Cakewalk with Ailsean - Groove Quantize, Splitting MIDI Drums, Maybe use a Compressor

all right so you guys can hear everything I can hear everything that is good stuff right there okay so what we're going to do is we're gonna use the groove quantize in cakewalk and we're gonna do something as shale had asked me about splitting drums and things into different tracks and we're going to talk about a little bit of that and we might get to do a little compression today's gonna be kind of a short and specific sort of a stream so without further ado let's get right into this and do some drums so I've already loaded up empty power drum I've already loaded up a bass channel as well so we can maybe do some bass that's low that's more like it okay so up here what we want to do is go to I want to do step record and I'm gonna set that to give me a thit's did it and then I'm going to view the piano roll and I'm on the drum kit okay we're at that octave okay so the first thing I'm going to do is bring this here record enable that and I do need to make this I guess a little smaller so I can hit the record button when you enable step recording when you I love how that artifacting happens when you enable step recording what's going to happen is you get the step record dialog when you hit the record button that you've used some different things we can do we're going to first let's let's just lay down some high hats and you're gonna see here that I'm not gonna care at all about anything other than just getting the data in we aren't we aren't concerned about velocities at all right now and I've set it to eighth notes so it doesn't matter how fast or slow I hit it it's gonna give me a thinit's so I'm just gonna go like this there we go now I got four bars at eight and now it's happening let's pull this up here now let's do sixteenths and let's do let's do something kind of stupid and busy here so we're gonna get we need to bring our line see where over here at measure six we need to bring that back and let's let's do a lot of kick and snare interplay and then we're going to what is it in cakewalk it's been a minute enter so we hit enter and that's going to let us go forwards so that dudette yeah and now let's try let's just do straight paradiddles I will do I want me to do it backwards and if we go back if we use the left-arrow no is it backspace no what goes back it is number pad zero sure that makes that makes sense I guess and it doesn't step backwards by the same amount apparently [Music] okay now that groove is gonna sound like the drummer is just kind of an idiot cuz it's gonna be super loud just hitting everything okay it should yeah no right-click doesn't do that in you in here what a smart tool smart tool again you're being less than smart mister smart tool there we go right click and drag still getting used to cakewalk still more used to Cubase okay so we've got that I would like to put in let's crash this one move that trash let's move this one as well to crash well go China okay now let's take this whole thing here I'll just copy that and we're gonna paste it right here at 6 so we get another four bars and notice that's fallen right into place let's take some of these and move them to Tom's so we get this let's do let's move you over okay I got to change my grid grid 16 let's move you up to the high Tom and shorten you I try what I'm doing Tom's and stuff when I'm arranging my kit I like to have one mounter in one fuller tom and that's all I really ever work with not seeing here if I open up the scent let's see what drums it's hitting we're not gonna use the grooves today we're going to look at the drum kit okay so let's look at the mixer okay so that's my let's go to the hi Tom it's how high do I need to drag these to get that high Tom there we go right there okay mixer and I want to pan those a little more let me get my Tom hi let's pan you a little farther Tom low paying you a little farther out let's get a little more separation on those guys oh that's nice ticket dude hopefully that sounds just as good to you make sure here of something real quick that we're not down mixing tamaño or anything dumb like that that has happened before nothing is down mixed to mono good so that means if I do this you guys are gonna see me go no no that's interesting well that still goes mono alright that's fine get back over here okay so we've got these drums I pull this up a little bit and we're just gonna zoom out I understand what's happening okay window zoom okay so now we have some stuff in here we have kicks snares cymbals and a couple of Tom hits not a whole lotta than anything fancy but notice I wasn't super careful about putting my velocities in I just played all of the notes to get the data in there now you saw that went pretty quick if I wasn't sitting here jabbering over it it would have taken me about 10 seconds to get to this stage next thing I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna just completely destroy these velocities we're just gonna set them all you know we could have used a line tool there that would have been nice but I care about it that much so we've got those and notice this the window is set to only show you the velocities for them it's that you currently have selected that's kind of a handy feature to keep you from accidentally messing with the velocities on notes that you're not trying to edit it does mean however that you have to remember to select the notes you want to do it so now if we go here I believe process groove quantize is what we're interested in now I already recorded this part to a grid we used step record so everything is perfectly lined up so the time part of this we don't care at all about duration we don't really care about it all either because these are all that we already took care of that by doing step record if you had manually played the part in and recorded it that way you might care more about those things you might want to pre quantize before you do that but let's go to these cakewalk DNA grooves here and I'm going to go let's do that let's do you know what let's go ahead and do the time and velocity just so you can see what its gonna do now if I audition this it's gonna play but it's not gonna play my whole selection it's only gonna play a snippet here ah that's swung it let's take this let's take this tempo down a little bit that's interesting what are you doing cakewalk all right num lock was turned off that's my favorite thing to have happen ever okay so we got these two clips here let's get back into it over here and before we go on let's let's change this to let's go to ride cymbal there so we got that now we're a little slower go back process groove quantize again that pulls our window up there are DNA grooves let's preview this shuffle feel and see what that sounds like [Music] notice how that had a pretty heavy effect on the velocities there and it also shuffled the shuffled the notes to be on a shuffle grid it moved the notes to be on a shuffle grid as opposed to a straight grid what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna go and select straight field B so we're just gonna do straight field B I don't care about the time at all I'm gonna set the velocity to about 74 75 I feel like it's a little heavy-handed when you go 100% and now when I said okay to that notice how it applied that effect and got us a nice groove based set of quantitative velocities this is a real easy way if you don't want to have to manually program all of your velocities to just be able to edit that and have get it get a nice groove so that is how the groove quantize works you can use it to do more stuff than that you can define grooves you can do a little more intricate stuff but the basic gist of it is you select what you want to select and you can use it to adjust the velocities the attacks where the notes hit and how long the notes hold really super useful if you were say trying to to create a groove with a not precisely quantized sort of set of notes you could take and for example apply that to the drum and the bass groove and you could use that to lock those two virtual players in so that they're just always hitting dead on the same place but they're not locked into the straight grid they can be locked into a grid to where they're pushing ahead or pulling back however you want to set it play around with those grooves you can you can get a lot of work done with those so now the next thing we want to talk about shale had asked about splitting because when when you have this if I export this out to audio all the drum tracks are going to be on a stereo pair or it's split mono they'll it'll either be two mono tracks or one stereo track the point is all the drums are gonna be on one thing and we don't want all the drums to be on one thing on one track we want that we don't want them all married to each other so what I'm gonna do here there are a couple of ways to go about this you can either copy parts create new tracks and then paste or you can do what I feel is a little faster which is to duplicate and then after you've duplicated the track then you just delete whatever you don't need first things first here where's my is there where's my glue let's select these I right-click and I uh bounced Eclipse there we go perfect so that'll save me a little time and in a few minutes you'll see so we go here we right-click our track we're just going to duplicate it and selected tracks just that we want to duplicate everything for now let's say we had put some reverb on there or if we had put any other effect we would want to go ahead and duplicate it notice repetitions we're actually going to do three repetitions and that give us four tracks and you'll see why we do that in just a second unless it unless it locks up decides it doesn't like me and wants to embarrass me on the internet that could also happen all right so we duplicated the track it seems to have loaded the synth four times and it didn't duplicate that I thought I told it to that is not a huge issue though it's not a big deal you're just gonna take your part copy it and then we've duplicated the tracks that's already got the correct sense on it everything is in the right places so we've got now our track four times now we're gonna name this one so all I did there was I just copied my clips pasted it down because somehow I missed that in the duplication process I'll go back and look at the video later and see what stupid thing I did but this track is gonna be kick then I'm gonna do snare I'm gonna do Tom's and then I'm gonna do cymbals lots of different ways to split things this is just how I like to do them okay so I'm gonna unrecorded enable everything here we don't need that and I'm gonna look at that and notice I'm just looking at the kick track right now so all I'm gonna do now is I'm going to highlight everything that isn't the kick drum now let me see if select none all by audio by time I was hoping cakewalk it added this there's a the feature that you see in a graphic editing programs all the time which is to select inverts inverse so you can highlight something and then tell it hey do the opposite now I was hoping they might have that but it doesn't matter so we know that that's my kick drum what I want to do is take everything that isn't the kick drum and delete it so now I'm gonna click over here and look at the snare drum I'm gonna highlight everything that isn't the snare drum and I'm going to delete it now I'm gonna click on my toms track here and this will be easy because it's everything except those notes right there usually you got to be a little more careful when you go when you do your Tom's because they're surrounded by symbols so we get those these that one and that guy did not do that as elegantly as I could have but you know we get the point across actually are those I may have done it wrong so low that yeah those are right okay but why is this note there we'll deal with that in a second okay symbols chicken chicken snare I need to go a couple of Tom hits we had here those need to go and we're left with nothing but cymbals so now if we come up here and let's say if I solo if I look at my kick track I've just got kick like if I click that there that fixes it yeah if you click on the name it just adds it and keeps the other track selected so if we click on that we got kick click here you see my snare drums my Tom track now only has the Tom's my cymbal track only has the cymbals let me solo this right around that okay come back to the Tom track here cuz I don't want that time to be that note I want that time to be that note you don't hear because I forgot to unsolo the other track I'm not sure how that that note got moved anybody see where that happened correctly again okay so now we look at this and we have a kick track snare track Tom track cymbal track and now they can all be processed just like you would if you were using a real kit we can go to the kick drum let's pull it in the mixing lens so now if we look at our mixer we've got kick snare Tom cymbals then rename this to bass if you care about that sort of thing you can load track icons go to percussion you can go to drums it really just you know kick drum I'm not I've never cared that much about having these sort of things but you know if you if you wanted to you can always do this just gonna do there we go so I'll save now that lets us know which ones which and if we watch now we can mix the kit we can add reverb we can add effects to those individual drum groups if we wanted to mix them separately and then also mix them out as a group we could create a bus I did that wrong we could come over here mr. stereo bus we can call it drums and then what we would do is over here instead of sending these to master we would send them to drums and now when we mix these we can we can adjust the whole kit volume using our drum buss if there's an effect that we want to apply to the whole kit we can apply it here and it will get applied to the entire kit using sins or inline effects either way inserts either way you want to do that but let's let's take a look at our kit here set that as the loop points so now we've got our kick there I need to turn myself up a little here those Tom's are hot I'm gonna just take a wild stab since I've got these so varied I'm gonna take a guess that my headphones are deceiving me a little bit but that's alright we don't care about that right now we're not talking about mixing drums today we're just talking about how to separate these out and get something useful and you can clearly see how if we wanted to we could pan these things probably don't want to do that but we can get all of that done here now just as though we had worked with a real kit the big difference is you won't have any bleed so that actually can be disadvantageous at times sometimes you want bleed especially in your your overhead mics on the other hand a lot you know engineers spend a lot of time getting rid of bleed and trying to fight against it so you've got almost an ideal situation also if you wanted to for example if you really love your symbols from one one kit that you've got we can now take this and we can use a whole other drum kit here if you wanted to use the kick and snare from two separate kits now that they're on their own tracks you can just take those and assign them to whatever drum synth you want so that's a super handy thing to be able to do now let's go back to our track view here I am not gonna do that and something else to remember here is that you would want to you would want to do this late in the game after you're done programming because now what happens if I want a program the drum groove I've got to work with these four separate tracks instead of being able to work on it with one nice easy to work with track so it's generally best not to do this at the very beginning like I did it where I've only got eight bars of drums programmed but again this is just an example so it's not a big deal let's go ahead and come back here what I want to do now I super don't need that open I'm gonna come here and go to the bass and record enable and we're just gonna record some quarter note bass I think maybe eighth note bass do all three I got to remember that all three is the one I need here so let's we're on bass basses record enabled so I may hit step record and I'm gonna go to eighth notes let's do a nice simple chord progression we'll just do that's hot maybe maybe before we do that we're going to turn this bass track down a little okay where is that in line with uh that's better okay so let's come back here again do all three and we'll do our step record and we're on our bass track and we've got eighth notes a destination track I should pay attention that I man that has had flashbacks two ages ago when I used to use cakewalk I can't tell you how many times I messed that up the number of times I've ended up entering stuff into the wrong track pay attention when you load the step sequencer this step record that the destination track is the currently selected track because it won't always be follow step size for the duration you can actually change that you can change it to be random delete on backstep yes advance insert is beat backwards okay step backwards is okay so let's uh let's just say we're gonna do a nice easy circle progression here we'll just do all come back here come back come back come back that loop getting in my way someone noticed every dog does is though don't they try to do too many things in that little region cakewalk is apparently no exception okay so okay so the the cakewalk idea the step sequence is still open now which is why this is happening even though you don't see the window stay on D next measure will okay now I picked a not very wonderful sounding bass on purpose let's listen to that and let's see our velocities again let's just let's just trash those real quick do we have a draw line excellent there we go so now we have super super all the same velocities okay so that's awful there you go process groove quantize we're going to set our resolution to eighth notes I needed to do that after I selected that straight field beat stop changing back I don't care about time or duration I just want velocity and we're gonna set it to about there okay and notice now we have something a little more sensible you can see that we're high low middle low and we're we've got the velocities moving up and down [Music] and these grooves are bad they don't go together all that well but that's alright we're just demonstrating a concept now let's go real quick one last thing we can do this is not going to be super effective here but let's go to the mix and what I want to do is I'm going to put a compressor on the base track and I'm going to do insert audio effects and we want the Senatus compressor let's pull this guy in and what we want to what we want to look at where is my input bypass this should have limiter on maybe this one doesn't do it it looks like we're gonna be doing that next time perhaps got a threshold you know what I would like to do is pipe the input from the kick drum but apparently this doesn't do it the way that it that I thought it would do so we're gonna use a different compressor for that all right well we got the gist of this done one we can do a basic sequence of drums and we saw how to split those out into other tracks and how to use the groove quantize on different instruments let me solo the bass real quick just so you can hear what a difference that made now let's take a look at that compressor and now notice how what I've done is now I've chopped that down to where the volume of the base is fairly steady sort of a thing but you can hear the tambour change on those attacks even though we've we've killed off a lot of the the up and down and volume that we got from the velocities so that's another way to process your base next time we're gonna look at doing some other things with it so anyway that's all we're gonna do for today we'll be back doing some more cakewalk stuff next week I am El Shawn from the grammar Club and I will see you later

Channel: Grammar Club

Views: 2,470

Rating: 4.6666665 out of 5

Keywords: twitch, games, Ailsean, The Grammar Club, Cakewalk, MIDI drums, Groove Quantize

Id: issvoVR3Zok

Length: 31min 41sec (1901 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 18 2018