How To Use Cakewalk by Bandlab - Audio Basics

in today's video we're going to be recording audio with cakewalk by band lab hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you will now today I'll be using cakewalk by band lab to record audio I've covered this topic a little bit in my previous video cakewalk basics if you haven't seen that then click on the link just here to watch that now but I'll be going into a little bit more detail today to help you guys get really good quality recordings when you're using cakewalk now if you haven't been to this channel before and you'd like this kind of thing all about da double use plugins gear reviews that kind of thing then please do help me out by subscribing and ring the bell on youtube so that you get notifications about my future videos now let's get on with some audio recording okay so here we are in cakewalk and i've got a guitar in my hand and that's because this is the audio that i'm gonna be recording in this tutorial today but it could be a microphone a vocal or it could be something like a synthesizer with this audio jacks plugged into your audio interface now the fact that it's plugged into an audio interface is important because i've noticed from previous tutorials in the comments that some of you are not using audio interfaces you're trying to plug straight into your PC or your laptop now you won't get very far recording audio like that it may be enough just to try out cakewalk see if you like the interface etc but you won't get into any serious recording so please do make sure you've got an audio interface and I'll be putting some links in the description down below to two or three that I'll recommend to you a cheap to medium price check out any of those and you should be on your way now let's get started with some actual recording so I'll go over here and click on new project and then I'm going to go across to empty project and what that will do is open an empty project are you with me so far good now we need to check a couple of things before we actually start recording so I'm gonna go to edit up here click on preferences and then I'm going to make sure this orange tab devices is selected here this will show a list of the audio devices available or your audio interface now I happen to have more than one and the ones I have have quite a few inputs on them you'll just be wanting to make sure that you've got at least one input selected so I have my mic instrument one selected here and that's fine so I'll click on OK and the next thing to add an audio track we will click on the plus symbol up here and we will have to make sure that we have the correct input selected now I only have one but it's created a stereo input automatically here it's got stereo set by default I don't want it to be stereo for an electric guitar so I'm just going to go down to where it says left here and click on instrument 1 left it's fine and click on create that creates a mono track using that instrument 1 input now I'm just gonna drag this down so that we can see all the controls associated with that track and I'm going to click over here to actually rename it we'll name it guitar it's pretty important that you do make sure you name things as you go along folks or else you'll get really confused later and you can even in cakewalk one of its nice features set an icon for it so I'm just gonna load an icon and I'll go down and find a nice electric guitar icon you don't have to do that but it does make it a little bit easier to navigate now the next thing we'll need to do is make sure that the guitar is set to record so we hit on this red circle here and that means it's armed to record now if I play the guitar you won't be able to hear anything but I can actually hear it through my headphones because my headphones are plugged into my audio interface so if you do the same you'll be able to hear it through your headphones but we're not hearing any processing that cakewalk is doing to it in order to hear that we'll need to click on this echo button on now we'll click that on and you'll play it and what's happening now is cakewalk is actually processing the signal now this is where you might get yourself into a little bit of bother because what you might be hearing is your initial sound from the audio interface and then a split second later you'll be hearing a kind of an echo and that's very very off-putting when you're playing and can make you go out of time that sort of thing it's called latency you'll hear it talked about a lot with home recording or any recording now in order to adjust the latency to make it smaller you will have to go up to edit again and go to preferences and this time click on driver settings and about halfway down under mixing latency you will see a setting for buffer size now for me this is grayed out this means that I have to actually adjust it from the software which came with my audio interface and I get to that just by clicking on this asio panel here for you you may be able to adjust it right in the interface here now here's the trick you want to get this as small as possible so you want it to be as far over to the left as you can make it so that you really don't hear any echo at all when you're recording however if you just simply put it all the way to the left the likelihood is your system or your D aw cakewalk will become unstable you will suddenly drop out in the middle of recording or you'll get pops and clicks on playing back so you do have to play around with this but I'm afraid it takes a little bit of gettin right you want it as low as you possibly can while the system still stays stable if you are finding that you it's popping or it's makes the suddenly stopping in the middle of playback then you're probably just gonna have to nudge this up a little more to the right now for some systems you may find that they'll find that the latency just gets so unbearable that you can't really play it in which case you're going to have to be looking for other solutions there are other settings that you can change which I won't be going into today I'm afraid because they are too in-depth I'll click on apply and then close and that means that this is setup now I'm now playing it and you should be able to hear the guitar and for me there's no discernible latency so I'm all ready to go now the next thing we will need to do is to set the basic input level now this is the most important thing for you to remember this will take you all the way through your sort of recording time and your experience and will improve your tracks enormous ly if you get this bit right now if you're not familiar here is the meter here I'm gonna zoom in on that and play the guitar and you can see these green bars going and up up and they make a show us where the signal is now you'll notice that the numbers start from the low negative numbers up here and go further and further down so we've got minus 6 down to minus 54 now 0 which is right at the top is the point where you get what is called clipping it's and in the digital world it's a horrible sound it's very it's not warm and fuzzy and nice like clipping kind of was in the old analog days it's a really unpleasant sound you can't get rid of it once you've recorded it so you don't want it at all so never ever ever go above zero in fact you can stay well below zero in digital recording now what I'm going to recommend to you is some numbers which I won't go into detail here because I have them in another video all about gain staging which I'll link to right at the end but the numbers I'm going to mention to you are really interesting numbers and they are there for a reason I want you to make sure that when you're playing your song that we're peaking around about minus 12 here and that the average of your song the sort of general level of it is minus 18 so that's a peak of minus 12 and an average of minus 18 now don't get too hung up on this your musics going to be different each time so it's never going to be exactly a peak of 12 and a average of 18 focus on the peak first make sure you're just going up to around about minus 12 and just generally minus 18 minus 20 minus 22 is fine but keep minus 18 in mind there is a reason for that number as I say that's in my case gain staging video so I'm going to play my guitar a little bit and the kind of level that is at the song and it's too low at than what at the moment so I'm just going to turn it up on the actual guitar I've got some leeway there almost there it's a little bit below minus 12 so I'll go up a bit more that's better isn't it so we're up to minus 12 there on the peak and as you can see the average is just hovering around about minus 18 so as I say don't get too hung up on it it doesn't need to be precise just roughly around about that now I'd actually like to add some effects that I'll be able to hear through my headphones I'm gonna play and the first effect I'm gonna add is something I learned in a previous video and that's to have a guitar tuner in there because in a previous video where I recorded this guitar I didn't notice though afterwards that it was out of tune horrible so I've got a guitar tuning in my library over here I'm just gonna click on the night for the name of it which is M tuner now M tuna is a guitar tuner by male reproduction it's free so I'll be putting a link to that down in the description definitely check it out it's my favorite guitar tuner and I'm just going to take that and drag it across to my effects chain over here now when I play the guitar then I can see I can see whether the each string is in tune so I will go ahead and I will tune up that guitar and speed up the video for that process okay so now that I have the guitar in tune I'm actually going to go ahead and add a little bit of reverb now I'm gonna add the reverb which comes with cakewalk so I'll open up the cakewalk folder here with my audio effects and by the way just in case you can't find this make sure you've got the audio effects tab selected up here now I go into the cakewalk folder and I'm going to select the cenotes reverb and drag that across there now I happen to know that I rather like the default setting which sounds like this let's find for this guitar part so I've got that all up and ready to go and I am almost ready to actually record but I want to set up my click so I'm just gonna make sure I'm right at the start of the track here by clicking on this button here the rewind button and I'm going to go up to project and click on insert tempo change I like to do it this way because here I can click on this button here to actually tap the tempo that I want so I'm just going to do that roughly now okay so it's come out around about a hundred and two beats per minute I'll click on it okay and that is my tempo so I'm all ready to record which I'm gonna do now I'm just gonna leave a bar at the beginning or so just to make sure I give myself some leeway so let's go and that'll do so here we are with the track recorded I'll just give it a double check by clicking on the play button you can see there's a nice healthy kind of wave there some reasonably sized sort of peaks and things so it's it's rather nicely now I'm just going to ditch the guitar and talk about some basic editing okay so now that my guitar is recorded I can switch this off here I can switch the echoing off and that has everything including the effects when I play now the first thing you might want to do is actually trim the beginning you can see there's a little bit of noise there which if it was a really silent part at the beginning you wouldn't want there so I like to drag this all out make it pretty big zoom in a little bit like this and then what you can do is make sure that you've got the smart tool enabled that's this star symbol up here I like to have that on most of the time in cakewalk and then I can go across and I can drag this across like this now you can see that it's jumping in little steps which if I want to do some fine adjustments I don't really want so I'm going to turn the snap off up here I'll turn that off and I can really just get right in there tight to the beginning of that way if that will give me a very clean signal and I'll click on play so you can hear is absolute silence before it starts playing now the next thing you might want to do is something like a fade-out so what I'll do is go right to the end here you've got a natural fade-out where I played the chord but what if we wanted it to fade out to absolute silence in a very very clean wait now what you can do here is do a non-destructive fade-out if you go right to the top right of the track here you can drag this over can you see the wave is just getting smaller and I'll move that right over like that we'll have a listen to that fade-out [Music] that gives us a really perfect failure you can also do fades at the beginning as well just in the same sort of way just like this sounds a bit strange but have a listen now that is non-destructive meaning that you haven't actually done it firmly to the wave file at all you can actually just do that kind of thing move it in and out and get rid of it all together if you wish now the next thing you might want to do is actually cut track so let's go ahead there's different ways of doing this in actual fact let's choose a point to cut the track here and what I'll do is you make sure my smart tool is on I'm gonna set the cursor to around about here I'm gonna click on do a right click and just click on split and click on OK and that splits the track right there what's interesting about this and this is what I wanted to show you is that you can actually move this out there you could move that section to another place but again it's non-destructive so if I were to now drag the edge out all of those parts are still actually there so you're not actually getting rid of stuff where you cut it there let's just undo that a couple of times to go back to where I was and the other thing you can do if you're using a smart tool is actually go over here to where it has the Edit tools long click long left click on that tool and go down to split and then you can go across and you can just do lots and lots of splits like that saves your doing all the right clicking and that's a really good way of actually editing your Clips you can move things around you can get them in time that's from a different video but I hope you enjoyed this one now the subject of audio recording is indeed massive and we've only just scratched the surface so if you have any questions and remember there's no stupid questions ask in the comments below and myself or someone else will endeavor to help you out now if you like this video please do help me out and hit the like button if you didn't like this video hit the dislike button twice if you like this kind of content then please help subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube and you will get notifications about my future videos I will see you in the next video like one of these two here you might like to click on one of those mm-hmm now it looks good what about that one No

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 94,592

Keywords: How To Use Cakewalk by Bandlab - Audio Basics, cakewalk by bandlab, cakewalk tutorial, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial, bandlab cakewalk review, bandlab cakewalk, bandlab cakewalk tutorial, how to use cakewalk by bandlab, how to use cakewalk, cakewalk, bandlab, cakewalk sonar tutorial beginner, cakewalk daw, cakewalk sonar tutorial, cakewalk sonar tutorials free, free daw, tutorial, Audio, Audio Tutorial, sonar, sonar audio tutorial, cakewalk sonar, cakewalk audio tutorial

Id: ap4pzN2k5n0

Length: 16min 19sec (979 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2019