Cakewalk by Bandlab: The Hidden Plugins

in today's video we're going to be taking a look at three awesome plugins that you may not even know you have in cakewalk by ban lab hi folks I might and I hope you will now cakewalk by ban lab is a fully featured da W which comes with a whole bunch of plugins and cool things like the pro channel all of this for free but there are three plugins which come with it which you may not even know you have and I reckon two of them are some of the best plugins to come with any da W so in this video I'm going to be showing you how to get access to those plugins and I'm going to be giving you a rundown of how to use them but before we get into that if you like this kind of content all about da WS home recording plugin reviews gear reviews that kind of thing then please do subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you get to hear about my future videos now let's take a look at those hidden plugins okay so here we are in an almost empty cakewalk project but it's not my regular copy of cakewalk which i'm running instead what i've done to demonstrate these things to you guys is i've actually installed what's called a virtual machine it's kind of a fake PC if you like with windows installed a brand new fresh copy of Windows and a brand new fresh copy of cakewalk installed right away on that so it's like an operating system with only cakewalk on it nothing else to corrupt it and this is just to demonstrate to you guys that when you first install cakewalk by band lab at the moment there are three really awesome plugins which are not enabled unfortunately now I am talking in September 2019 so perhaps in the future these will be enabled and you can just almost disregard what I'm about to show you but I will give you a demonstration of these three plugins so you may want to watch that anyway anyhow in this project we have one audio track set up here and if I go to add effects here you will see a list of effects which come with cakewalk including a whole bunch of solitaires effects what you won't find there if these plugins are hidden the PX 64 percussion strip which is a really awesome percussion strip the viet 64 vocal strip and the TL 64 tube leveler now all three of these are really really good plugins and it's really worth having them at your disposal now you may think you don't have them but you actually do they're hidden so I'm going to show you how to enable them in cakewalk so I'll just close this project off and you can imagine that you've just loaded up cakewalk for the first time here I want you to go to the utilities menu at the top here and then under there right the button you can see an option called cakewalk plug-in manager so click on that and that's going to bring up this little window here now on the left hand side we have various different types of plugins in the plug-in categories here if you flick through you'll see the window in the middle there change to show the plugins which you currently have enabled which is awesome there's quite a few there but there's some missing as I say now if you go down towards the bottom left of this UI here you can change the option here from show enabled to show excluded so I want you to click on show excluded and now if you go down through the various categories you'll see that there are some excluded plugins and just some of the categories so the main ones are in this VST audio effects category now you're going to see four plugins here which are excluded that's boost eleven the px 64 percussion script the TL 64 tube leveler and the V x64 vocal strip now I'm not going to ask you to enable boost eleven it's already enabled so I don't think you really need to enable that I should say another version of it is already enabled so I'm gonna get you to do is just click on each of these holding down the control key on your keyboard so you can select all three of them and then you just need to click on enable plugins down here in the bottom left I'm clicking on enable plugins and there they are now if you go under the VST 3 audio effects here you will see drum replace is excluded I'm not going to talk about that today so I'm not going to enable it I'm not I haven't fully tested it out to see if it works so we won't be enabling that for now now you can close that window and then you can create a new project song up to file new and simply create an empty project click on OK and I'm then going to add an audio track quickly I'll expand that and then when we go to effects and click on the plus icon there go over to in sort insert audio effects and right down at the bottom you can see an uncut agrees section there and that has the three plugins which we're going to talk about in today's video and I'm going to start off by talking about my favorite of the three which is the V x64 vocal strip so in order to show you the V X 64 vocal strip plug-in I've pulled up this little demo track here so that we can see how it works now I just want to address this quickly because I've used this demo track before in previous videos and some people have emailed me and messaged me about it to say what song is this where can I get holiday etc etc and I'm sorry to disappoint folks but this is not a real song it's just a few lines of vocal which my partner Susie sung a few months ago with a little bit of piano and it never got any further so it's not a real song maybe one day I'll finish it off and actually even give it a name perhaps you can suggest a name down in the comments now as I say it's very simple it consists of just a piano part a lead vocal and a backing vocal and it's on that lead vocal on this middle track here where I've applied the V x64 plug-in so I'll just click on that to bring it up and it's a lovely looking interface which I will go into in detail in a moment but before I do that let's just have a quick listen to a couple of the verses of the track so you can get an idea of context now do bear in mind that this vocal has nothing at all on it at the moment it's completely dry you've taken my heart and you give it up trying to figure out how to fill your couple that's what we do I'm always telling me that you here to stay wake up in the morning and you've gone away hey that's what we do okay so you should get the gist of it there so let's take a look at the plug-in itself I'll just bring it up a bit bigger here now a vocal strip is just a bunch of sort of effects if you like and processes which I are there for especially for vocal tracks this sort of tailor-made for vocal tracks and I think this is especially good it starts off with saturation on the left-hand side over here and in fact has a saturation control on the right-hand side as well for the output so you can put it on the input all the output channels it also has a de-esser a compound which is a combination of a compressor and expander a tube equaliser a doubler and a delay so let's run through each of these and see what they're all about starting off with the saturation on the input I'm going to go to the beginning of the vocal here and I'm going to solo the vocal and I'm just going to push this saturation up so you can see if you can hear the effect you've taken my heart and you give it up I'm trying to figure out how to fill your couple now if you can see me bypassing it's switching it off and on there then you probably can not hear too much of a difference I think the main reason for that is that the signals not quite loud enough to really push that so what I would do in this case is pop that back down again increase the input signal here I'm going to push it up by say five decibels or so now I want to counteract that on the right hand side just by pushing the output level down by five so that we're not just making the whole thing louder and then I'll increase the saturation again have a listen again you've taken my heart and you give it up I'm trying to figure out fill your cup okay it's probably a little bit too much there if you can't hear much of a difference don't worry about it too much it is a subtle effect and especially if you're new to kind of recording and mixing it takes a little while for your ears to hear little details like that but that's saturation control very easy to use a very subtle I think we'll switch it off for the moment because I don't want it there and we'll move on to something you will be able to hear and that's a de-esser so we use a de-esser to get rid of siblings in vocal that's things like this sound or the sound those are very uncomfortable things to listen to especially if they're too loud in the mix or they're just too harsh so we almost always want to get rid of them now this particular de-esser like a lot has very few controls we simply have a control to select the frequency so that's the frequency which we're going to reduce so we can just sweep through there as we're listening to hear that and then we have a depth control which controls how much we're going to reduce that particular frequency now what's really interesting is we actually have this listen control here if we listen to the vocal first of all with that listen switched off you're always telling me that you're here to stay okay so you can hear a couple of s sounds in there which we sort of want to get rid of what we can do is we can flick this listen switch over if we pop that over and play again what we're gonna hear is what it's actually taking away so I can hear right away there it's actually catching the kind of frequencies that I want so I probably don't really need to play around with this frequency control but what I do want to do is exaggerate it a bit I want to actually reduce those frequencies even more than they're being reduced at the moment so I'm just going to push that depth quite a long way up and we'll have a listen again to hear again for what it's actually taking out okay you can hear it especially works on that Long's at the end so let's flip that listen switch over again and have a listen to the vocal with the dsr on first of all you're always telling me that you hear this now let's have a listen with it bypassed you're always telling me that you're here to stay so you can hear it's actually really rounding off that siblings they're probably in a little bit too much because it sounds a little bit muffled so I'll bring that depth down there a little bit have another listen you're always telling me that you're here to stay okay I could play with that for hours but that's roughly in the ballpark there so moving on to this next section which is called calm pain so this is a combination of a compressor and an expander and it has very few controls that's their fault very easy to use you just have to use your ears mostly now you may be asking well what's a what's an expander you might not have used them before indeed you may be asking what is a compressor let's have a very quick explanation of what a compressor is a compressor attempts to reduce the dynamic range of a signal so what does that mean the dynamic range is the range between the quietest part and the loudest part of the signal and what a compressor does is it takes the loudest parts wherever you decide to cut them down and it cuts them down and then because you reduce that dynamic range you've sort of shrunk it down like that you can now push the whole thing up and make it louder which means you could make the quieter parts louder by making the louder parts quieter if you didn't understand that I highly recommend rewinding and watching those last few seconds again let me know how many times you had to watch it before you got it hopefully I can explain that better in another video now an expander is the opposite of that and expand it once the signal reaches a certain threshold then the expander actually increases that signal rather than reducing it now I must admit I do not use expanders very much at all on vocals so I'm probably just going to show you that it's here and not use it too much at all but you should know it's there the controls for those the compressor and the expander are the same in fact they both use a threshold so that's the point at which the effect will kick in they both use a ratio now a ratio is calm way of saying how much are we going to change that signal so in the case of a compressor once it goes over the threshold how much are we going to reduce that signal the attack is how quickly are we going to do that and that the attack is a shared control for both the expander and the compressor in the case of this plug-in so what I'm going to do is I'm going to play the vocal I'm going to play it with the music in the background because I always feel you should do that when you're compressing a vocal so that you can hear the context that you doing it in and I'm just gonna muck around with some of these controls and try and give a little bit more presence to this vocal you're always telling me that you hear to stay wake up in the morning and you've got away that's what we do oh come so far [Music] felt so far away from you okay so that is the expertly compound so the compressor expander we'll move on now to the equalizer here it's called a troop equalizer for a specific reason we'll switch that on and we'll start off with the equalizer part of it so it's essentially just a 3-band equalizer a low mid and high band equalizer if we start off with the low I'll just change the level of it there it's really why I would call a low shelf and that enables you to cut out some of the lower frequencies you can adjust where it kicks in using this frequency control and that's the same for all of these bands you've got a frequency and a level control so for the top-end I'll just pop that up there that's what I would call a sort of a high shelf and I will just bring the frequency back a little bit and that's really useful for when you want to add a little bit of sparkle or breath enos to a vocal and then you have a middle band where you could select a particular band in the middle and either increase or decrease it so just I have a quick play around with this vocal I'm going to get rid of some of the muddiness at the bottom of it and add a little bit of breath eunice to it much like I've already got it set up but I'll listen to it to make sure it sounds good you're always telling me that you hear to stay I'll wake up in the morning and you've gone away he that's what we do come so far [Music] so far away from me okay I'd probably play a lot play around a lot more with that in an actual mix but you get the gist so very very useful equalizer indeed but here's the little added bonus to it because you can actually add saturation not just overall to the signal there but to specific band so if you wanted to add some saturation to say these top tube and then you just flick the switch over there for those two bands and then you can use the level control there to add saturation in so a really nice addition to that equaliser there now let's move on to what's down here the doubler now a vocal doublet is very useful tool indeed and it's really good for making vocals sound really really wide and I like to add it and have it increase during choruses and that type of things in songs just to make them sound larger than life depending on the song of course now it has only just a couple of controls that is a presence control and a stereo control so if I switch it on you'll see the UI change over there you can see that the presence control increases basically the volume of those additional signals I probably didn't explain that a doubler takes the original signal and it creates to duplicate signals for the left and right channels so the presence control is controlling how loud those additional signals are and then the stereo control here just controls how wide they are access from a pairing control for each of those duplications so let's have a listen again to that vocal I'm gonna solo it this time so you can really clearly hear what it's doing and have a listen now you're always telling me that you're here to stay wake up in the morning and you've gone away hey that's what we do okay so you can basically hear what it's doing the other I'd like to use it fairly subtly as I say it's a really good one to actually automate this one I'm not going to go into automation now but essentially I would virtually have it switched off safer versus and then have it kick in during courses so good for automation there now moving on to the last section here which is delay I'll switch the delay on so a delay is a very commonly used effect on vocals both delay and reverb which I'll talk about in a moment and what I really want to add to this vocal is a really quick sort of almost a slap what you call a slap back to lay so I'm gonna switch the doubler off because it's a little bit distracting when we're trying to do this I'm going to solo the vocal again and I'm gonna try and add a very short delay so it's almost like it's just coming back at you once very very quickly that's what I'm going for you're always telling me that you hear to stay wake up in the morning and you've gone away hey that's what we do I can control the level of it here come so far okay and then we also have a filter on the end there so you can control you we can sort of filter out parts of that delay so I just want to have it really on the sort of top end I think so it's just mucking around with that filter control there so I'm cutting out the so it's not adding delay to the whole signal it's just a particular frequency ranges and I'll have a listen again you're always telling me that you're here to stay we could thin them okay that'll do for now I'll add that doublet back on and this is starting to sound really really big this vocal here let's have a listen and I'm probably going a little bit overboard so I'm just gonna adjust a little bit you're always telling me that you're here to stay wake up in the morning and you've gone away hey listen in the mix that's what we do Oh [Music] felt so far away from you okay so you do not have to have these sort of effects in the order that they come in they're in the order that I've gone through there you can actually change them down here is basically an icon for each part of the plug-in there and you can just grab an icon for say the dsr there and drag it to a different position and that can make a bit of difference to what you're doing so it's important but I'd suggest that the default position is not a bad stuff of course as I mentioned you do have saturation over here on the way out as well and it operates in just the same way as the saturation on the input signal now the only thing I would say is missing from this and it's by no means of criticism because let's face it you get this an amazing vocal strip for free with cakewalk by banner but I would say the thing that we commonly of course do - vocals is add reverb as well so I already do have a reverb I should say not reverb I've been told off for this I already do have a reverb added to a bus and my JW here so I'll unmute that now so that we can hear and let's have a listen to this vocal in the context of the music again with all of those things done on the vocal strip you've taken my heart and you give it up I'm trying to figure out how to fill your couple that's what we do you're always telling me that you here to stay I wake up in the morning and you've gone away hey that's what we do [Music] moving on we're going to be taking a look at the px 64 percussion strip plugin so this is a plugin which is very very useful for drums and percussion that kind of thing now thankfully in terms of your sanity and the length of this video it has an awful lot in common with the vocal strip plug-in so we won't be covering the whole things just what is unique about this particular strip now I have got a little demo prepared and it's this little drum groove now [Music] rather than try and use this on the whole drum kit I wouldn't recommend you do that I have it applied to a couple of individual drums and they will leave the kick and the snare drum so let's bring up the plugin a bit bigger so you can see it and we're going to be starting off by having a listen to the kick drum now as I say it's got an awful lot in common with the vocal strip I'm sorry I won't be going through everything the things that it has in common is saturation on the input and on the output just the same as a vocal strip you can change the order of the sections over here using the icons you have a delay section which is very very similar to the vocal delay so I won't be running through that you have a compressor and expanded now they're separated on this and you only have controls for threshold and ratio you don't have an attack control I guess that they are considering that you're always going to use the same sort of attack settings for drums you may or may not just agree with that and then we have an equaliser section now that is quite different so let's start there the equaliser section here in actual fact has four frequencies where the vocal strip had three and you can make some changes to the types of bands that you have so if we start off with the lowest band here at the bottom as well as using it in the same way that we could with the vocal strip is kind of a low shelf we can actually switch over and make it a cut so we can actually cut all the bottom end out of this kick drum so let's have a listen to that not particularly useful for this kick-drum but it may be useful on another drum where you just want to get rid of any muddiness at the bottom and the same with the top end of this where you would start off by default with a sort of a shelf you can actually switch that to a cut there so if you wanted to get rid of the top end of those drums you could using that cut control now you can also have your other middle two frequencies which I'll play around with a little bit there so you can see them on the graph and what you can do with those is switch from a vintage to a classic style and all that really does it you'll see is it changes the shape of that curve it sort of flattens it out and it creates a little spike just at the point where you're setting that frequency so that is the difference with the equalizer there I'm not going to be applying it to the drums at the moment now the biggest thing that you're gonna find is different and it's very appropriate is that this has a shaper section to it and I think the sake of the shaper section in this particular plug-in is very very easy using cool indeed so this is where we can shape some characteristics of the sound hence the name shaper so let's have a listen to begin with to this kick drum and you'll notice there's quite a ring to that kick drum that's happening if you like on the tail end of that that sound so I'm going to use this decay setting here you can see as I bring it down it actually lowers the tail end right now I'm going to take it all the way down and let's have a listen and see if you can hear any ring on that kick drum but it's completely gone we wanted to make it really ringy let's put it all the way up sounds like a big marching band bass drum now so that's a really good thing if you want to control that ring eNOS that you can get on drums sometimes so I'm going to leave that all the way down there actually I rather like that then we have this white control here this is really cool because this really controls how heavy that drum is sounding so I'm going to play the kick again and have a listen as I bring the white all from all the way down to all the way up so you can hear that real thud there again I'm just gonna leave it like that it's very extreme I kind of like it and then there's the attack now this is where this section which really works on the transient that initial heat that you get with a drum and this is very useful if you want to add punchiness or just soften off that drum so let's see what happens when I start off with a slow attack so this is going to make the transients really coming slowly it's going to make this drum sound much softer and then I'm going to increase it to fast let's have a listen it's very extreme there you can see that transient at the beginning is really being pumped there so this is a really good way for completely changing the sound of that kick if I now bypass that shaper and I'll play the kick and then I'll switch it back on you'll hear a massive difference so an awful lot of fun can be had with this strip so I'm going to leave that kick drum as it is and I'm gonna play the whole groove again but this time I'm gonna muck around on the snare drum where I've also got this percussion strip installed and I'll just play the whole track and just to play out I'm gonna have a go at making this snare drum sound really kind of snappy [Music] [Music] so last but well in the least in my opinion is the TL 64 tube level plugin now I'm really just mentioning this plug-in because it's there you've enabled it it's free to use so why not but there's many many plugins which approach this problem of how do we get the sort of characteristics that we use to get from old analog gear particularly when they had vacuum tubes in them and this is another plug in along those lines it attempts to add the sort of color that we used to get from that old analog equipment so I've just actually put this on the master buss of my little demo song with my piano and vocals and I will go through some of the presets in a moment just so you can quickly hear if you hear a difference now I will mention a couple of things quickly I want to point out that at the beginning there is this Drive control and that basically controls how much of the signal is being driven and how much effect the tubes are going to have on that signal do make sure that when you push that drive control up that you also compensate by bringing the output gain down otherwise what happens is you do increase just the volume of the signal and to human beings when things get louder they just sound better so you might fool yourself into thinking it sounds better when actual fact that doesn't so that's an important thing and they do do that in the water presets so I'm just going to quickly go to this first preset which is to make the mix warmer and I will play this song with and with out so I'm going to start off with out this plug-in switched on you've taken my heart and you give it trying to figure out how to fill your cup [Music] that's our stone it always telling me that you hear as they wake up in the morning and you've gone away now certainly to my is it does add a little something a little more depth in there so that's kind of cool now another control I just want to point out in this particular plug-in is a really interesting one and this is this dynamic response control here so basically what happens with vacuum tubes is they actually do not react to the signal consistently over time they react differently so what I've tried to do there is emulate that and they give you this ability to switch on that dynamic control now you may or may not hear the difference if it's there it's very very subtle indeed but it is there and I kind of appreciate the effort they've gone to to do that as well as this sort of control here to control the frequencies particularly in the basin because they could start to sound a little bit nasty when you add this kind of effect so you do have the compensation there and you can use it very creatively there on the base in which they have on that particular plugin that I've played there I'll switch over to another plugin this one is called warm one I'll just play that and have a listen again first switched off you've taken my heart and you give it up I know I'm trying to figure out how to fill your cup [Music] you're always telling me that you hear stay wake up in the morning and you've got away that's what we do so as I say a very very brief overview there of the TL 64 tube leveler which comes hidden with cakewalk by band lab so I do hope that you enjoyed this video and that you can make use of these three plugins let me know in the comments down below which of these three you think be most useful to you and if you already knew they were there then be smug about it and tell us down in the comments down below and you can feel really good about yourself now if you like this video then please do hit the like button if you didn't like this video then hit the dislike button twice if you like this kind of content and please do subscribe ring the bell on youtube so that you get to hear about my future videos thank you so much for all of your support and I do hope to see you in the next video

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 96,449

Rating: 4.9394736 out of 5

Keywords: Cakewalk by Bandlab: Hidden Plugins, Cakewalk by Bandlab: Secret Plugins, vocal strip vst, percussion strip vst, vx-64 vocal strip, px-64 percussion strip, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial, cakewalk tutorial, cakewalk by bandlab, how to use cakewalk, recording studio 9, home recording studio, cakewalk plugins, free vst, free vst plugins, cakewalk vocal editing, cakewalk mixing, vst plugins, cakewalk tips and tricks, cakewalk percussion, cakewalk drums

Id: CNX2TzX4nAs

Length: 33min 20sec (2000 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Low_Pan]

Been using Cakewalk for years, since long before BandLab and even Gibson. These are some of the most useful plugins available in any DAW.

[u/CreativeSauce2B]

Hi folks! Cakewalk by Bandlab comes with some awesome plugins - but can you see them all? In this video I take a look at three cool plugins hidden from view!