After going through this video,
you'll have the foundations to start making music
and mixing in Cakewalk by BandLab. And this will also work for Sonar as well. So what we're going to look at in
this Cakewalk tutorial is setting up Cakewalk
for optimal audio recording, we’ll do some audio recording work with MIDI
and virtual instruments we’ll add effects to tracks, do a little bit of arranging
and a little bit of mixing. So you’ll have the foundations
and then we'll do a mix down to MP3 so you could share your projects with the world or just listen to them
on other devices if you want. So first let's look at setting up
our audio interface in Cakewalk by BandLab and what we want to do
is from our main open screen, we just go up to edit
and then preferences. And then in here you want to go
to the devices tab right here. And if you're not seeing
all the same stuff that I have, maybe you're not clicked
on the advanced tab. You could just go to basic if you want. But for what I'm about to go over,
we just need what's in the basic anyway, so you won't need to change that
Now, the way Cakewalk is set up, it's not chronological here. What we want to do is go down to playback
and recording first. So under the audio tab,
playback and recording and then you want to go to driver mode and ideally you want to use a go here. And this is the lowest latency
driver type. If you have a USB audio interface,
you'll likely need to go to the manufacturer's website
to see if there is an AZO driver for it. And if there isn't one,
then you could go to the wasabi to either exclusive or shared. You might want to try shared first
and see if that works out for you. That's going to be the next best lowest
latency in there. So we set that to AC or you set it to the WhatsApp,
you whatever mode works for you. Then we want to go up to devices
and then in this input driver section you want to make sure
all of your inputs are checked. That means they're enabled. Now my audio interface has a lot of inputs
on it. Yours might have one or two or three
or four whatever. Make sure you check off
all of the ones that you have there and then for your outputs,
you want to make sure you have your outputs one and two checked for sure
because that's your main output. But if you have other outputs
and you want to use those, you can check those as well. Now one more thing
that we'll look at here, and that's going to be our driver
settings. And the important stuff in here is going
to be your sampling rate as they call it. And I like to use 48,000. Typical for beginners would be 48,000 or 44, 100,
and you could go with either of those or you go with something higher
if you really want to. But I don't recommend going lower than 44
148,000 is a nice middle ground. It's DVD quality,
whereas 44 100 is CD quality. You can do either one here
when you're just starting out and then you might want to get into
some of the higher ones later on. So if you're using that as your driver,
you're going to see this mixing latency. And what you see here is buffer size
and there's fast to safe and then you're going to see
a little number at the end here. And it's also down here
so fast is the lowest latency and safe is the highest latency. So when you're starting out,
you might think, okay, I'm going to go with the fastest,
but your computer and your audio interface
may not be able to handle the fastest. So you can try it out, see if it works. If you start experiencing weird stutters
and it doesn't playback, maybe it even crashes, then
what you want to do is go back in here and move it up to something else
and keep trying until you find the buffer size
that works best for your computer. Now, one thing to keep in mind is the more tracks that you start
adding in to Cakewalk by Band Lab, and if you start to add effects in there
as well, it's going to increase the demand for your buffer size and you're going
to need to increase it later on. So try to find that safe ground early on
and do your recording using the lowest and then start adding
your effects later on. And you may need to increase this later. So this is a tab you might want to revisit once you get to
the mixing stage in your project. So that's it for in here. But while we're in this settings,
if you have a mini keyboard that you're going to be using,
you might want to just quickly hop in here, go to devices,
and then in the input section, just make sure you have it checked off
for whatever your MIDI keyboard is. You'll see it in the list,
make sure it's checked for inputs. The outputs won't really matter
unless you're going to be routing many out or if you're using a mini controller, then you might want to access the outputs there
and then we're done here. So you would just click apply
and we would close this down. So now we're ready to start a project and when you first open cakewalk,
you should see this screen. If you don't see it, maybe you closed it, but you can easily
bring it back up if you go up to file. And then we go to start screen
and what we need to do now because we're just beginning
is create a new project. And you can see there's
some templates in here and some are pretty straightforward. You have basic which is going to set up
a basic little bit of a mix for track. You're going to four tracks, 16,
you'll have 16, and then you can see
I've created some templates down here so you can have some
that you create as well. But what I want to do for
this is just create an empty project. So we click on that
and here's our empty project, right? This is what it looks like
when we first open it up. And what we might want to do right now is
just tidy up our workspace a little bit. You can go to these little arrows here
and we can click on that and it's going to kind of hide that away
because we don't need it right now and we can do the same thing over here. Just hide that away. And we have a nice clutter
free workspace to get started with. And now one thing I do recommend doing,
if this is going to be a serious project for you, that you're not just kind
of playing around in here, I do recommend going up to file
and then you want to go to save and you would just save this to wherever
I'm going to save it right here. I'll call it test two two, and we'll just click Save. And now we can easily
save our progress as we go. And I really recommend getting used to pressing control
and s on your computer keyboard. Those are the hot keys for saving
and you want to save often. Sometimes you want to save
after every little step that you do. So if you record something in save,
if you move something around, save you want to keep saving and just get in the habit
of clicking control as often as possible. Because these programs do crash
and it's not just cakewalk that crashes. It's all of them. They can crash. A lot of times it's because of third
party plug ins just kind of interfering. Sometimes it's due to your buffer size. It can crash. Whatever the reason is, they do crash. So you want to save often. But now we're ready to start
making some music in here. So let's create an audio track
and we can just easily click on this Plus sign here and you can see
you can choose either instrument or audio. So if yours is on instrument by default,
we're creating an audio track now. So we're going to click on audio
and for our input, you can see it's defaulted to a stereo input,
which is input one and two. Yours might do that as well. I'm not going to be recording in stereo,
I'm just going to be recording Input one. So I'm going to choose input one. Yours might be named input one
or I might have some other name on there, whatever it is, you just click on it. We can record, enable it right from here, and input monitoring can be enabled
right from here. You'll probably want to do that If you
plan on recording, just easily do that. I would normally click this,
but I'm going to show you another way that we can do this
from outside of this window. So let's go to create
and we have our track here now I'm going to expand it
so you can see these arrows again. We click there
and we can make it a little bit bigger. And I'm going to give this a name. I'm going to call it bass. So I'm going to record a bass guitar
in there eventually. So I'm just going to grab my bass
right now and I'll be right back. All right. So I've got my bass connected. I'm ready to start recording and
you'll notice if I play my bass right now, nothing happens on the screen. You don't see any levels.
We don't hear it coming in. What we're going to want to do
is first click on the record enable here or ARM
for recording button and we'll click that. Now, if I play, you can see we have some levels
and I want to adjust my levels on my audio interface,
not in the software. So you saw
my levels were really hot coming in there. They're a little bit better now and what I did was just adjusted it
on the audio interface. If you use the faders in Cakewalk
to adjust your levels, all you're doing is just lowering it. So if you see that you're clipping,
if you lower the volume, you're still clipping,
it's just going to be quieter, that's all. So you want to make sure your levels
are set on your audio interface. And typically a nice setting for me
is between -18 and minus six. DB It gives you lots of headroom in there. It's a lot of dynamic range for whatever
it is you're recording. When you're setting your levels, try
to either play as loud as you're going to be playing when recording or sing as
loud as you'll be singing when recording. And that way you can make sure
you're not going to be clipping once you are recording.
But we have the problem. We can see we
have levels, but we can't hear our levels. We need to enable the input monitoring and from out here it's
this little button right here. We'll click on that. So that is our input monitoring. We're ready to record right now. But what I want to do before I hit
record is just change our BPM. I know I want a BPM of 154 what I'm about to record and to make sure
that I stick with that BPM. I want to enable the metronome here. So these are our metronome settings and you see right above it
there's these two buttons right now. It was clicked, so my metronome will
come on when I'm recording. That's if I have this clicked right here. If I have this clicked, it's going to play
while I'm just doing playback. So I'll hear the metronome
when I'm just playing. I don't really want that. I just need it for when I'm recording, so I would have it there
if you don't need it at all, you can turn it right off if you want
and there's more settings. If we click on that,
you can see there's a record count in and maybe I'll do that,
we'll do one measure of a count in and you can see there's
some other settings in here. You can control the levels,
the sound of the metronome. You can go in here and adjust that all
you like, but I'm good to go right now. So what I'm going to do now
to record is hit record up here and it's going to start recording,
but we'll hear that count in first. So let's do that. All right. So that's my little bit of a bass
recording right there. And if we wanted,
we could trim this up a bit. You can see that
if I go to the edge of the audio clip here, it changes the way it looks. And when it looks like that, I can just
click and drag to trim it up a bit. So I'll do that right now. And if I hover the mouse over the top
part of the edge here, I can add a little bit of a fade
if I want, so I might as well add that now you may want to zoom in and out,
and to do that you hold down
alt on your computer keyboard and you can use your mouse
to zoom in and out. And if you want to scroll across,
once your projects start getting bigger, you may want to scroll across. We could just hold down control
on the computer keyboard and use the wheel
and it's going to scroll across. Or if we want to zoom in, we hold down. ALT So there's some little tips for you
right there. Now, one thing to note
is we've just started recording from about bar two to bar ten,
and we can continue recording right from bar ten
if we want, or I'll zoom out a little bit. I can start recording somewhere else
on this same track. Say I want to record at 15 here. I can just hit record and you
can do that all over the place in here. And of course we can click and drag these
clips around, drop them wherever we want. We're going to get a little bit
more into the arrangement side of things a little later in the video. So I'm not going to get too heavy
into that right now. Also, we can record on another track
while we have this one playback. So if we have a guitar or a vocal
that we want to record using this as a backing track,
we can easily do that. So we will create another track. It's going to be another audio
track will use the same input and this time I will record, enable
and input monitor right from here, create. And we're going to disable this other one
for recording and turn the input monitoring off
and I'll name this based two. So I'm ready to record again. I'll make that bigger hit record. All right, so you get the picture. We can continue to create tracks
and record two new tracks. If you are recording vocals,
you're likely going to have backing vocals,
doubled vocals and other vocal parts. You'll have a lot of vocal tracks in there
and you can create as many as you want
or as many as your computer can handle. So that's a look at working with audio. Now let's look at using MIDI
and virtual instrument. So I'm just going to put my guitar away
and I'll be right back. We're going to expand this little menu
over to the side here because it makes working
with virtual instruments a lot easier than just creating
an instrument track. And what I'm going to do is click on this
little looks like a keyboard icon here. I'll click on that and it's going
to show us all of our virtual instruments. Now, I have a lot installed on my computer that I've paid for and got for free,
and you can do that as well. You can add as many plugins
as you want to cakewalk and you're probably going
to want to do that as you go along. But for this, I'll look at some plug ins that came with Cakewalk
and first is going to be drums. So if I go in here this Asi drum kit that actually comes with cakewalk,
if you don't have it, you might not have installed the add ons
when you were doing your first install of cakewalk. Now you can easily go into your band
lab assistant app and on there you want to go to the apps
tab at the end here, go down to Cakewalk and there's a little dropdown menu
and you'll see install add ons and you might want to do that
or you may not. It's up to you. But for this I'm going to use the ASI drum kit and
that's the one that comes with cakewalk. So I just drag
and drop it over into this section here. It's going to create our drum track
or instrument track for us. And just by looking at this,
it doesn't look like we've added anything. Now I'm just going
to close this side again. But if we want to see the interface
for this drum plugin,
we can click on this little icon here. Again, it looks like a keyboard. So we click on that and there's
our user interface for our drum plugin. I can click and you can hear them that way. I can play them on my keyboard here. One thing to note is if you're going to be recording,
you can't record your clicks. So if you want to record melody input,
you won't be able to record your clicks because that's not MIDI
and the system's looking for mitti. Now if you don't have a MIDI keyboard,
but you still kind of will have that feel, we can go up two views and then in here
we can go to virtual controllers and we're going to go to computer keyboard, click on that
and I'm just going to minimize that so we can see this virtual keyboard here
and I'll open that up again. I'll bring it down here. Now, if we play, you can see we can control this from our computer keyboard and we can record that if we want. So let's arm this track for recording just by clicking that arm for recording. Same that we did with the audio track. And then we can click up here
on the record button. All right. And to stop playback, we're recording. You can easily use the spacebar
on your computer keyboard or you can press the stop button up here,
but you can see we've got some MIDI information,
input it in here because we just recorded SimCity,
which was actually our computer keyboard. You can also do it with your MIDI
keyboard as well. Same steps,
but you would just use the mini keyboard. So we have this mini information in here
and it's controlling the drums. And one of the cool things about MIDI is
we can change it all afterwards. So if we double click on our MIDI clip, it's going
to bring up the piano roll down here and we can scroll up
just using the wheel on your mouse. You can see my playing is a bit off so I can easily just click and drag. So it's on the line here. I could do that with this one. Another thing we can do is quantized. So if I wanted, I'm going to scroll out
so I can see everything and I'm going to right click and drag. So I'm highlighting all of my notes. And then what I want to do is press. Q And that's going to bring up
this quantized window. So that's. Q on your computer keyboard,
and we can quantized this. So it goes to the 16th note. You can see there's some other stuff
in here that you can access. You can offset it
to give it a little more humanistic feel. But I'm just going to say, let's quantized
this to the 16th note, click okay and you'll notice everything quantized in the 16th note,
which really wasn't what I wanted. Let's try that again. And this time
we're going to go to the eighth note. Click okay there. That's kind of more of what I wanted. And some of these are a little off. Again, we can just go in here,
but because I have everything selected right now,
I just want to click off. So nothing selected,
but we can click on our note and move it to wherever we want in here
and we can add more in. So I just played kick drum and snare. I can add high hats in here if I want. So there's our high hat again. Just click, drag that in there and I can put these wherever I want. Add other drums in whatever you want to do. You can do that in metal. And another cool thing about Marie is
we have this MIDI information. Say we don't like those drums. You could add another drum plug in in here
and use the other drum plugin,
so information will go across instruments. It doesn't matter what instrument
you recorded it in, you can use that information
with any other instrument. Now, one thing to keep in mind is not all
drum plugins have the same mapping. So what's a kick drum? And this plug in
may not be a kick drum in another plug in. So that's just something to keep in mind. But you could easily move things around
to the same drums and other plug ins. Now I'm going to get rid of this clip
that we recorded, so I'm going to delete that. And another way we can do
many in here is through a step clip. And that kind of makes more sense
sometimes when you're working with drums. And what we can do easily is click on our drum instrument here. That's that little icon again. And right here says Piano roll
If we hover over it, but you can click and hold down on that
and we can go to step sequencer, which it already did
because I accidentally click there. But we have step sequencer in there now and here is a little easier for drums. So if I click here, it's
going to add our kick drum. If I click here, it's adding
sounds like a stick. We might want to there, there's our snare and we're going to do this again. It's way off. I'm not really paying attention to that,
but you can see how easy this would be to add your drums in there. And you notice I deleted those.
That's just right clicking. So you left click to add right,
click on it to take away. And if you want, you can click and drag
and it's going to put them right across there or you can right click
and drag and take them all off of there. And there's other more advanced things
that we can do in here. But I just wanted to show you
there's another way to work with MIDI and Cakewalk
by Band Lab, and there's even more ways. But again, this is just a basic thing
to give you the foundations that you need to get started. I don't want to get too complicated
in this video, but let's close this down. So if we want to hide this bottom area, we can just click on the little arrow down
there. Let's add another instrument in here
and this time will go to piano. And this is the I electric
piano comes with cakewalk by Band Lab. And again, we'll click that to open up
the little interface here. If we click on the keys, we have some sound. All right,
So let's just get rid of that drum beat that I have in there because it's
going to be a little bit confusing and we'll start to record just very basic piano into here. So I'm going to disarm this track,
the drum track for recording and arm the piano for recording that I'm going to hit record. All right. So a very basic piano part there. But you can see what we can do with adding
more and more virtual instruments. So if you don't have real instruments,
you don't have a real bass. There's actually a bass
that comes with cakewalk by band, and you could add that bass guitar in there and there's some orchestra
type instruments in here as well. If you go to strings,
you see some strings that's in there. So a lot of stuff
that comes with Cakewalk. Let's say we like my piano part here,
but we just want to use more of it so I can just click on there
and we can hit Control C on our computer keyboard, then click wherever we want
and control V to paste it. Now it's pasted on to the wrong track, but
I can just click and bring it up there. If we made that mistake,
we can control Z to undo another way. We can copy this is to hold down control on your computer keyboard, click and drag and then let go and it's copied it or we can click on our clip and control D and that's going to make a copy directly
after the clip. So if your clip is nicely trimmed up,
you might want to do that and it's going to be nice and time
aligned. You won't have to worry about dragging it,
but you can keep hitting control D as much as you want is going to continue
to make copies of your clip there. So let's do that
and I'm going to move this out of the way, move that over there
and we'll copy this one. Control D We can add the fades. I showed you the fades earlier. You can add those in there and
you can continue to arrange your clips. However you want for your song. You can add more clips in there. If you realize you need to record
something else, you can easily start recording from here
and maybe we want to record that second bass guitar or vocals or guitar
or whatever right there, or your Middy. You can just arrange your song however
you want and take clips out if you want, If you realize that piano wasn't
nice right there, we can just click on it, hit delete
on our computer keyboard and it's gone. Now what we need to do at this point, let's say we're happy with everything
we have recorded in here. It's time to start
looking at doing a bit of mixing. So we're going to bring up the console. You can see down at the bottom
we have console and if you had stuff already open at the bottom,
say we have the piano roll already open, you would just click over here on console and if we scroll up here you can see it
kind of looks like a traditional mixing console
that you would see in a studio. And it kind of is it has a lot of advanced
features in here, a lot of it. We're not going to go over in this video,
but it can be a very advanced tool to use in your mixing at this point before you start adding
plugins and anything like that. What you really want to do is just adjust
your levels and your panning. So let's just listen to what we've got. Yeah, everything's
kind of awful in there right now, so we want to lower bass too, and
we'll also want to lower our piano a bit. So we'll do that. I'm going to disarm this for recording
just in case we accidentally hit something. Let's say we like that. Then you might want to do a little bit of panning so you can see
we have these pan knobs here. I'm going to pan this one over to the right
and I'll pan base to over to the left. Now, that's not a typical thing, having a second bass
and a piano like that. But what you want to do
is make sure you're balancing things out. So if you had two guitars
recorded in here, I know a lot of people say hard panned them left and hard
panned them right. I don't like doing that. I like to go anywhere between 80
and 60 on either side. And you can see there's numbers here. That's the percent. So between 80 and 60%. The one thing you want to make sure you do
is balance out the sides. So if you're going 60% with one guitar on right, then do 60% on the left side. And that way you've got a balanced sound. If you're off, it's
going to sound a little off, but you can use that as a creative thing
if you want. And in cakewalk, there's actually a built in channel strip on every single track. And let's go to our base to track here and you can see pro channel if we click on this little arrow here,
we can see our pro channel. Now, another way we can look at
it is just to click on this track here and then we're going to expand this side
over here. And you can see
we have a couple of channels in here, but let's just focus on one so we can click
on this little icon up here. It's just going to show the channel for
the current track that you have selected. So you can see base two
and then you can see that there. So you know which one
you're controlling over here. So let's do base two and you have a very
basic channel strip set up here right now. There's a compressor at the top here. It's kind of like 1176 style compressor. To enable that,
you would just click that to enable and you can do your compression
as you want. You have an IQ here
that's actually a really nice IQ. You can enable it
there and start doing your cueing. You might want to put the low
as a shelf here and then we can start to lower
that down a bit. And whatever it is you want to do in here,
start your e cueing. Have fun. This isn't a mix tutorial
that's going to look at each cueing and compression because those are huge
topics on their own for their own videos. But I just want to show you
that you have these tools in here that you can use to start your mixing,
so you don't need to go and add other IQ plug ins. You can do that,
but you have these right in here and they're built on every single track
you can see. There's also other stuff in here. This is a console emulator
that kind of emulates the sound of a console
and you can also add more things in here. So you can see at the top
if we click the plus, there's other things we can add in here,
all very basic mixing tools. But they're they're the building blocks
that you need for your mixes. I think I've alluded to this earlier. When you're doing your recording
and you're in the recording phase, I really recommend that you don't start
adding plugins in yet. Just do your recording. There is one exception though. If you need a guitar amp Cem While you're
recording guitar, you can add that in. Usually guitar
amp Sims are very lightweight, low latency and they're not going
to bog your computer down too much. So I'll show you how
we can add an effect to a track and you can do this before
you start recording, or you could do it after because it is
an effect that comes on after. So even though we've already recorded
the bass, we can add an effect on there. So we're going to go to insert audio
effects. And again, I have a ton of stuff installed on here,
so yours is going to look very different from mine. But what I'm going to look
for here is over loud and to H3, this comes with cakewalk,
and so does this brief verb to cakewalk. And that's a really nice reverb. So I'm going to open up to H3. This is a nice guitar amp. Cem It's fairly basic for nowadays,
but it is usable. And in here you can see you have banks,
we can click here and you can scroll through
and find a preset that you might like, or you could just build your own preset. You can see there's amps
over here that you can add in and there's also cabinets
that you can put in there as well. So let's just go to Bass Super Tube. I'll bring that in here. There's Bass Super Tube, and now maybe
I want to put a cabinet on there as well. So I'll go with 410 bass
and we'll put that on there, drop that in, and if we click there we can see the head click over here, you can see the cabinet
and you can move mikes around. However you want. There's two mikes. And now let's just listen to what this
bass sounds like with the effect on there. And what I'm going to do is solo this
track. So if I hit this ass, it's going to solo it. So I only hear this bass. And the cool thing is
we can change up the settings. You can add effects in here as well. So if we go to all categories,
you can find an overdrive in here. If we want, we can add that in there
and you can start to build a sound. You could do that with your guitars. You can change this up after you're done
recording because you're not actually recording the sound of this amp them,
you're just recording your dry guitar so you can change this up afterwards
and use other amps. Now what we might want to do
is a mix down. Say we want to share this with the world. So what I'm going to do
is just click and drag a section here. So I only mix down this section,
say our songs only in this section. Maybe we have some bits and pieces off to the side
that we don't want in our mix down. You don't have to do that,
but I like to do it. Then we'd go up to file and from here we can go down to export and we want to export audio
and now we have lots of options in here. So the things you might want to focus on
are file type. You may want to change that to MP3. That's up to you. And you can see there's
some more things down here and this is all the default settings. So you really shouldn't
have to worry about this. This is probably what you want and you want all of your tracks, mutes
and solos to be followed. You don't want them to add all that stuff
in the clip. Automation, all of that stuff
you want in your mix down. And you'll notice here and range,
we have time selection and that's the selection
that I chose at the top. But you can have entire projects selected in there
if you just want the entire project. But I'm going to stick with time
selection here and when I'm ready, I'm going to hit export and this is going to
give me the MP3 options because I chose AMP three
and I can choose the quality. I'm going to go with. 320. Yes, it's stereo and quality. Let's just go with better
and I can put all the ID3 info in here. I'm not going to do that now,
but you can enable that right away, you know, click okay
and you can see it's doing the mix down up here and now it's done and that's going to be in your project
folder. So if we go to our project folder here and we go to audio export, you can see we have test 22,
we can listen back to that and that's our mix down
and you can take that out of there and post it online, share it with friends,
listen to it in your car. If you put it on your phone or whatever
you want to do, you can easily do that
with your mix down file. And after all of this,
I know it was a lot. You might want to go through some of this stuff even more,
but you should have the foundations to start creating music and mixing music
in Cakewalk by Band Lab. And I really do recommend
adding some third party plug ins that you either get for free
or you pay for. And if you want to check out
some of the best free ones, click this video right here. If you liked this video that you just
watched, please give it a thumbs up. Also, subscribe to the channel
for more videos like this. Thank you so much for watching for audio
tech. TBH. I'm saying keep creating this bump. Thumbs up.
