How To Use Cakewalk by Bandlab - Console and ProChannel Basics

in today's video we're going to be learning about the console and the pro channel inkay walk by ban lab hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you will in today's video we're going to be learning all about the console and the pro channel in cakewalk bye ban lab we'll be looking at the basic workflow of the console and how it all sort of fits together we'll be looking at things like busses and how and why we use them as well as a little look at the pro channel a really very cool feature incapable by ban ads so stick around for all of that and hopefully you will have all the knowledge you'll need to get on with mixing your songs but before we get into that if this is your first time here and you like this kind of content all about da W is home recording gear plug-in reviews that kind of thing then please do subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you get to know about my future videos now let's get stuck into cakewalk okay so before we get stuck into this console view I just want to take a quick look at the anatomy of this demo track that I've put together for you guys because it affects the way that the console view looks when we first open it up what we see here in fact is a lot of empty space there is a mixture of MIDI tracks on here and also outputs from the virtual instruments that I've got in this track in fact the whole track is made up of virtual instruments which you can see over here I've got an electric piano I've got drums some trumpet saxophones bass guitar and a piano you can see them in the synth rack over here now let me start off by looking at for example the electric piano which is the first instrument that I use in the track and it's down here we see the MIDI fort here on this track and this is why I like to organize things I have the MIDI track separate from the virtual instrument track and that is the next track down here the actual electric piano track that's the output from the virtual instrument and of course there's nothing there because it makes a sound dynamically as we play the track the MIDI plays the sound from it so that's the way I like to organize things you don't have to do it like that but it gets a bit handy when you get more sort of complex pieces and where it does get complex for me is just with the drums which start off down here I actually record my drums on three separate MIDI tracks one for the kick and snare one for the higher end cymbals and one for the toms it's just the way I like to do it you could do it all on one MIDI track and they all control my virtual instrument drums which happens to be these what's it called down here superior drummer three here and that has multiple outputs it has different outputs for the bass drum the kick and the TomTom etc and they are all down here so this may look quite different to your setup don't worry about it it's just worth you knowing before we open up the console view and the way it looks different on mine to the way it will look on yours now let's open up the console view I have a tab already down the bottom here which says console on it and you probably do too if it's an if it's a new project you've open up but it's possible that it won't be there if it's not there then you just need to go up to views and then click on console view here or you can hit Alt + 2 on the keyboard and that will open it up now once it's there and I'm gonna open up mine by clicking on this tab once you'll see something like this now this is not particularly useful because we can't see most of it we could drag it up like this and this is why I would use it if I want to make quick adjustments to the overall mix while I'm still tracking but in honesty for mixing this it all looks a bit messy there's too much information on the screen here so if I was a mixing mixing stage what I prefer to do is double click on that console tab and then that pushes it right up to the top of the screen so we can't see the track view anymore also I like to hide these side panels so over here on the left I will just click this collapse button and on the right I'll hit this collapse button and now our console takes up the whole screen in fact I'm just going to move my camera out of the way so that you can see the the controls on the console now the first thing I'd like to look at with the console view to sort of start to break it down is there's a divider a sort of a thick gray line and I've got it over here on my right-hand side which you can drag around that separates the console view into two distinct parts on the left-hand side you've got your main tracks which were all the tracks that we saw earlier all the different instruments and MIDI tracks etc and then on the right-hand side on the other side of this divider we've got some special tracks here which we didn't see in the track view earlier and we'll talk about what all of those are a bit later but for now we'll just divide it so it's over there now there's actually a lot more information on this screen still than we need and that's because we can actually see channels for all of the MIDI tracks now we're not going to be mixing using the MIDI tracks they're just to control the notes etc so we don't really need to see the MIDI tracks here so to get rid of them what we're gonna do is go up two strips and then we're gonna click on that and we're going to uncheck where it says MIDI there we'll click on that and all of those MIDI channels are gone which means we can now drag out our divider a little bit so we've got a bit more space for these special tracks over here right now we're at a much better starting point to actually start mixing our little piece now before I go into all the details of each channel I'd like to talk about channel flow or signal flow if you like and how it works on a console because you might not have used a console before and if you did you might not have understood what you were doing with it so let's go through at the top of this track over here this is the kick drum what happens is the signal starts from the top and it works its way down through it goes through this gain control here it then goes through the pro channel which we're going to cover in the second half of this video so stick around for that because the pro channels one of the most brilliant features about cakewalk it then passes through the effects section here it then goes to the send section we'll talk about how it branches at the send section later but leave that for the moment and we continue down through to the pan control here and the fader as well as of course being able to mute solo etc etc here it continues down through this six all the way through to the bottom where it hits its output and here you can see the output is master we've got a number of selections and it's defaulted to master that means from here it goes all the way across up to the top of the master track which is over here in this special section and comes down through the master track in the same way it came through the track itself and finally through to the output at the bottom which is my sound card now while we're over here let's also take a look at these special outputs as we've already gathered this first one here is the master track here the one next to it here is for the volume of the metronome now well I'm not going to be using the metronome anymore on this track because the track has been written so I'm going to right click on there and select delete bus now we have another special channel which is there by default and this is the preview channel this is so you can actually control the volume of the audio previews that are in the browser don't worry about that we don't need it now I'm not going to go into details of what that does so we can again right click there and hit on delete bus and that's gone and now over here in this section we just have our master output we're going to be adding some things there later but we'll leave it as it is for now now let's get back through and start to talk about each section of this this signal flow starting at the top I'm going to look at this snare drum so we have a gain control basically this sets the volume of the signal before it gets processed by anything else it's actually a very important but simple control and I talked about this type of control in a video I made about gain staging a really important process in mixing which if you're not familiar with mixing at all yet you know I'd leave that to later but it's a good video take a look at gain staging I've got it on my channel it's not done in cakewalk it's done in another day aw but the same principles all apply it then goes through to the approach and of which again I'm going to say I'm gonna leave that to later in the video and then comes down through to effects this is where you will add effects now I've got a snare drum here which I'm gonna add a reverb to so I'm going to click on the plus button for effects and I'm going to click on insert audio effects now I've got a lot of effects on my system you might just have a few and I'm just going to go to Kate walk and go through Tucson urtis reverb because that comes free with cakewalk we now have the cenotes reverb in the effects chain I'm going to push the reverb right up here so it's pretty sort of evident and I'm going to make sure that the effects chain is switched on here so click that on and now I'm gonna play my track and have a listen to this snare because it will have loads of reverb on it very 80s okay so there's our snare with some reverb on it what if we want to add also some EQ I want to make it a bit snappy so I want to bring out the top end of the snare so I'll close that damn click on the Add button and I'll add audio effects and I'll go to Kate walk again and I'm gonna add the sonnet is equalize it again it comes free with cakewalk so you'll have it there and I'm going to push up all the top end of this snare so it should be fairly snappy now let's have a listen again we should be able to hear that effect [Music] okay that's a very extreme effect there but good for demonstration purposes now it's worth mentioning at this point that it is important it's the order of these effects so what's happening at the moment is coming through it's adding all of that reverb to the snare and then the equalizer is getting the signal with the reverb on it you may not want that so let's drag that equaliser up to before the reverb there I've just dragged it up above and that's easy to do it now it's it's using the equalizer on the raw snare signal before it hits the reverb and you get a slightly different sound [Music] okay so that's how we are adding those effects that I'm actually going to remove those now because what if you're in a situation where you wanted to add the same effect to a number of different instruments you wouldn't want to put a whole bunch of plugins and effects plugins on every single instrument for two reasons one if you did that it's going to use up a lot more resources on your computer so that's not a good thing and the other thing is is it every time you want to adjust the amount of reverb you have to go to every single instrument and adjust that reverb all the type of reverb even so that's not very handy so that's where Sens become very useful now what we're going to do to create a send is we're gonna actually go right to the right-hand side and we're going to create what's called a bus this is a new channel on our console we're gonna right-click and hit insert stereo bus here I'll click that and we've got a new bus and that it we're going to call it in fact reverb because that's going to be its job that's what it's gonna do now on this new channel again we're gonna add in on the effects section that reverb bear with me and you'll see what happens in a moment again cakewalk so notice reverb so now we have that same reverb I'll turn it up fairly loud again and enable it on this channel over here now what we need to do is send a signal or some signals to that reverb now rather than do it with the drums like I did before what I'm going to do is with these two channels over here and that is the trumpet and the saxophone over here these are my last two tracks over here I'm gonna send them both to that reverb so let's click on their send button and then select reverb it's there now because we create it and call it reverb click on that and we'll do the same for the saxophone there click on that now both of those signals are now being sent to this reverb it's worth mentioning the flow here it still starts at the top goes through it exactly change the route when it gets to the river it sort of branches off it continues after this down through the panning and the failure etc down to the bottom of the channel but it does branch off now what's happening there is we use this control here just to determine how much of the signal goes through to this reverb let's have a listen to see how it sounds at the moment [Music] so there's a reasonable amount reverb there may be too much so let's adjust the amount of reverb we're getting and we're going to do that just by adjusting the level that we send one we're just going to change it there and the trumpets and I'm going to change it there and the saxophones and now I'll have less reverb [Music] okay so that's all very well but even that could be a little bit cumbersome if you would having to do that miss a whole brass section maybe you had you know sort of four or five different trumpets four or five different saxophones etc you would have a lot of reverb controls to adjust there every time you had to do it so that's probably not the best way to do it unless we want a different amount of reverb on each instrument instead we're going to use a bus in a really different way we'll start off by just by removing that reverb there will delete the singe and will delete the scene we're actually going to keep the reverb bus here but we're going to create another bus and we're going to add that insert stereo bus there and we're going to call this a bus brass so we'll click that rename it to brass now over here and our trumpets and saxophone section right at the bottom where we've got the output going to the master PHA that we're actually going to change that and we're going to send it through to brass let's click on brass there and then let's click on brass here so both of those instruments are now going not through to the master but now both going through to this brass bus and that brass bus eventually goes back through to the master what this means is we can control the overall volume for example of that brass just with this one fader so let's have a listen [Music] so you can see I'm adjusting the volume of the brass just using one fader so that's really really handy for really sort of doing overall changes to your mix but one of the great things we can also now do is send but both of those instruments through to that reverb us so we can add that reverb so we'll send it through to the reverb bus and now in order to adjust the amount of reverb on the brass section we just have one control to do it let's play [Music] so that's really really cool and that's a couple of different ways that we can use buses now while we're here before things get too confusing let's look at how we can colorize these tracks so I'm going to click over here on the trumpet go down to the bottom to where this little gray bar has been highlighted as I drag over it I'm gonna click on that and I'm gonna choose a color for the brass let's choose a very brassy color yellow I'm gonna do the same for the saxophone and I'm also then going to do the same color for the bus that they both go through okay this is just a visual thing it doesn't change the sound at all it's just a way for you to visually keep track of your track so I'm actually gonna go through and I'm going to colorize all of my drums for example to the same color and some of my other instruments and I'm going to speed up the video so that you don't have to watch the tedious process [Music] okay so that's really really handy and it makes it much easier to actually visually see what's going on with the track and the other thing I'm going to do now is actually create some extra buses one for the drums here and I'm going to create that and recover it so the color of the drums and we're going to create another bus over here for the keyboard instruments and we'll just call it keys that is the piano and electric piano and just to keep things tidy I'm also going to create one for the bass guitar even though there's only one instrument going through it I'm going to recolor eyes those and root all of those through to those busses and again I'm going to speed up the video so that you don't have to watch the tedious process [Music] okay so now that I've done all of that what you can see is it's now much much easier for me to actually control the mix over here I'm basically creating sub mixers so for example for the drums over here I might mix them I can normally listen to it while I'm adjusting the mix but this is just for a demo and then I've got my sub mix of my drums but I can control the overall volume of the drums down here let's have a listen [Music] [Applause] if I just want to listen to the drums by themselves I can hit the solo button it's a really good way of organizing your console and you're kind of mixing section now before we get on to the pro channel there's one last thing I want to mention here in this sort of introduction to the console and that is automation I'm going to go through to the towards the end of the track and I want you to have a listen to the brass section right at the end [Music] you can hear they have that really sort of unnatural sort of hanging on so what I want that to do is actually fade out at the end of the track and I want that to be automated so that every time I play the track that's happening without me having to do it manually that's really simple to do remember I've got all of both of my brass instruments my trumpets and saxophones going through to this one bus here and we're going to automate the fader on this so what we need to do is hit the W key here which stands for right and that right enables the automation for this track and you can see the things that can be automated here because they're surrounded by red that's the gain the pan at the top here this pan down here and the fader and I'm going to automate the fader so I'm going to play the end of the track and I'm actually going to drag that fader down to fade out that brass [Music] okay so once that is done we click to disable it being right enabled and it's already read enabled that's this our button here so you make sure that's on so it's read enabled it's going to read the automation data which is there if I play it and I'll show you my hands in the video no hands and we get the automated failure automation is a really really important part of mixing in actual fact you do it and generally towards the end of your mix but a very very useful thing and something that we didn't always have in the old school analog world of consoles so a very important feature in today's recording now let's get on and talk about the pro channel now one of the great features of cakewalk is the pro channel even though it was introduced a number of years ago and still many other da w's don't have anything quite like it it still remains one of the great features now we get a little glimpse of the pro channel down here with this little representation of an EQ yes this can actually be used we can drag the nodes around of the EQ not very usable because it's so tiny I guess a push you might quickly adjust something there but a much better ways to see the pro channel in full and to do that we click on the little triangle next to where it says Pro channel click on that and we start to see the pro channel for that particular channel strip this one being the electric piano in its full glory now by default it has four modules in there the compressor at the top here followed by an EQ a tube saturation module and a console emulation module we can actually drag those around to a different order we found out from the effects train earlier that could be important so let's for example drag this EQ a little further down so it's a little bit further down the bottom so that's one thing that we can do but there's also a whole bunch of other modules available to us which we can't see here to add another module we actually right-click say on the blank area up here and we click on insert module and we can see that there's quite a few other modules available to us here with cakewalk now not all of them can be seen here and that's because with some specific models we can only have one instance of that type so for example we already have this compressor module in here we can't add another compressor module if you let's see the other compressor module that's available and swap it out instead what you do is right click on compressor and click on replace module and now in the menu we can actually see there's another compressor available here so we'll swap that out for the other compressor and you can see that here now these are based on some old hardware compressors and have controls which reflect that you just have to go through and try them out and see which ones you like best as I mentioned we have a nice tube saturation there but let's get down to the EQ module this is the only module that we can't actually remove from the chain this is always there and as we mentioned earlier we can actually drag the one of the four nodes around to adjust our EQ all we can use these knobs down here and if you prefer you can get a bit more control by using those but not only that if we double click on this area here it expands the EQ to its full glory here we can really get fine control over our nodes we can adjust things like the Q as you can see the effect that the Q has there and we also have a high-pass filter which we can adjust here I'll just switch it on and a low-pass filter so it's really like having six nodes in all it's a really really useful EQ it has some different types here available which changed the way the nodes behave lots and lots of experimentation needed there to find out which of those you like but as I say a really handy EQ will close that off and then we'll move on down here a console and emulator this sort of colors the sound in a particular way and they have actually modelled this on some old and famous hardware consoles and the way that those consoles color the sound the that's coming through them but it's really easy for you to control you don't need to know the history you just have to see that there's three different types available there and I just say just the main one which is the drive there see how it sounds for you flick between the three different ones and you're away you don't need to know too much about him now as well as having all of these these pro channels on the main channels we also have them over here on your special channels the buses and your master channel etc so let's take that reverb off that we had earlier that solitary verb will delete that and instead we'll go up to the pro channel on that bus and we will insert let's go through we will insert I'm gonna go through we've got a nice breather but there which is a very very nice one but I'm actually going to go down to the style dial of X now these are all modules that just have one knob so they're super super easy to use and I'm gonna add the space module they're just one knob I'm gonna send my electric piano through to it so I'm gonna click on the send button and go through to reverb it should be loads on there and I'll solo that electric piano so we're just hearing there and then as it plays I'm going to push up the dial for that reverb have a listen [Music] [Applause] [Music] so a really really quick way to get a nice reverb and of course you can use the send on the channel just to control how much of it there is I always recommend doing that in the context of a mix it's not a good idea to solo and sort of change things like reverb you want to see how that's fitting in the whole mix but anyway that's another subject entirely so all you have to really do is get into cakewalk and try out all of these different modules for yourself and start to learn about them what this does is it gives you an arsenal of effects which are the most common effects that you will use in your effects chain for most tracks you've got all kinds of things in there without having to go out and buy lots of plugins you really are self-contained in cakewalk unless there's something especially specific that you want to use so have fun with the pro channel so I want to take this moment to give a big thank you to the many people who have sent me messages about this series about cakewalk by ban lab it seems that many of you appreciate this really basic approach so that you can just get in there start recording and mixing your songs so thank you so much for your encouragement there if there is anything that wasn't clear at all then please do ask in the comments down below and I'll do my very best to help you out now if you did like this video make sure you hit the like button if you didn't like this video then hit the dislike button twice and send a letter to my mum and good luck there now if you like this kind of content and please do subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you get to see my future videos and a couple of those videos are showing on the screen right now so I suggest you might like to start with one of those two or just go to my channel page and look at the many videos available there thank you very much

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 83,294

Keywords: How To Use Cakewalk by Bandlab - Console and ProChannel Basics, Cakewalk Console and ProChannel, cakewalk pro channel, cakewalk, 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, bandlab, cakewalk sonar tutorial beginner, cakewalk daw, cakewalk sonar tutorial, cakewalk sonar tutorials free, free daw, tutorial, audio console

Id: HVGvaiK2Dkk

Length: 29min 1sec (1741 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CreativeSauce2B]

Hi folks! If you woukd like to learn about Cakewalk's console, and it's awesome ProChannel, check out this tutorial I've made in my 'Basics' series!