Easily Record Guitar in Cakewalk Tutorial

in this cakewalk tutorial i'm going to show you how to easily use cakewalk by bandlab to record guitar i'm zane welcome to simple green tech where i do weekly audio tech tips tutorials and reviews to help you conquer the tech and unleash your creativity now cakewalk by bandlab is an incredible free daw or digital audio workstation and if you're a guitar player the included th3 guitar amp sim can give you some great tones so you don't have to install any other plugins of course you could install other guitar amp sims if you really wanted to but for this video i'm just going to show you how to use the included th3 guitar amp sim now first i'm going to show you how to quickly set up your audio interface in cakewalk so it's optimal for recording and then i'll show you how to bring in the guitar amp sim and arm a track for recording and then we'll get into the actual guitar recording all right to set up our audio interface in cakewalk we want to go up to edit preferences and then you want to go to playback and recording right here you want to make sure your driver mode is set to azio now this is if you have an asio compatible audio interface which most are but you might have just plugged in your audio interface and went with whatever the standard driver is for it and it might not be an azio driver so you should go over to the manufacturer's website for your audio interface and make sure you have the current driver set up for it now if your audio interface doesn't have an azio driver you may want to get the free azio for all program and set that up with your audio interface and that acts like a virtual driver and you can use your audio interface with it to get a little bit lower latency and that's why we're going with the azio driver as it provides lower latency and when recording guitar having just a little bit of high latency kind of sounds like an echo and it can throw your playing right off so you want to try to get as low of latency as possible now once this is set up you want to hit apply and then go up to devices and you probably won't have as much in your list as i do so just find whatever audio interface it is that you have and make sure you have a check mark next to it now if there's a check mark next to something else and you want to change it you have to uncheck it from both the input and the output like this and now you can see i can select something else from in here and once you have that set up click apply again and now we want to go down to driver settings and you can see down here we have buffer size and the lower the size the lower the latency but your computer and your audio interface may not be able to handle the lower settings so you might want to play around with this a bit to find the settings that work best for your computer and your audio interface and there's another button here called azio panel if you click on that it would bring up the control panel for your particular audio interface and you can see there's buffer settings in there so you want to make sure you match those up and get as low as possible now i use this fl studio one just for recording these videos as it allows me to record these videos pretty good but normally i would be going with my manufacturer's control panel and the driver for it and i can get even lower than 256. so try the lowest settings see if they work if they don't just increase it as you go and you'll be able to tell because it's going to make some funny noises if it's not working it might not even play audio back or record audio if it's not working so you would just go back and change this setting once you're ready here you can click apply again and then we can close out of here and now let's open up a project i'm just going to start a new project it's going to be empty and when you have a project open for the first time it may look like this you have these sidebars open and i normally click on these arrows at the side to close these bars down because i don't really like them there i like to have a nice clean interface and of course you can open them up again if you do need them later on now let's add an audio track so you click on this plus sign here make sure this is at audio and then your input you want to make sure you select the input of your audio interface yours might say input 1 input 2 something like that but make sure you choose input 1 or 2 or 3 or whatever number not stereo you don't want to choose stereo when recording guitar as guitar is a mono source so mine is input 1 then click on create and we now have our audio track here so now let's click on this button here this enables it for recording and then to hear it you click on this here and now if i play my guitar [Music] you can hear it play back if i didn't have that clicked i'll play my guitar you can see i have a signal going in there but you couldn't actually hear the guitar so this enables it so you can monitor it while you're recording so now one thing you want to do is make sure your levels are okay so if you strum and mine look like they're going to the -12 mark which is okay if yours were too high or too low you want to adjust the levels on your audio interface using the knob for that channel that you have your guitar plugged into not in the software you don't want to go into the console view and use one of these faders here to adjust the levels that actually just turns down the volume so if you were still clipping then you would still be clipping it would just be a lower volume or if it was too low and you increased it it's still going to sound muddy but you've just increased the volume of the muddiness so make sure you adjust your levels on your audio interface and you can aim for around minus 12 minus 18 somewhere around there that's a decent level so now we just need to add the guitar amp sim all right before we actually get into the th3 guitar amp sim i just want to ask if you're enjoying this video so far can you please give it a thumbs up it really helps my channel out and i appreciate it so much now let's get back into the cakewalk tutorial all right to add three the guitar amp sim we just need to click on this plus sign beside effects here and then you want to go to insert audio effects and your list is probably going to look different than this as i have a lot of third-party plugins installed on my computer so if yours looks different don't worry you just don't have all the same plugins that i have i've actually linked to a video below showing you how to install third-party plugins in cakewalk just in case that's something you want to do but when you're in here you want to go down to guitar you should have this at least because that's where three is so when you go to guitar you might only see three click on that and here's your guitar amp sound now it doesn't look like a guitar amp sim yet but this is it and to get it to look more like a guitar amp sim you want to click on one of these banks here and these are all your presets in these banks so let's just click on th 3 cakewalk and we'll open up one of these presets let's try metal hero 80s rock 80s hard rock let's hear what that sounds like sure we'll go with that one and another way of course you could do this is just by dragging these amps over into this area here and you can build your rig up that way but i'm just going to use presets for now so we are now ready to record and one thing before we start recording is you might want to make sure this button is yellow here or turned on and this is your metronome you might want to play along with the metronome so i'll leave that on and then to start the recording you just press this button here [Laughter] [Music] [Music] all right and there is our guitar recording and you can press the space bar on your keyboard to stop it from recording or you can just press the stop button up here now if you wanted to record another guitar track you would just create a new track again same way you did it before we're going to turn the other track off so we're not recording that track anymore and we'll actually set the input to none on that track and now we can just copy this down into the effects there so hold down the control button on your computer keyboard then click and drag it down into this effect so now you can see we have it in two places so we'll arm this one for recording [Music] and let's try the lead [Music] and there's our lead so maybe that's what we want to do and you could actually play over top of what you just recorded so you can have this as your lead guitar all you would need to do is just hit record again [Laughter] [Music] i couldn't really remember what i played there but something like that and the cool thing about recording with a guitar amp sim is if you don't like the tone that you had you can go back and change that later we didn't actually record that guitar tone we recorded the raw guitar and that just plays through this effect so we could remove this effect i'll just turn it off and then you can hear what it sounds like without the effect on it and that was just the raw guitar so you can go back and change the tone if you like if you want to check out some more free guitar amp sim plugins click up here or click down here to see what youtube recommends if you like this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more videos from me thank you so much for watching for simple green tech i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon

Channel: Audio Tech TV

Views: 40,601

Rating: 4.9463987 out of 5

Keywords: cakewalk tutorial, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial, how to use cakewalk, cakewalk by bandlab, how to use cakewalk by bandlab, cakewalk daw, free daw, Th3, TH3 tutorial, cakewalk th3 tutorial, th3 guitar amp simulator, how to record guitar, how to record guitar on computer, cakewalk guitar, cakewalk guitar amp, cakewalk guitar setup, cakewalk guitar plugins, how to record guitar in cakewalk, cakewalk guitar recording, cakewalk by bandlab recording, cakewalk recording

Id: 5uuur51L9xI

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020