hopefully I’m not seeing your post too late… But just in case:
From what you describe, I think you have it set up correctly but let me confirm… Your vocal should be on a track with Waves Tune Realtime, and then your midi is from a different track. The midi should be routed to the sidechain input of Waves Tune Realtime.
And here’s the important part – in the lower left corner, “Target Pitch” must be enabled! If that isn’t clicked it’s going to ignore any midi input and work automatically.
You can also enable “Reference Tone” and that will give you a basic synthesizer sound so you can hear that midi is working when you play your keyboard, and you can use that to record the midi parts and then Waves Tune Realtime will follow the midi.
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For point of testing, turn the speed down to 0.1ms, the note transition to 0.1ms, and correction to 100%. That will be a very robotic sound, but you’ll definitely hear the processing if it’s working correctly.
Other things to note when using this plugin:
It is very helpful to set the correct scale. This will help Waves Tune Realtime correct to the right notes when it’s working in auto mode.
After that, you can let auto do most of the heavy lifting and then use midi to spot-correct in places where it’s needed.
Another trick is to automate the correction amount so that you’re not processing all of the time, just when needed. (If you’re going for a natural sound.) If you’re going for robotic, by all means go crazy with it!
Anyhow, I just wanted to confirm that midi should work just fine once you have it configured correctly. I use this plugin in almost every song, although it’s been some years since I worked in Sonar.
PS. For any Reaper users who see this - in Reaper you don’t have to use a separate track for midi. The audio and midi can coexist on the same track in different lanes. Just make sure both (or all) lanes are active, and then toggle the input between audio and midi depending on which you are recording. This isn’t possible in Sonar, though.