BandLab Bootcamp For Beginners [In-Depth BandLab Tutorial]

hey music makers welcome back to the studio and today i am excited because we're taking an in-depth look at how to use the free recording software van lab bandlab is a free and fully functioning digital audio workstation that's compatible with any platform out there and today we're going to be taking a comprehensive look at its more beginner features and then move into some of its more advanced features so if you've been looking for a recording software to start recording your music in then this just might be the program for you and without further ado let's jump in all you have to do to get started with bandlab is create an account within which i've already done it's free so once you're all logged in it's as simple as hitting the create button and the first thing we're going to look at is tracks this is where the music making happens and you can see here we have several categories that we can choose from and we're going to start first with the first option here software or midi instruments so all you have to do is click that icon and it brings up a new software instrument track which by default is this grand piano but you don't just have a grand piano available to you you have a huge library of instruments which you can find right down here if you don't see this box you can click on instrument and here you can click on this top menu and you can choose what kind of instrument you want to play do you want to play some pianos do you want to play some drum pads some drum kits you know play basses you want to play strings i'm going to stick with piano for now and then this lower menu gives you options of different kinds of pianos that you can play so we started with the grand piano let's move it on down to the low-fi piano and give that a try so some super beautiful sounds that you have available to you for free so how do you play and record these digital instruments we have two main options the first one would be plugging in what's called a midi controller this is a small keyboard that plugs into your computer usb and automatically syncs with bandlab the second option would actually be using your typing keyboard so you can see down here that v and g and b and h and n control these keys on the keyboard and then if you want to see what pitch you're actually playing you can switch over and go oh that's an f note a g note in a note switch back over and i can see what typing keyboard note that is so now we're ready to record our first part but before we do that i want to bring your attention to this button right here which turns on or off the metronome the click track so whenever i turn it on and hit the space bar you can hear that click track and here i want to pause and recommend that you record all of your tracks with the click track on because it's going to help you stay tastefully in time throughout the course of your project now if the click track is too fast or too slow you can double click here and change the speed of your song you can also click this button and actually tap in how fast or how slow you want your song to be for this example i'm going to go ahead and leave it at 120 and now i'm ready to record and so i can either hit this red button here or i can hit r on my typing keyboard [Music] once i'm done with that recording i simply hit spacebar to stop the recording and now let's talk about how to edit this performance i can double click right here and it brings up what's called the midi editor window i can also click this button here to bring up or down the midi editor and here inside the midi editor there's a lot of really powerful tools that you can use to shape your performance the first one is you can grab any note move it up move it down you can go to the end of that note and shave it down or lengthen it you can do the same thing from the beginning of a note you can select a note and delete that note you can also select a note and come right over here and adjust its velocity this is how hard the note hits you want it really soft and intimate do you want it kind of hard and punchy you can choose that right here and this is handy if you accidentally hit a note way too hard or accidentally hit a note way too soft but you don't want to redo the entire performance then you can just come in here and adjust the velocity of that note and there are more tools in this section but i want to skip down to the quantize feature because this is one of the most exciting and powerful tools that you have in the midi editor to use the quantize feature you select any note or even a group of notes and you are going to hit quantize and it is going to snap them into perfect timing in line with the metronome grid so i can do it one note at a time or i can even use this button here to shrink things down and select my entire performance at once hit the quantize feature and now every note is going to be perfectly timed with the grid which is a huge time saver so now listen to the tight timing of this performance up against the click track it's beautiful isn't it now if you have a note that's too far out of timing it might drag it to the next nearest marker so you can just drag that note back to where it should be hit quantize and you'll be ready to go the last thing i like to do when editing a midi performance is to come up here and actually use this little icon to shave off the parts of the performance that i don't need i don't want to have all this extra waste out here especially if i'm going to copy and paste this section again so now we have an exact eight bar loop that's good for copying and pasting if we want to later so i've recorded one piano track here but i want you to get the idea that these digital instrument tracks are not just for piano you have a large library of different sounds available to you so let's add another track we'll hit the midi instrument track again now i can come down and choose a totally different sound and i'm going to go ahead and go on down to synth pads and i'm going to choose the new age synth which sounds like this super beautiful so i'm going to add a second part on top of my piano part using this pad sound and the same rules apply i can use my typing keyboard to play and record it or i can use a midi controller that's plugged into my computer and when i'm ready to actually hit record i can hit the red record button or r on my typing keyboard [Music] so now i've recorded a lovely piano track and a warm pad track and again i want to re-emphasize that these digital instrument tracks are not just for piano or pad there's all kinds of sounds that we can make out of them so if i hit add track i go to midi instrument again this time i'm going to go down and i want to choose a bass sound so i'll hit bass here and then you have several options of different bass sounds that you can choose from i'm going to stick with the 62p bass because this is kind of a jazzy soul type song and go ahead and record a bass line for this part [Music] so there's the base and the very quickly i'm gonna add a new track hit midi instruments again and add one last mini instrument track this time i'm going to choose a drum kit and you really have two options for drum sounds drum kits are more realistic sounding drum kits while drum pads are more electronic sounding say for trap pop electronic hip-hop etc i'm going to choose a live sounding drum kit for this song and i'll scroll on down and i'm going to choose the jazz kit because this is kind of a jazzy song now you can see right down here where you can actually play the different pieces of the drum kit with your mouse or you can play them with your typing keyboard which is really cool so now i'm going to record a quick drum [Music] part so pretty cool right but you're probably thinking in your head well i don't actually play drums well that's what the next track is all about so i'm gonna go up to add tracks and i'll move to our second option the drum machine and click on that and you'll see this menu pop up which is the drum machine and by default the drum machine is going to give you two basic patterns to choose from or you can start from scratch and come up with your own beat by simply clicking in the lines here but again if you don't play drums just stick to the patterns that they give you it's a lot easier that way and i also want to note here that if you click on this menu you have options you can choose from more lifestyle drum kits here with their own beats or you can go to the pad kits which are more electronic or trap or pop in nature and each of them have their own flavor and their own beats [Music] so there's a flavor to fit every style song and this is a huge tool for those of you who don't play the drums so now it's time to move on to our next track and that is the voice or the microphone track and this is where it starts to get really exciting i simply click this button and if this is your first time making music in bandlab then it's going to ask you what you want to be your default microphone to record with you can choose your computer's built-in microphone you can choose a usb microphone that you have plugged in or if you have an interface with an outboard mic you can of course choose your audio interface and i just want to pause here and say that no matter what microphone you use you should always wear headphones while recording with the microphone so that the sound from the other tracks doesn't bleed into your microphone recordings now before i record with my microphone i want to show you two things right here is the monitor button when i turn this on i'll be able to hear myself in my headphones as i see i'm going to leave it off for this video because it would cause an echo next let's look over here at this line that's jumping up and down as we record our voice or any other source with the microphone we want this bar to hit somewhere between the green and the yellow we don't want it to go into the red because that means that it's clipping and it will actually distort the audio and sound really grindy and weird we also want to make sure that our source isn't really really low down here in the bottom because then you're going to pick up a lot of background noise from your room so before you start recording with your microphone go ahead and do some tests and make sure that you're hitting about halfway to two thirds of the way up this meter and then of course when you're ready you can hit the red record button or r on your typing keyboard and start recording your voice [Music] so that's my quick vocal take and here i want to pause and show you that at the end of every audio region you can click on this little button here and actually trim off any unwanted sounds and that's what i've done to all these tracks to make sure that there's no extra sounds and that they're just clean and even with no wasted space at the end so now that we've recorded the vocal let's talk about some really exciting and powerful processing presets that you can add onto your vocal with one click so i'll come down here to the bottom and click effects and then i'll move up to this menu that says presets and here i can pick from a huge library of preset sounds preset processing and effects so you don't even really have to know how to mix you can just click through different sounds and see which ones fit best with your vocal so i'm going to start with dimension [Music] chorus now let's try a different one let's go to high vox and then just for fun let's try one more i'm gonna go down to tight vocals this is a cleaner [Music] sound so no matter what preset we choose you can see down here that it's going to give its own mix of different processing effects you can even adjust the effects within that preset or if you know how to mix you can actually add effects or add plugins right here and maybe you want to start from scratch where you can come here say no preset and you can start adding effects and shaping your own sound and i just have to say that this is a super exciting and super powerful tool that bandlab offers you so now that we've talked about vocals let's move on to our next track which is the guitar track and here i want to take a pause and say that this guitar track means that you're plugging in your guitar into an interface into your computer and you're recording yourself playing an actual guitar this isn't a software this isn't a digital guitar this is you playing your guitar inside of bandlab but if you've got your guitar plugged into your interface then you're going to want to make sure your interface is selected here as your input device and then you'll go down and if your guitar is plugged into input or channel one you'll put one here if it's plugged into channel two then of course you would put channel two mine is plugged into channel one and then again we have the monitor button which allows us to hear ourselves playing guitar as we record and then i want to show you the on-board tuner which is really really cool you click the button so you can simply tune without having to unplug which is a super handy feature then once you're done tuning you can come over here to effects and you can choose a guitar preset if you like [Music] now again i know some of you don't play guitar and you want to add guitar sounds to your song well one thing you can do is come up here to add tracks choose a midi instrument go down to instrument make sure you select guitars and there's some really solid sounding guitars like this acoustic guitar [Music] or like this nylon acoustic guitar but either way you do it you can get some great guitar sounds here in band lab now let's move on to our fifth and final track i'll hit the add tracks button and come over here to the base now i'm not going to spend a lot of time here because the concept is exactly the same as the electric guitar you want to make sure your interface is plugged in you want to make sure you're plugged into the right channel and you have that selected here you can use your monitor button to listen you can use the tuner to tune your base then of course you can go on over to effects and you can choose from a ton of preset options to add to your base or if you want to start from scratch you can add lots of plugins here to beef up your bass sound so we've now covered the five tracks that allow you to create sounds in bandlab but these aren't the only avenues to create sounds within bandlab you have two more options and they live right down here the first one is to import audio or midi let's say you have a backing track that you want to bring in and sing vocals over or maybe your friend played a guitar line that you want to add into your project you simply click here you choose your file hit open and it brings that file onto its own track and then of course you can do all of the normal adjustments that you would with any other audio track you can also drag in audio files by simply clicking here in this region and going through the same process now let's talk about the final way to create sounds here in bandlab and that is by using loops and bandlab offers you a huge library of royalty-free loops so you can use these in your songs you could publish and sell these songs and you wouldn't have to pay them a dime so here in the loops menu we can bring it up or pull it down using the loops button here and here we'll see a menu that we can choose from you can choose from lo-fi loops hip-hop loops all kinds of different sound packs so i'm going to test out lo-fi and you can see i have tons of different lo-fi packs to choose from i'll just click the top for an example and now i have all these loops that i can listen to and potentially drag into my song [Music] then once i find a loop i like i can simply drag it onto this track and release it then i could grab a drum beat and pull that below my piano line and i would have [Music] then of course i could bring in a baseline [Music] and this is just one pack if i go back there are tons of packs even within the lo-fi section and you can come up top here and search by all the different packs and there are a ton of them but one cool thing you can do is click up here on loops and then click here on instrument and you can actually search by instrument so if i want guitar loops i click here and there's 916 guitar loops to choose from so you can see how the possibilities are pretty endless now i will give a tip here for building songs out of loops and that is i think it's easier to start a song by building out loops and then build instrumentation on top of those loops than it is to try and build out instrumentation and then find loops that'll fit on top of your pre-existing instrumentation so now that we've talked about how to create music here in bandlab let's take some extra time to look at some advanced tools some extra fun tools and of course how to export and share your songs we'll start with a handful of advanced tips the first one is did you know you could turn on something called the cycle region which allows you to hit play and once it gets to the end of this region it will loop back over and this can be really helpful if you're trying to write a part and you want to listen to a part over and over without stopping and going back constantly and you can move this to a different point if you want it over here maybe you want it for a shorter section maybe you want it for a longer section you can actually adjust how long or how short and basically where you want this loop region to start and to stop the next advanced tip is for slicing audio if you put your playhead anywhere you can then come up top hit edit hit slice at playhead and it will actually split that region in half and you can make individual adjustments to that region as needed this can be really helpful if there's a sound in between vocal phrases that you don't want to make it into your recording well you can cut it out another advanced tip here on audio tracks is that you can come down and hit the editor and here in the editor you can do things like reverse a clip slow it down or speed it up you can pitch shift it or probably the most handy tool is this fade in tool so you can fade something in or fade it out so this can help with things like clicks or pops at the beginning or end of an audio region it can also tame breaths as well then the last advanced feature i want to show you is automation which is found right here when i click on this button lines appear on every track and i can click at any given point in the line and actually make manual adjustments to volume so let's say this vocal gets too quiet here at the end of the phrase well i can automate the volume of that vocal to come up so we don't lose this little phrase but it gets way deeper you can not only automate volume if you click here you can automate panning reverb eq and any other effect that is currently on the track it's crazy so i might use this to create a reverb tell here at the end of my take so the reverb vamps up as i'm finishing the vocal line and now let's talk about a handful of really handy extra buttons that live around the bandlab interface if you come up here to the view tab there's lots of really cool options you can turn on the snap to grid which i use almost every time that i'm editing so that whenever i do moves like this it snaps perfectly onto the grid beyond that you can choose if you want your tracks to be large or compact i tend to like to work with my tracks large so i can see better then down here under theme you can also change the look or the color feel of bandlab i'm going to stick to dark for now next let's look at the track header where every track has a volume slider that you can turn up and down it has a mute button where you can mute out a part if you don't want to hear it it also has a solo button where you can solo just that track and hear it by itself and of course it has a panning knob if you want to pan it to one side of the stereo spectrum or the other then there's more you can either right click or hit this button right here and you can rename your track and give it a specific name you can change the color of your track or you can do things like duplicate the track delete the track or even export it as a midi or wav file then up here up top you can change the key of the song if you know what key it is you can change the tempo of the song you can change the time signature of the song and then if you click this button you can actually tap tempo to find the speed of your song then you have some metronome settings you can click here and actually change the sound of the metronome if you want a different sound than the click you can adjust the metronome's volume you can also adjust your count in which means when you hit the record button do you want to hear four clicks eight clicks or no clicks before you start recording next i want to go to this side of the screen where we have a plus and minus button where you can zoom in and see things in greater detail or you can zoom back out and see the whole project i find this feature especially helpful in the midi editor if i'm trying to do detailed work on a part then i can zoom in and get really detailed with it then if we move down to the bottom of the screen we have this really cool feature where we can write lyrics or notes which is super handy you can also do midi mapping which if you don't know what that is don't worry about this button if you do then it's available to you here now here's something really cool that you can do in bandlab if you click chat you can begin inviting people to collaborate on this session because it's online you can actually collaborate digitally with friends if you hit start session then you all can be working on it at the same time together which is absolutely amazing and of course you can chat to each other while you go then we'll move back up top and if you want to change the name of your project you can simply type it in right here and up here in the corner as you're working if you want to hit save to save your work you can and you can hit publish and share it on the bandlab website now you can also come over here to file and hit download and you can download the tracks you can download a mix as well but here's one last really cool feature i want to show you if you exit your project and you come right here to this button and you hit mastering you can actually drag and drop your songs and have them mastered for free every time here on bandlab all you have to do is click here select your file hit open and it will begin mastering your song for free then once it's finished you can choose from a few mastering presets hit get your master and just like that you have a free high quality master which you can publish you can share you can even download which is an insane tool so truly from song creation to mixing and even mastering band lab is an all-in-one fully functional digital audio workstation that's free easy to use and incredibly powerful [Music] you

Channel: The Songwriting Studio

Views: 111,716

Rating: 4.976737 out of 5

Keywords: bandlab, band lab, bandlab tutorial, bandlab beats, bandlab songs, bandlab mastering, bandlab on computer, bandlab vocal effects, bandlab presets, bandlab how to sound good, bandlab tutorial for beginners, how to download bandlab on laptop, bandlab tutorial pc, bandlab tutorial Mac, how to use bandlab on computer, learn bandlab, bandlab bootcamp, bandlab basic tutorial, bandlad, free daw online, free online daw, bandlab tutorial android, mixing vocals in bandlab

Id: TAHn_0Vy-Zg

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021