How to Edit Audio in Cakewalk by Bandlab

in this video we'll be taking a look at how to edit audio in cakewalk by ban lab I focus I'm Mike and I hope you're well now one of the great advantages we have in digital recording over recording on tape is the ease of which we can edit audio we can move it around we can reverse it we can stretch it all kinds of good stuff but it's not without its frustrations especially if you're not fully aware of the tools available and some of the best practices involved so that's what we're going to be covering in today's video we're going to show you how to do edits which is seamless which the end listener is not aware of and they just feel like you've played it in that way so please do stick around for all of that now if this is your first time here welcome if you like this kind of content all about home recording da double use gear reviews plugin reviews that kind of thing then please do subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you get notified about my future videos now let's get stuck into some audio editing so 90% of what we do with audio editing is achieved with a few basic tools and techniques which we're going to cover now in the first couple of sections and the idea here is to avoid some of the common pitfalls that people have concerning timing of Clips that they've moved around and also convincing and smooth sounding joins and edits so let's get stuck in now what we have on the screen here is a demo project which I recorded quickly last night it doesn't sound that great but it's good enough for the demonstration purposes here and it's made up of just a guitar part a bass part and a drum part they're all audio parts here and we're mostly going to focus on the guitar part today and do our edits there so I'm going to start off by getting rid of the console view because I don't need that we're gonna try and use as much of the screen as possible so I'll start off by zooming and I'm gonna do that by using a keyboard shortcut because if you use the zoom controls on the corners of the windows down here it gets a bit cumbersome and with audio editing you want to zoom in really really quickly so first of all let me zoom vertically now you notice I've selected the guitar track here that's what I'm going to be working on that helps to have the correct thing selected when you zoom in because it's going to maintain focus on that particular track okay so I'm going to hole control on the keyboard and I can use the up and down arrows on my keyboard to zoom in and out so I'll just zoom in so zoom in like so and I'm just gonna have that guitar take up the whole window there folks okay now the next thing I want to do probably is just zoom horizontally a little bit now what matters here is where you have the playhead it roughly keeps focus with the playhead so if I just wanted to keep everything in the center then I'm you know I'll just zoom in like so with the playhead there in the middle of that waveform okay so the first thing that we often doing is getting rid of unwanted noise at the beginning and the ends of the track so let's just have a listen here you can hear me shuffling around you probably don't want that maybe the guitar isn't the first thing in so you don't want that noise there and at the end this is very very common at the end where we've just finished the track people are moving and shuffling in their seats and we get this kind of thing so let's start off at the end first of all with this topic and titling of our track I'm just gonna zoom in a little bit towards the end so we can see what we're doing and I'm just gonna drag the end in so I'm moving to the edge of the waveform hovering my mouse there so I get that little icon there and then I'm just dragging to the point before all that shuffling starts okay now I have step snap turned on here you could do this without snap turned on if you've got a very specific place it doesn't really matter too much in this particular case now if I just left that there and imagine I did the same thing to a number of other tracks we do get a little bit of a sudden drop-off there even though the guitars become quite quiet there let's have a listen we get that sudden cutoff like that whenever you've cut or adjusted or trimmed the edge of a waveform you can also do a fade on that edge if you go right to the top of the clip you will see the icon change to this fade icon here what I'm going to do is drag this out and create a fade all the way from that last strum and let it fade out or decay all the way through that passage there so let's just have a listen [Music] in fact I'm going to solo that guitar so we can hear on its own [Music] now that's a really nice ending there and nice and smooth what's important to understand about a fade is it's going to go all the way down to zero DBS it's going to reduce your audio to zero DB by the end of the fete that's very very important for everything we look at later on with fades now an important thing to understand is that once you have done a fade like that it is non-destructive so you can undo it like so but once it's there you can go to the top corner of that Fay the beginning of that fade and if you right-click then you can change the type of curve that we see there so I could change it to a slow curve that means it slowly starts to fade and then gradually gets faster as it goes cells on this [Music] okay so we maintain a bit more of that guitars natural decay that's probably the one I would use but if we do right-click again you'll see there's also a fast curve available all right so I'll change that just slow curve so that's the first very common thing you're doing just at the end of your tracks now likewise all the way at the beginning here you can see that there's a lot of shuffling at the guitar we don't want all that so what I'm gonna do is just quickly just pull it up there close to the beginning now I'm going to show you two things one what I would actually do in real life and I'm going to do something else for the moment to create a little problem for later but what I'm gonna do is just move my playhead to that position roughly I'm gonna hold ctrl on the keyboard use my arrow keys to zoom in up like so and what I normally like to do is this I would move this as close as possible somewhere around about there to the beginning of that guitar being played and I would do a very very small fade okay you can't even hardly see it on the screen there it's hardly noticeable it just ensures that we are gonna have a nice smooth transition into that sound coming in have a listen okay complete silence before hand just so you know we'll move all the way back here and it sounds nice and natural when the guitar comes in okay so what I'm actually gonna do is undo that and I'm gonna do a much more rough edit here okay I'm just gonna drag it all the way out up here somewhere that's fine and I'll just do that little fade again let's have a listen that's acceptable but later on we're going to get back to why that can become a problem for us so I'm gonna zoom all the way back in again and that is the basic topping and tailing next we're gonna look at moving some parts around to new destinations so one of the things we commonly want to do is copy and paste audio from one part of the song to another we may do that for musical reasons to change the arrangement or it may be because there's some kind of problem with some section and we just want to take a good part of the audio and replay a bad part of the audio may be a player error or some pops and clicks something along those lines so let's take a look at this guitar again and what I have here is phrases marked out you can see the markers here phrase one phrase two phrase three and phrase for now the first three phrases are musically very very similar so they could replace each other the last one is no good to me at all now let's say for example I want to replace a phrase to hear I want to get rid of it and just use phrase 1 as a replacement first of all I'm going to show you a way which causes some issues but I'm gonna start off in the right way and have snap turned on okay I've got that switched on and I'm gonna just kind of have it snapped two whole beats of the bar okay so as I move along there you can see it's snapping two beats of the bump and I want to cut this section out so I want to go to use my split tool now in the tool bar at the top some of them have several selections if we go to the fourth one here where it says edit I'm gonna long press on that and change that to the split tool okay that means whenever I press f8 on my keyboard I'll be using that split tool f5 to go back to my normal selection tool my smart tool and as I say FA to now change to that split tool so I'm going to go in I've got the snap turned on and I'm going to make a cut here at the beginning of that phrase and I'm gonna make a cut at the end of that phrase I'm going to go back to my usual smart tool by pressing f5 that's already selected and I'm gonna press delete on my keyboard and that cuts out that section which I don't want okay so I've decided I actually want to use phrase 1 okay so I'm going to select that now there's a few different ways of doing this I'm going to show you a very basic way and that's to press ctrl C on the keyboard to copy that phrase then move my playhead to where I want to paste it okay so I want it to be pasted in here and press control V on my keyboard to paste it in now the next thing I'm going to do is for your benefit I'm going to have the metronome switched on because there's going to be an issue with this which I want to demonstrate with the metronome have a listen [Music] you can hear that this guitar is out of time and that's because I haven't been careful enough when I've actually copied the guitar and I know lots of you have problems with this with the timing so I'll select it and delete that get rid of it now the issue that I'm having the reason I'm having this issue is if I move my playhead to the beginning of this section do you remember earlier on when I trimmed this guitar actually didn't do it with the snap turned on and I just did it just a little bit before the beginning of the path now it may be that that's where you want that edit to be and that's fine but as I say because I didn't have the snap tool selected and I just selected this whole clip I pasted it in and essentially that means this beginning of this clip is then at the beginning of the bar where I pasted it which is the wrong place right because the beginning of the bar is actually just in here so what I would actually do in this case I'll just zoom out a little bit I do have snap selected okay so it's switched on and instead of actually is selecting this and copying the hotline copying and pasting the whole thing I'm just gonna move my cursor down towards the bottom of the clip here and I'm going to drag out like so now you perhaps can't easily see but it's selected an area of this clip and it's not selected that very beginning part there as I say probably not so easy to see but it's selected with using snap from the beginning of the bar now what I'm actually going to do to copy it and move it around this time is actually pressed ctrl on my keyboard and then I'm just going to drag this over holding ctrl when you drag in cakewalk with these clips make sure a copy is made okay so that's what it's done there incidentally if you wanted to do a copy to another track you can as well I'll just quickly insert audio track here so I've got another this could be another guitar track and I could actually take this hold ctrl and then just drag it up like so so I had everything selected there which wasn't what I wanted to do so holding ctrl on the keyboard I could drag it up here now I happen to have snap turned on at the moment so you know what's going to happen is the same as happened before you can see this is gonna be out of time I play both of those to get off so that one as well [Music] you can hear that delay effect okay now a way to avoid that if you have snapped turned on or off it doesn't really matter is hold ctrl and shift on the keyboard drag straight up and then it's just going to make sure that you can't actually move it from side to side so I'm wiggling my mouse around from side to side that will make sure if you copy and paste clips in this way that the timing is kept correctly almost then get there okay so I don't actually need that I'll just get rid of that track of theirs I've delete the track so there is the first part of the procedure of copying and pasting that section in there next we're gonna deal with making nice joins okay so I've got this guitar part and I've copied and pasted a section as I did before but usually you're gonna have some problems with the joins and we'll tackle that in a moment I just want to quickly mention how I select particular parts and I'll turn snap off here the actual part that I was really interested it was this little section here kind of a couple of beats there of guitar playing where I wanted a slight variation now if you try and do it it's very very sort of surgically like that you can create more problems than it's worth what I like to do is grab a little kind of a buffer either side and select a section where it's musically the same yeah because it's no good if it's musically different but I like to do my cuts actually on a beat where possible or on a transient if that's more appropriate mostly that's going to be on a beat and I just like I so like to have a buffer either side because it can matter where you make that cut or it can make it easier if you make the cut in a good place so I've chosen to have it cut there but you will hear a problem as I say let's have a listen go back to here and have a listen for this join now you may not have heard it so I'll play again if you listen very carefully you're gonna hear a tiny little scullers click sound and it's just not that nice and if I listen to the end part I have a listen again and it's even more clicky there it depends what you're listening with whether you'll hear that clearly but it's most definitely there and it can often times be a lot worse than that first of all let's see what causes that I'm just going to move my playhead to that join and I'm gonna zoom in control arrows on the keyboard as far as I can go and there's our actual joint now look at the waveform here and paint attention to this line here this is the sort of center line where we've got 0 DB sometimes it's above sometimes it's below but whenever it's either above or below that line if you do a cut there or a join there will be some kind of click in fact if I just move this join all the way over to here well it's much more obvious you can see that there's more amplitude to the waveform there I'll zoom all the way back out now let's have a listen here it'll actually be worse now that's right move all the way back here if I can listen again you can hear that click has got a lot worse now okay so I'll zoom back in again I'm actually just gonna undo that sorry try to undo it so then we're back to our original and join that so how do we cure that well there's one very simple way of doing it which I wouldn't never recommend necessarily but it's low B is through years ago and that is you can just drag the join to a point where the line is crossing over that zero point it's okay you can get rid of pops and clicks like that but it can be very tricky to find a good point to actually do the Edit so instead what I like to do is create a crossfade I throw out a fade to begin with is the method I'm going to show you on each of the clip so if I just drag it out a fade like this at the top of the clip remember it's just the top corner of the clip is where you'll see the fade icon you can just drag it down this is very small I know it looks reasonably big on the screen but it's very very small in terms of actual time now if I grab the edge of one of those clicks and clips and drag it over we've got a crossfade there okay now that is definitely going to be a nice smooth join we'll zoom it out and have a listen okay I'll go back a bit so you can hear definitely no pops and clicks in there at all which is great right that's what we want and if we zoom in again I'll just undo that because I actually showed you this kind of harder way of doing things it does depend a little bit on a setting here if we go up to options above the track pane I'll click on that what the setting I'm talking about is Auto crossfade you need to have that switched on I didn't always like to leave that on because it can create issues for me when I'm doing editing but just to demonstrate if you do have that switch on you can grab the edge of your clip here and you can just create an overlap and it creates an automatic crossfade for you okay it just depends on how far you dragged it as to how much of a crossfade it is now I would suggest in these sort of circumstances as small as you like you know it's something like this is fine that's going to make sure that there again is no pop or click in there so let's have a listen great so we just need to do the same thing at the end of our little section here so I'm just going to move the playhead in there again I'm just going to zoom all the way in like so and I'm just going make sure that you've got Auto crossfade switched on as it is and then I'll just drag that over like that okay so let's zoom all the way out I'm getting there okay and here's my little section here you can just see the clip there that's where my new section of guitar is I'll go back before and let's play all the way through and we shouldn't hear any pops and clicks or anything at all [Music] okay so that's a very very useful way to make sure that you don't have those dead giveaways that there's been an edit there now let's take a look at changing the actual amplitude of some of these parts of the wave so sometimes it will have a small section of audio which is a little bit too loud or a little bit too quiet it could be a single word from a vocalist or it could be a single hit from a drum where it's just played a little bit too hard and in this case we're going to be looking at this acoustic guitar again we're just one note I feel was a little bit too loud now it's very tempting in these circumstances to grab a compressor and start timing the audio like that but that can be sometimes a complex solution for a fairly simple problem so let's have a look at the waveform here and you can see the one I'm talking about I'm just hovering over it here there's one guitar note here which where the transient just pokes up quite a lot higher than the others and I just want to tame a little bit so I'm just gonna click over there so the playhead is over that transient and I'm going to zoom in using my keyboard and then at the top of this track here you can see where it says the name of the track guitar they just below there's a drop down menu currently it says clips I'm going to change that to clip automation and gain okay now this draws a line and that shows the current gain of the clip or the volume of the clip now what I'm gonna do is create some control points just either side of that waveform there so I'll just click just to the side of it there and just at the end of it there and then I'm just gonna do another two just inside the first ones okay just like so so we've got four little dots there I'm gonna select the inner two there I'll shift on the keyboard so I've got both of those I'm just going to drag that down now you can see the waveform changing as I do that this is a new feature that you can see that I believe in the latest version of cakewalk so if that's not happening for you you may want to take a moment just to make sure you do update to the latest version and I want to say do make sure you backup your work before you do an update always try and say this to people because I have lost work before during the update process this is really really handy and you know if it's not sounding quite right this may sound good it may not cyber listen yet that's sounding okay but sometimes if it's needing to be it sorry undo that if it's needing to be a little bit more exaggerated like so listen probably it does sound a little bit like a compressor is kicked in a little bit too hard there you can either then just gently adjust it like so or you could add some more control points in there and make that a little bit more gradual try and smooth out that curve there a little bit so it's not quite so obvious to the ear what is happening let's have a listen I think that's acceptable and may spend a bit more time but very very handy now the useful thing about this is you know we could have done this with volume automation on our console so if we have our consort open like so we could have used the automation features but it's a little bit fiddly to do it that way and the nice thing about this is the the volume stays relatively the same even if you're moving the fader up and down in your guitar so if I'm just making the guitar a lot quieter you know it's as if I'd recorded that waveform in that way to begin with so a very very handy way of making some quick edits to some audio in terms of the volume without reaching for that complex plugin so if you found something about this video confusing or perhaps I haven't covered something to do with audio editing in this video and you'd like to find some answers and please do ask in the comments down below and myself or someone else we'll try our very best to help you out now if you did like this video make sure you hit the like button that tells YouTube that it should show this video to other people and that really helps me out and if you didn't like this video for any reason whatsoever make sure you hit the dislike button twice and if you do like this kind of content then make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you are notified about my future videos and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 60,483

Rating: 4.9667869 out of 5

Keywords: How to Edit Audio in Cakewalk by Bandlab, Editing Audio in Cakewalk by Bandlab, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial, beginners, cakewalk, audio editing tutorial, audio editing tutorial for beginners, cakewalk audio recording, how to edit audio, cakewalk by bandlab, cakewalk tutorial, how to use cakewalk, creative sauce, music production, cakewalk sonar tutorials free, how to use cakewalk by bandlab, cakewalk sonar tutorial, cakewalk sonar, audio, editing, daw, home recording

Id: R1EKnepfyXE

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020