Cakewalk by BandLab Tutorial for Beginners

hey guys in this video we'll be doing a beginner tutorial of Cakewalk by bandlab a free digital audio workstation we've done a complete tutorial on the software a few years ago but this will be an updated version that's more targeted towards those just starting out [Music] first go to the Cakewalk by bandlab website we'll scroll down and download the bandlab Assistant I'm choosing this to be able to download some extra tools with Cakewalk instead of just the Cakewalk installer on its own launch the bandlab assistant from your downloads to install it then start up the program from the bandlab assistant you'll need to make an account if you're using the software for the first time or log in through one of your social media accounts at the top switch to app and select Cakewalk press the button in the bottom right to install the software I recommend even for beginners to install it with the studio instrument suite and we'll be using this in our tutorial drum replacer melodyne and theme editor are found here as well and can be installed but were covered in some of our other videos and used some more advanced features of the software when we launch Cakewalk we'll start with a new project screen select a template or in my case I'll create an empty project the first thing we need to do is set up Cakewalk with whatever audio interface we have if we're using one if you're not and you're planning on using virtual instruments only you can skip this step once we're launched I'll show you how to get into the settings this is where we can set up our audio interface and midi controllers if we're using those on the left side start by going to playback and recording and change the driver mode to azio to allow for low latency then go to devices uncheck the default inputs and outputs and select those for your audio interface if you have multiple devices you'll only be able to select up to one audio interface for the inputs and outputs and the other devices are unselected since the software can only use one audio interface at a time now go down to MIDI devices and we can enable the USB MIDI controller since I'm using one from the Akai mpk 249 that allows for the keyboard drum pads and control surfaces to be used with our project last we can go down to VST settings until Cakewalk what folder on our computer all the extra plugins we want added are and that way we can use some free plugins that are featured on this channel and we know how to install them now let's jump back to our blank project a few of the topics we'll be covering in this video will be managing tracks in playback recording instruments and microphones mixing controls with plugins and the channel mixer and midi controls when we're all done we'll export the final song take walk by bandlab has a few different view modes we can select between the various tools and layout this is chosen from a drop down menu in the top right of the program we can set it to advanced mode to see most of the tools that we need to use or pick a more basic mode if we like that the very first thing I like to do on a new project is set the click track this will be the framework for our project and sets the timing for the virtual and recorded instruments go up to the time display at the top of the screen to the right there are the click track settings the play button Turns The Click track on during playback and the record button turns on the click track during recording if we want to disregard the click track completely we can do that by unselecting both of these we can also turn them on depending on when we want to hear them usually during recording but not always during playback below the time we can select these boxes and type to change the tempo we can also click to change the time signature and that opens a small window to change it to the right is the metronome button to open that menu for some more options having a one to two measure count in is helpful so we can start playing right on time with a lot of my projects I start with a rough midi programming midi is basically a set of instructions that will send to a virtual instrument to make into sound we'll tell it what notes or hits on a drum kit to play at what time this will lock to the project time so it's easier to start setting this up before the instruments are recorded in Cakewalk we have both midi tracks and instrument tracks we'll want to use an instrument track and use some of the virtual instruments on that track we'll use the SI instruments that we showed you how to install at the beginning of this video this can also be installed again from the bandlab assistant if you skip the step earlier with the drum kit selected we can now start to adjust the settings if you want to hear the kit you can click the various parts of the drum kit with the mouse on the left side we have the drop down to choose the type of Kit we'll use I'll start with aggressive kit all the components of the kit have a tune pan and volume control to adjust them individually once we have the sound we like we can close this window now drag the bottom of the instrument track to expand it to get the instrument window back up just click the keyboard icon directly to the left of the track name double-click on the instrument track to open the piano roll at the bottom this is where we'll draw the notes to tell it to play if we right click on the piano on the left and select use these note names instead to change it to General midi drums this gives us the name of all the kits instead of the piano here we can set it so that we can set the name of the drum kit to all the midi notes instead of the piano keyboard the bottom right of the piano roll has Zoom buttons so we'll zoom in to work closer here at the top we can change the length of the note that we're using we also need to change the snapping resolution there's a snap Target to the left of the transport we used earlier at the top of the screen I'll set it to the smallest note duration that we need now at the top left of our screen we can see the mouse tools we can use the smart tool for most things like drawing notes moving notes and deleting them we just click to draw notes hold and drag to move them and hold and press the delete key to remove them if we create a section we want to duplicate we can use the select tool to highlight all these notes then copy and paste it to a new section we can use the transport tool at the top to play back our drums I'll program something quickly and then we'll jump back to our project foreign we can see there's a lot of little Clips created here mostly because stuff was copied and pasted to clean that up we'll use the select tool to select all of them then go to the clips menu at the top of the tracks and bounce it to a new clip with the drums finished for the section let's create a base clip we'll do the same thing to make the instrument track and this time select SI bass guitar same thing again here we can select the bass sound we want to use and I'll use hardcore then we can adjust it by tweaking the sounds of it from there close the bass instrument double click the track again and it will bring up a new bass clip we'll draw out the notes just like we did last time I wanted to show this with an instrument like bass because now we're dealing with notes that have duration and we can set all those as well we just click to add the notes and drag them for the duration and the Snapping tools become a lot more important here as well [Music] for additional virtual instruments we also have the included SI strings and Si electric piano which have their own sounds presets and controls to adjust the sound of each of the instruments these can be selected and used the same way as the drums and the base virtual instruments foreign [Music] [Music] to make our first audio track right click on the track section on the left and select insert audio track drag the bottom of it down to expand it double-click the track name to rename it and I'll call it guitar to the right we have the mute solo and record arm buttons and if we click those it turns each of them on and off mute will make our track not play solo makes only that track play and record arm tells us we want to record on this track when we press the record button for the project underneath we see the eye drop down for the input click that select your audio interface and select the input that you plug the guitar into from there arm the track for recording with the red button for this tutorial I'll show you two ways to record the electric guitar the first will be with a direct recording where we plug the guitar into the audio interface set the audio interface to instrument mode and use a virtual amplifier and Cakewalk to simulate the sound of it running through an amp the other option is recording the guitar with a microphone on an amplifier or in my case I'll run my Hardware amp simulator the Avid 11 rack directly into my audio interface once we have our track armed we can go to the top that shows the transport the transport is used to navigate throughout the project if you press the red button it will start recording there's backwards and forwards buttons play pause and stop in this section you can also navigate by clicking on the project timeline there's a scroll bar with zoom in and zoom out tools at the bottom to navigate the tracks as well let's record a quick track once you're done you can hit the space bar to stop recording [Music] if you don't like the track you can click it to select it and press the delete key on the keyboard to remove it [Music] thank you [Music] foreign with the clip on the track we can click and drag the ends to trim it or slide it around by dragging it on the middle of the track if we click and drag at the start or stop towards the center that allows us to create a fade to simulate the guitar amp go to the guitar track effects panel and press the plus button to add an effect go to insert audio effects guitar and select th3 we can select a preset on the side adjust the amp settings and use guitar pedals the major advantage of recording direct like this is that we can change the amp settings after if we record a guitar amp directly we don't have the same amount of control over the sound after it's recorded there are ways to record a guitar signal direct and send it back out through a guitar amp after but you need a little bit of extra Hardware to be able to send an instrument input out in this example I've gone ahead and recorded two identical guitar tracks on two different audio tracks and later in the mixing process we'll pan these tracks out to expand the sound when I'm recording I usually just set up my audio interface to play the guitar sound directly so there's no latency but it's also possible to play with the th3 guitar effects processor in real time [Music] another option to have for recording is the Avid 11 rack this input will also work similarly to a guitar amp in that I'm recording a guitar signal that's already processed but the 11 rack does have the option to record both a process and a direct signal that way we can reprocess it later so you would just send the output from the guitar track back into the 11 rack guitar input by USB for reprocessing then record it to a track I won't be doing that in this video though because it's a little bit more complicated and not as applicable to most users basically to set this up I have to set the software to use the Avid 11 rack as the audio interface and record from its two stereo outputs all the settings are adjusted on the unit itself and I have to physically plug in my headphones to the Avid 11 rack to hear the processing go back I recorded a quick stereo electric guitar lead track over top of everything after we have our virtual electric guitar amp recorded we can try recording a different instrument as an example I'll throw an acoustic guitar recording in here we can do this with a single microphone or a pair of microphones using two inputs but I'll do one for this video making it a mono instead of a stereo signal we have additional videos on this channel for recording acoustic guitar to record this way we just set up the microphone on a stand connect it to the audio interface we're using with an XLR cable and set up the preamp I'm using phantom power and adjusting the level to get a loud signal without any clipping that way we don't get too much noise again we just create an additional audio track and name it the acoustic guitar then select the input arm it for recording and record at the transport when we're done just stop and trim up the clip to finish [Music] that basically covers the two ways we'll record with the direct inputs we can record direct guitars bass keyboards and other synthesizers with audio inputs we can record a drum kit acoustic guitar electric guitar amps and vocals other instruments can be filled in with the midi tools using various virtual instruments that can be added to Cakewalk that covers the tracks I want to have in the mix so far I'll play it all back with the levels reset to give you a starting point all I've done to start is just decrease the master volume [Music] foreign with virtual instruments I like to decide on what setting I'll use for those first meaning I'll select the drum kit and bass and tweak the sound of them I change both of those to something I like a little bit more since they're virtual instruments they're made to sound pretty good right in the mix right out of the plugin so I'm not going to change much in this video some instruments will allow you to send out all the components like the kick and snare to separate audio tracks if you need to and that way you can have unlimited control of the mix but we won't do that for this video today at the most basic level our mix will start with a little bit of adjustments to the panning and levels of each of the tracks with all our Clips recorded we go to the view menu at the top and switch to the console View and expand it upwards to increase the size on the screen that way we can see everything now I'll begin by just muting everything except the bass and drums that forms the foundation of the mix and we want to adjust them to sound balanced generally when I start like this it's important to recognize that the track will become louder and louder as we add more instruments in so if my base is overpowering the drums I like to bring the Bass Down rather than increase the drum volume unless the levels are very low to begin with working from the console view we can see I have faders at the bottom to adjust the levels and a pan knob that adjusts the left and right position above that the drums come out pre-mixed but if you're recording a real kit you would need to be adjusting the panning for each individual microphone the base should always stay centered after that we have the same mute solo record and automation controls from earlier next I'll bring in the Rhythm guitars on their own I'll start with just one of them and this is the chance to play around with some of the settings in the th3 plug-in before we go too far keep in mind the version included with Cakewalk is just a demo so it doesn't have all the possible amps and effect options of the full version I just changed the amp preset to start [Music] let's play them together I turned down the volume on both and pan them out I Pan the left out a little more so that way I can use the right side of the mix for my acoustic guitar later [Music] let's bring the bass and drums back in the most obvious issue here is the low end has a lot of crowding and this is caused by my rhythm guitar invading the frequency space of the kick drum and the bass we need to clean these frequencies out of the guitar a little to leave space for the base and make them sound more distinct the way I'll do this is with Equalization but since I'm working with a pair of audio tracks let's use a trick called a stereo bus to combine those two tracks into one that way we don't have to duplicate the processing I'll also remove all the volume adjustments and just add it in after once that's added I rename the track to rhythm guitar and I change the track outputs of the two Rhythm guitars to the boss at the bottom [Music] now go to the effects panel on the bus and select the son of this equalizer we use equalizers to boost or cut certain frequencies out of our track to adjust the balance as I said there's too much bass so I'll add a high pass filter to cut out some of those base frequencies we can see that the first band here is just a low shelf which will just decrease the low frequencies evenly we want something that will cut the very low frequencies out more that's why we're going to select a high pass filter then we select the frequency that it will cut off at basically the high pass filter will filter out all the low frequencies and let the higher frequencies pass through a low pass filter does the opposite we also have bands that can boost or cut at different frequencies the frequency sets the frequency that the booster cut applies at The Cue is the shape and width of the curve and the gain is the amount [Music] now let's add in the acoustic guitar I added a slight amount of compression to this which just helps level out the volume of the track with compression it reduces the volume above the threshold level by a certain amount which is set by the ratio this then applies with timing there's a delay when the compression applies after the threshold is reached and that's called the attack time and then the time when the compression stays on after dropping below the threshold is the release we can see the meter shows the amount of gain reduction being applied [Music] [Music] I added a little EQ to also cut out some of the low end and bring out some of the highs [Music] the last mixing trick I'll show you is how to use Ascend Ascend is similar to a bus and that you can send multiple tracks to it but it's different because the original signal goes through both the master Channel and the send you can use this to apply an effect like a Reverb to all the tracks together to subtly pull the mix together again we'll create a stereo bus track then add a Reverb effect to it I'll set the Reverb to 100 wet because the dry signal still goes to the master output then we can select to add the send to each track and adjust the volume we want to the send balance these out but don't overdo it keep in mind this is applied before the faders at the bottom so the levels won't be adjusted if we adjust the level of the faders there's a lot of other tools like the pro Channel and various effects and plugins that are also included in Cakewalk by bandlab you can also add basically an unlimited number of different instruments and plugins from third parties to the program so it makes it quite powerful to customize it however you want [Music] foreign once you're ready to export your project go to the file menu at the top and select export audio here you can name the project select the folder and choose the file type the file type is wave as the default which is an uncompressed audio file to maintain the quality the sample rate should be 44 100 Hertz and 16 bit for normal CD quality you can also choose a compressed MP3 file if you need to share your audio with a smaller file size thanks for checking out this video tutorial on recording music with Cakewalk by bandlab if this video helped you out don't forget to give it a like And subscribe to the channel for more content you can also check out our full cake walk by bandlab tutorial for more details on how to use the software

Channel: Your Home Recording

Views: 19,060

Keywords: free daw for windows, how to record music on pc, cakewalk by bandlab, daw tutorial, how to record music

Id: B4f1esE7c5w

Length: 25min 30sec (1530 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2023