How To Use Cakewalk by Bandlab - Getting Started

in this video we're going to be running through the basics of how to use cakewalk by band lab hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you will now a few weeks ago I made a video about why I thought you should choose cakewalk by band lab as your da W you can click on this here to go and watch that video if you haven't watched it already now a few of you were convinced but mentioned that you had a few teething problems in getting started so I thought I'd put together a quick guide as to how to get started with cakewalk by band lab we're going to be covering downloading installing it setting it up for the first time with your audio interface and then recording a virtual instrument and a real electric guitar so stay tuned to watch all of that now if this is your first time here and you like this kind of content all about da W's home recording gear reviews plugin reviews that kind of thing then please do subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you get notified of my future videos now let's get stuck in with setting up cakewalk one so the very first thing you'll be needing to do is download cakewalk by band lab and you can do that by following the link that I've put in the description below and it will take you to a page something like this you simply click on the big orange download button and it's going to scroll all the way down to the bottom of that page and it's going to explain to you there that in order to download cakewalk you first have to download a little app called band lab assistant don't be confused by this or worried about it you are going to have to sign up to band lab in the process but it's not going to cost you anything and they're not going to nag you for money there's no hidden extras there's no tricks download the band lab assistant and then open it now you will be faced with something along these lines and this is the sign-in screen this is where you will actually sign up for band app so I will now sign in now once you have signed in you'll see a screen something like this one and you want to be going over to the apps tab over here so click on apps now for you you're going to see cakewalk here but it'll probably say install here so you'll be wanting to stall it from here it doesn't take too long do make sure in the process that you install all the add-ons and virtual instruments that kind of thing and I think you have to do that by clicking on the little arrow which is over this side so just make sure you install everything there is to install once you've done that in the latest version at least it puts a shortcut to cakewalk on the desktop here now you could open the ban lab assistant each time and go over here to apps an open up cakewalk from here seems a bit long-winded to me so in future I would just click on this shortcut that they've put up here so you click on that and that starts up cakewalk for you too now because I've already created some projects using cakewalk it opens up on this recent project screen for me but for you it may open up on the new project screen now this is just a collection of templates to get you up and running quickly in particular situations however today we're just going to click on the empty project and we're going to start off with a completely clean slate now we're going to start adding some instruments and some audio however before we do that we need to make sure that cakewalk is set up to communicate with our audio interface so you're going to start off by going going up to edit up here and clicking on preferences now once you're in there I actually want you to start off down here at the playback and recording section so click on that it'll turn orange and they don't want you to go over to driver mode here and make sure you select a s i/o now if you use any other driver modes you are probably not going to get very good results at all if your sound interface or your audio interface doesn't happen to support ASIO then I recommend a little utility called ASIO for all and I will put a link to that in the description once you have installed that and come back here and select ASIO from there click on apply and it will go blank for just a moment when it pops back up I recommend going down to devices now this is where you're going to select your input and output devices to be used with cakewalk now you this is gonna look a little bit different to mine I happen to have two audio interface connected and one of them has lots of inputs and outputs for you there may only be one or two choices here so you want to select your main audio input device that's where you're gonna plug a microphone or an instrument into for me I'm going to select this one here which is the studio 192 mic instrument one for you it's going to be something different once you've done that go down to the output section this is typically gonna be the audio interface which you get which is connected to your speakers so for me again it's the studio 192 I select that and again click on apply it will go blank for just a moment and the next thing I want you to do in terms of the audio is go to driver settings and we're mainly concerned here with the sample rate now for me I recalled quite a lot of audio to go with video so I have 48 kilohertz selected however for you if it's just audio you're recording you probably want to select 44.1 to start off with you can record at higher sampling rates we can get onto that in the future but for now I would keep it simple and just select 44 kilohertz as I say for me I'm gonna leave it on 48 because I'm doing video click on apply and that should be the audio part of your audio interface setup now the next thing you want to do is set up your MIDI devices so for that you will go down to MIDI and click on devices now here you will see a selection of the input and output ports now what kind of things will they be they will most likely be things like MIDI controller keyboards they may be things like control services and you may have some actual external MIDI Hardware like pianos etc drum machines so what you want to do is just select at least one input and output for each device for me again I've got a whole bunch connected I'm just gonna select one of them and that's this USB MIDI cable and I'll do that for the input and for the output and that connects up just the one MIDI keyboard that I have connect I'll click on apply' and I should be up and running and be able to start adding instruments and audio 3 so you're probably eager at this point to start making some music and that's what we're going to be doing now I'm going to give you a quick overview of adding instruments there can be a lot to this which I won't cover but I'll just give you the easiest way to get started and I'm gonna get started by adding some drums so I'll go to the big plus button up here and I'll add a track which is an instrument track so I'll click on instrument and then from instrument I'm gonna select si drum kit this is the drum kit which comes with cakewalk so that's completely free and quite reasonable to use for input so I'm going to leave it set to Omni that means it's just going to receive triggers from any MIDI instrument that I've got connected to my pc which i've set up earlier with cakewalk I'll click on create and it creates the drum kit instrument if I click here on the drums you'll hear some sounds now before I start recording the drums I just want to set up my metronome so that it's working at the right tempo and I can keep in time with it so I'm just gonna click where it says 120 up here this is where we set the tempo and I'm gonna change that to 77 I'll click on Enter or return and the tempo is now set to 77 now I also want to make sure that when I hit the record button that there's a little bit of time for me to get comfortable and get started so I'm going to click on the metronome settings here and I'm going to change the counting time to 1 measure so I get one measure of counting before cakewalk actually starts to record so I've set that up now also in addition to that I'm just gonna set my playhead over here to the second bar I'm going to click here where it says 2 for the second bar and that moves the playhead over to there that just means that I haven't got everything starting right at the beginning of the track and if there's a couple of noises before the song really starts we get to record those as well because you never know when you're going to want them the next thing I'm gonna do is arm the track for recording so I just hit on this red record arming button there and now we are ready to record these drums I'm gonna have to head over to the other side of the room to play the bass and snare drum which I'm gonna record and I'll do that now and I'm just gonna hit this big record button up here okay so that's my bass and snare now I want to make sure that they're really really in time so I'm gonna click on the recording over here and I'm going to press the cue button on my keyboard the cue button brings up the quantize options I'm gonna leave that set to 1/8 and I'm going to click on OK and that should put my bass and snare drum basically in time and I'm just gonna hit play to have a quick listen to make sure okay that sounds eh okay the next thing I want to do is put a hi-hat on there so in order to do that all on record along with what I've already recorded which is the bass drum and the snare drum so I want to go up to this record button here and long press on my left mouse button and that brings up some options and I'm going to change this to sound on sound that means I'll be able to hear what I've already recorded and record over the top of it as well with something new and retained both pieces so I've got that set up I'm just gonna scroll back a little bit to that second bar so I've got a little bit of time to get settled and I'm going to hit record again and play that hi-hat [Music] so that is the hi-hat recorded now I'm just gonna drag this track down a little bit so I can see it in a bit more detail and you'll see probably you can see they're just the hi-hat the bass and the snare drum are actually underneath it so I'm going to select all of it there and I'm going to right click on it and click on the bounced Eclipse and that will just merge everything together and now you can see the bass drum the snare and the hi-hat all together I'm gonna click on it again and click the cue button again just to make sure it's quantized this time I'm gonna split just leave it on eighths and click on OK and we'll just have a quick listen to see what we've got so far [Music] okay so that sounds ok and we're gonna move on to adding a bass guitar so again to add the bass guitar we click on the add track button up here we go over to instrument make sure that's selected now I'm actually going to select and pull sound P light - this doesn't come with cakewalk but it's a really good bass guitar which is a free plugin which you can get from Apple sound I will put a link in the description so you can get that I just happen to like it a little bit more than the bass guitar which you do get with cakewalk if you can't be bothered with that it's fine just select the bass guitar here that you get with cakewalk but I'm gonna click the ample sound one and again I'm gonna leave the input to Omni I'll click on create and now I have a new bass guitar track now you'll see here that it's sort of again a really small track there's a really nice option that you've got here if you click on View like so and click on Otto's auto track zoom just select that now I'm gonna drag that track out so it's bigger this is the bass guitar and now if I click on the drum track you can see that becomes bigger if I click on the bass guitar that becomes bigger that's just a nice little feature that I find quite handy now I have to arm the bass guitar track again so I'll click on record there and I'll disarm the drum track because that's already done now I'm ready to record the bass guitar so again I'm going to set it back all the way back to the second bar so I'll click on to there and I'll hit record [Music] so there's my bass guitar part and because of the little sort of beats in it I'm gonna click on it click on quantize queue for quantize remember and this time I'm going to change it to 16th and click on OK there and let's have a listen to all of that together so that's the very basics of adding instruments I'm now going to be adding another kind of instrument but it's a real instrument an actual electric guitar which I'm gonna plug into my audio device for okay so now we've got those drums and bass guitar down I'm gonna add a real instrument and I've got a guitar in my hand in order to do that the principles are going to be exactly the same here if you were adding for example a vocal and I had a microphone plugged in it's just on this occasion I've got my guitar plugged into my audio interface now I've set the levels and everything which you need to do on your audio interface not in cakewalk itself so you need to set them to an appropriate level which I will cover in a different video but basically make sure that they're not clipping now I will say that in the time I was away and I had a little test run I found the tempo of the track was too slow so I've changed it from I think it was 77 before and I went at the top and I changed it to 90 so you'll hear that it's a little bit faster now so the next thing I'm gonna do is go up to the add cymbal again I'll click on add but this time instead of clicking on instrument I'm gonna click on audio and I'm going to select an input now I have to go down to my device here and I don't this to be a stereo track it's just in mono so I'm going to click my second input which is labeled the right input here in my interface may be different on yours and I'll click on that and that makes sure it's a mono track and then I'm going to click on create and this is now going to be my electric guitar in fact I'll go in and I'll label the track electric guitar now all I have to do is arm it for recording and I'll be ready to go but because it's an electric guitar I'm going to add an effect on it so that we're not I'm playing I can kind of hear that what the end results going to be and I'm going to add an effect or an amp simulation which comes with cakewalk so I'll click on the plus for the effects here and go over to insert audio effects and go up to th3 now if I want to make sure that I hear this effect I'll need to make sure that this monitoring input echo is switched on and I'm actually going to select a preset down here I think is going to be something like a clog we'll go to cakewalk the clean it's not really doing too much but it just adds a little bit of richness to the direct input signal so I'll close that off and I think I'm ready to go again I've got it set up on my second bar so I've got a little bit of time before the actual beat comes in and I'm going to hit the record button [Music] okay so there was a little bit over the edge there but it's not the greatest guitar part in the world but you can see how the process works now if I just go to here and click play we can hear it all together [Music] and it's as easy as that for adding audio tracks to cakewalk so that's the basics covered of cakewalk by band lab obviously there's lots more to it than this but this should just get you started now if you're confused about anything in the video then please ask questions in the comments down below and I'll be more than happy to answer them for you if there's anything you would like to know about cakewalk specifically that I haven't covered in the video then please do suggest future videos in the comments below as well and I'll try and make them for you and if you like this video 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 do subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you get to see 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Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 272,376

Rating: 4.9485874 out of 5

Keywords: How To Use Cakewalk by Bandlab, How To Use Cakewalk, cakewalk by bandlab, cakewalk tutorial, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial, cakewalk beginners tutorial, cakewalk setup, cakewalk setup tutorial, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial for beginners, bandlab, cakewalk sonar tutorial, sonar tutorial for beginners, sonar cakewalk, cakewalk sonar, cakewalk midi tutorial, presonus, presonus 192, presonus studio 192, cakewalk sonar tutorials free, pro audio training, digital audio software

Id: YZqXiL2L36g

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CreativeSauce2B]

If you are looking to get into recording with a free DAW, then you may wanna check out this tutorial I've made about getting started with Cakewalk by Bandlab!

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Enjoy!

[u/SwettySpaghtti]

Cakewalk is dead whats the point