How To Use Cakewalk by Bandlab: Making Drum Beats

in today's video we're going to be taking a look at making drum beats in cakewalk by band Lab hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well now today we're going to be delving into making drum beats using cakewalk by band lab we're going to be using a general method which is really good for all kinds of genres of music plus a pattern bass method which is really good for things like EDM dance music or hip-hop so stick around for all of that we're also going to be looking at why the drum kit which comes for free with cakewalk by Band Lab has some limitations which you may not know about and some free solutions as to how to fix those issues now before we get into all of that if you like this kind of content all about home recording dwz ear reviews and plugin reviews that kind of thing then please do help me out by subscribing and ring the bell on YouTube so that you get to hear about my future videos now let's get into some beak making okay so this first approach is a general approach which you could use for all genres of music really I don't think it's the best approach for the lute based music such as dance EDM maybe even hip hop that kind of thing I do have another method which I'll be covering later for those genres of music however I do encourage you to stick around regardless because I still think there are useful things that you can learn in this part of the tutorial now we're gonna start off over on the right hand side on the plugins tab and we're going to just click on the little keyboard icon in that tab which is to insert virtual instrument and we're going to go down to the cakewalk folder expand it and we're going to drag across the si drum kit all the way to the left hand side here now when we drop it there a dialog box appears and it's really important here that you select MIDI source and first synth audio output for the purposes of this tutorial that's really important then click on ok now that's created two tracks there I'm going to expand them open a little bit more so you can see them more clearly now the top track there is our actual virtual instrument track if we click on the icon next to number one here you can see the actual drum kit here and if I click on the drums you can hear them and you can see the meters moving in response to that audio and it's kind of for that reason that I think of this as an audio track you can even add audio effects such as reverb compression EQ that type of thing so essentially I think of it as the audio coming from the virtual instrument in this case the drums so what close that down now the second track which has been created is actually a MIDI track and that has its output set to that virtual instrument this is where we're going to record the actual note information when we play the drum which drum we play what velocity that kind of thing so I like to start off by renaming those two tracks and I'm going to call the top one drums this is just to avoid confusion later on and I'll call the second one drum MIDI now also in the console view which I have opened at the bottom here I like to hide the MIDI tracks there because I just like to have audio information in my console view so I'll go to strips and I'll deselect the MIDI selection there and that hides that MIDI track in the console view okay I'm almost ready to start recording so I arm my MIDI track ready for recording by clicking on this icon here I'm going to make sure my tempo is set correctly it's set to 115 at the moment which is just fine for this song but you could adjust it to whatever you want and I'm also going to click on the metronome icon here and make sure I'm going to hear the metronome while I'm recording and that is indeed selected there so I'll click on OK now I like to record my drums in separate parts I generally like to record my hi-hat and cymbals is one part my kick drum and snare is another part and perhaps tom-toms on another part that's just because I'm not very dexterous on my keyboard now I'm going to be using my controller keyboard to do this you might be using drum pads or just a regular MIDI keyboard if you don't have any of those things and you can click alt 0 on your computer keyboard and that brings up this virtual control and you can now use a computer keyboard to play notes like so okay the problem with that is is it only records notes at one velocity so you are gonna have to go in and adjust the velocities afterwards it's quite a lot of work which is a really good reason to actually buy some kind of external keyboard however if you don't have one then you can get by with that just for now so I'm all ready to start recording so let's start off with the symbols and the hi-hat okay so my timing wasn't absolutely perfect there so I'm just gonna click on that little clip there and I'm going to click Q on the keyboard to bring up my quantize options so quantize helps you tidy up your playing gets the timing tight with the actual grid I'm not going to go into detail about quantizing now I've covered it a little in my MIDI basics video so check that one out but I know my settings here are all correct so I'm just going to click on OK and that tidied all those notes up so let's have a quick listen to make sure they're okay and that's absolutely fine so now I'm gonna go ahead and record the kick and snare drum now I'm gonna need to record those over the top of the hi-hat and cymbal I'm going to want to make sure they don't actually record over them so I'll go to my record button up here and do a long left press on that and change this from comping where it is at the moment debt to sound on sound this means that my hi-hat will be retained and the kick and the snare will record over the top of them and let's go ahead and record that kick and snare [Music] okay so you'll see here that the only things we can actually see is the kick and snare on the display there the hi-hat is still there but it's kind of on a clip which is underneath that we can't see it so what I like to do at this stage is select the whole thing then right click and click on bounce two clips and that sort of puts it all together in one clip now I'll hit Q again after I select it hit Q and that will bring up my quantize box again and I'm going to click that and we should have that quantize so let's have a listen to the whole beat okay so I'm pretty happy with that so far so let's double click on that and that's going to bring up the piano roll view now if I double click on the piano roll tab but we can expand it to four high this is where I can actually make adjustments to our actual playing if I again expand the bottom part here clicking on this icon down here we can bring up the velocity information so let's say for example if I listen to that well I thought that that first cymbal crash was a little too loud so I'll just click on this symbol there and I can go down here and adjust the velocity make it a little bit quieter let's have a listen again [Music] okay so again I covered this in the MIDI basics tutorial so you should go and have a look at that just to figure out all the things about this sort of piano roll view now there is another view which we can use for drum beats and that is a view up here we click to those go to the View tab here and click on show/hide drum pane you'll see this view now it's completely blank at the moment which I acknowledge is useless to you and that's because we need to do a little bit more setup I'll just double click on this tab down here the piano roll tab so that we can see our tracks view again we're going to need that in a moment now what you need to do is load up what is called a drum map that's basically a map which designates certain keys on the keyboard to certain drums on certain virtual instruments you could use multiple virtual instruments for a drum pad now I've created a drum map for this virtual instrument for you so I'll put a download link for that and you can install it I'm just going to make life a lot easier if you use that one now in order to use that drum map we need to go up to edit we're going to click on preferences we're going to go down to drum map manager so we're going to create a new drum map by clicking on new at the top here and in the second section down here where the presets little selection is we're going to click on that and there's lots and lots in there and we're going to go all the way down to s I drum kit this is the drum map which I've created for this drum kit we'll click on that and that loads up the drum map so all the keys are now keep a sign to a particular notes or drums on that virtual instrument so I'll click on OK now I'm going to expand the piano roll again oh sorry before I expand the piano roll again I'm going to go to my MIDI track and rather than have the output going to the drums I'm gonna select the drum mat which is called DMI 1sr drum kit will select that so what's happening is the MIDI is being sent to the drum map which sort of processes it and decides which virtual instrument no and which virtual instrument is going to be played with that map component and as I did that you probably saw all this change down the bottom here so I'll again double click on the piano roll so you can see it all there we don't really need this piano roll information anymore so just drag that down out of the way now your view it probably looks a little bit different to this it probably looks a little bit squashed more like this so do click on these sort of magnifying magnifier icons to expand it down and the reason that's useful is we can now see our drums in a slightly different way the duration is no longer there because duration is not important for drums but velocity is actually mixed in with the drums there you can see these kind of little triangular shapes which represent where the beat is play but you also have these sort of upward pointing tails if you like if I use my tool here I can actually drag on those and I can go in and quickly change the velocity of a note like so so so that's a really different way of doing things you can also see all the drum names down here and you can actually click on those to hear them so that's another similar way of editing your drums using a drum map like that now if I double click again on that piano roll tab so that we can see this track here what I could now do is just grab that whole thing I'm clicking ctrl C on my keyboard to copy it and I'm gonna move my playhead over to this bar here and click paste and then I could begin to construct a whole song in this way now obviously once I've copied and pasted a few copies over like so I could go in and make changes to each individual one to have some variation within the song now my approach is this I actually make a basic beat like this at the beginning of the song because I think this is better to play along with say when you're playing guitar or basic cetera then playing to a metronome but I keep it dead simple like this there's no need to go into detail at this stage it's more of a guide track I would say then once I've got a few of my instruments recorded such as bass and guitar I then go back and I record the whole drum track now for the genres of music that are normally producing which is more of a sort of a pop rock or acoustic rock kind of genre I actually don't copy and paste too much what I like to do is record say the hi-hat and cymbals all the way through the songs and then do the bass kick etc all the way through the song and that's all I've got lots of natural variation in velocity all the way through the song and probably some little variations on the action be as we go through so that's just my method and I think that helps to keep things more natural now for this method we're going to use a pattern based approach and this is way more suitable for looping types of drum patterns which you might see more commonly in EDM dance or even sometimes in hip-hop this is much better for those genres of music now I'm going to start off again over on the right-hand side on the plugins tab and I'm going to go to that little keyboard icon to insert a virtual instrument but this time I'm not going to be using the built-in cakewalk drum kit I'm going to be using a third-party drum kit and it's a completely free one so I'll put a link in the description and you can go ahead and download it to use in your projects as well and it's called drum Pro 64 so look under the studio link VST folder once you've installed it and you'll find drum Pro 64 there again drag it all the way across to the side and then in this dialog box the same selections again I want you to have MIDI source selected and first synth audio output selected as well click on OK and we're going to expand those again and you can see the top one here is our virtual instrument if I click on the icon next to number one it brings up drum pro 64 and if I play it my keyboard it sounds something like this now I'm not going to use those particular sounds for this so I'm going to go to the presets section here click on that and go all the way down to drum vintage tr-808 to get those classic sort of 808 sounds okay so now that we've done that we actually are going to use another drum map in this now I've created a drum map for this instrument to make it easier for you guys the link is in the description down below so you can go to that page and there'll be instructions about where to put the drum map on your computer so you can use it so once you've done that go up to the edit and then preferences selection then go to drum map manager here click on new and then I'm going to choose a preset here which I have called Pro 64 that's what it should be called for you to if you've downloaded it from my website so click on that and then click apply and then that has assigned that drum map correctly to that instrument now you need to make sure on the MIDI track here that its output is the drum map not the instrument so you go it will say something like this DM 1 drum pro 64 I'll select that and now we're ready to start recording our drums now we're not going to record them in real time this time we're going to use something called uh sort of a pattern editor so we will right click here in this view click on View and go to the step sequencer sorry I call it pattern sequencer but it's a step sequencer now just drag that up a little bit here now because we installed the drum map already the drum sounds here X 4 you can see X 3 are all the same sounds that you actually see on the actual virtual instrument itself the same name so I should say so if I bring it up again you can see the names of the drum pads here so I'm gonna start off with a hi-hat I'm gonna change the tempo actually for this I'm gonna change it to say 78 so I think that should be it about right and I'm gonna start off by dragging out some hi-hat so I'll just go to the hi-hat here if I click here you can hear it I'm just gonna drag a whole bunch out over the whole 16 beats within these measures so let's have a click listen to that by clicking on this play button here this will actually loop around the sequence if you click on this play button okay that sounds just fine for me so I'm gonna chuck in some snares let's put one in here and another one in here click on play all standard stuff so far and I'm also going to put in a kick drum I'll put one here yeah one here one here and one here you can put them wherever you wish but it's a good idea to have a listen okay that's okay I don't like this kick drum here on the third beat so I'm gonna click on it right click on it I should say to delete it and actually put one just a little one step before that just in there and have a listen to that okay don't mind that beat at all and now I'm gonna pop some claps in there as well I'll put them on the same beats as the snare so one in there one in there let's have a listen to those and that's the very basics of making beats in this step sequencer now next to each of those drums there are a few options which we're going to look at some of them so let's look at these claps for example I'm going to click on the little triangle next to the claps there and that opens up this panel here I'm feeling that those claps are just a little bit loud for my liking so I'm going to take them down using this control here which is a velocity control and I'll just drag it down a bit now that's changing the volume of all the velocities within that pattern for that instrument so let's have a listen okay that's about right now now if you wanted to adjust the velocities for individual beats it's a different approach I'm going to do that on the hi-hat so I'll close that one and open the hi-hat one and what you can do is actually just drag over the velocities over here to change the velocities for each particular note okay I'll have a listen to that okay and I'm just gonna pop a couple of them up a bit higher I'll pop that one up there and this one up here and that'll give us some nice little bits of emphasis okay cool so that's my basic drum beat now in this kind of music you're generally going to be looping it now I start this off I hadn't put the playhead right at the beginning so I'll just drag this over so it's right at the beginning here now if you want to loop it you simply take the end of that little piece there and you drag it out for as long as you want to loop it so loop it for say four times there and release that so if that doesn't come up like that and that isn't all loop then just right-click and make sure you've got groove clip loop loopings selected so now I can play that whole thing with my normal play button then you'll hear all looped now if I go in and edit that by clicking on the step sequencer again and I make a change say like I'm just going to make a double clap at the end here so a double snare a clap let's have a listen to that okay so you can hear that it's done it automatically for all of the loops so that's really really handy you only have to actually now to make adjustments in one spot and it's going to change it for all the times that's looped now if you wanted to say do it variation then what you would do is go up to this edit icon up here click on split and just hover over the part say I want variation in the last section something a split it here now that is still the same pattern here so what I need to do just go back to my normal selection is right click on this last one here and click on unlik unlink step sequencer clips now if I make a variation to this one so I'll remove those claps that I did I actually those claps and snare I'll just remove them there if we click on the last one here where I split and then sort of made a different copy you can see that those are still there so that's where the variation will be so that's a really handy way to quickly make some variations on what you're doing [Music] and then you could go ahead and select say those and that one copy them and then they move over to here and try again paste and then we've got you could just go ahead and construct your whole song in that way so that's probably a more useful way of making drum loops for that kind of music now with both of these methods using the drum instruments that we've used there is a major drawback and let me explain it to you I've gone back to using the internal si drum kit that comes with cakewalk we've got our drum beat set up and we'll play it and you'll see that everything is coming out of one stereo track and you may not think that's a major problem because after all you've got a mixer within the drum kit itself so if you want to change the level of the say the snare you can do it here so let's have a look at that there's a couple of reasons why that is not at all ideal first of all when you're later on mixing your whole track it's really inconvenient to keep going into virtual instruments and using their internal mixers second of all and this is a really big problem is you can't apply separate effects to each of those drums so you've got a really cool reverb that you really really like you can't just suddenly throw that on the snare and not everything else you can't do different compression on different drums so it's really not an ideal thing and I'm going to give you a solution if you were using either the internal drums you know the SI drum kit or the electronic drum kit the program 64 that I recommended to you earlier to fix this because the problem with both of them is they don't have options to output these different drums to different channels now my workaround is not at all ideal but it doesn't work and I'll explain why it's not ideal later so what you're going to need to do is I've got the drum track set up as I did in the earlier tutorial there's a drum map there and if we go in we can see that so I'll go to the piano roll view and you can see that it's using the the drum map there so what I'm going to do I've got this virtual instrument called drums I'm going to create exactly the same virtual instrument again so I'll go to cakewalk I'll go to the si drum kit and I'll drag it over this is going to be a drum kit that I only use for the sake the snare drum in this case now before I drop it I just need to have first synth audio output selected I don't need anything I'll select it there enable MIDI output you don't really need that I'll click on OK and I'll do the same again I'll just drag another one over and this one's going to be for our kick drum same options again and I'll click OK now I'll drag though both of those up to up above where the MIDI was just to keep things tidy and just rename them I'll call this one snare that's number two and I'll call this one kick that's number three and now I have three separate drum kits in there and two of them are going to be used just for one drum I'll go to the console view and play the track and you'll see everything's still coming out on the first one because there's a couple of things that we need to do on the the drum map to make this work so let's go in again on the piano roll here now let's say for the snare drum which was on our second drum kit out that's here I just double clicked on that snare drum there and then where it says output port for destination I'm going to switch that over to si drum kit to there make sure that selected and close that and then for my kick drum which is called bass drum on this drum map I'll double click on there and I'll select drum kit three for that why is that now if I play my pattern and you watch the meters you'll see that those sounds are coming from the separate drum kits [Music] now you could do this for as many of the drums as you want within that kit that's often enough because you often probably only need to really do separate things on the kick and snare but you may want to be more detailed than that now if I go over to my console view you'll see if I just expand that that life becomes much easier because when I'm playing the track afire for example just want to turn the snare up and down it's easily accessible there from the console view and when you're at the mixing stage it's the console view where you're going to spend most of your time now if I wanted to say add a reverb to that snare I could go to the effects insert an audio effect I'll do one of the basic ones solitaires reverb and then I'll play that again you should hear a gigantic reverb on the snare that's great so that means you can automate as well individual drums all that kind of good stuff so that's the first method for fixing that problem now the problem with the last method is it uses up too many resources there's a lot of drums being loaded into memory which are not used when you use several instances of the same drum plugin so it's really better if you can use one drum virtual instrument with many outputs now the built-in ones with cakewalk can't do that and also the pro 64 drums I showed you earlier can't do that as well I have found one here called Mt power drum kit which is a free drum kit which can have multiple outputs now when you first load it up it comes up with this or a splash screen here and ask you to make a donation you can make a donation if not you can just go ahead and click skip you won't get any sound from the plug-in until you've actually clicked on skip there but it is a free plug-in and it's got a reasonable sound sounds like this okay so I've already got this loaded up with a drum pattern and I've got a drum map corresponding to it as well so if you want the map for that then please do follow the link in the description down below and I've made one for you so that you can use this particular free drum kit and also the link for the drum kit itself now how is it useful to us so let's have a listen again to what we've got and you can see it's all coming out on one stereo track now if we go to the mixer section of this drum kit you'll see the mixer here now there's already some useful things in that it's got a separate compression control on each drum so that may be enough for you but in case you want to do a lot more than just that then you can select a different output for each drum so I'm just going to do the kick in the snare again so for the kick here I'm going to select output two and for the snare I'm going to select output three now if we play the drums now you won't hear the kick in the snare and that's because we haven't created the outputs for those in cakewalk yet in order to do that you just need to right-click on this area here and insert an audio track an audio track that is remember this is an audio track we click on it there and we will just expand that and we'll make its input that empty power drum kit you hover over that and there's a whole bunch of other selections and I want you to go it down to where it says 2mt power drum kits stereo and that is the output for the kick drum in fact so will click on stereo and there we go there now if we play the pattern again you'll hear the kick drum through that channel cool and we just need to do the same again for the CIA snare so right click insert audio track and then for its input this time we'll go MT power drum kit one and we'll go down to three empty power drum kits stereo and we'll click on that now if we play [Music] again we have separate outputs on our console for each of those drums which when you come to the mixing stage is really really fundamentally awesome now that is okay if you like the sound of this power drum kit what if you don't it's not going to be very useful for certain types of music I'm afraid at the moment the only option I have for you other commercial ones now things like studio drummer 3 not only have the ability to output two separate channels but you also got a whole bunch of drum libraries available there for you for both acoustic rock electronic all kinds of stuff jazz all the business there the other one is addictive drums which also has those features they are going to cost you money if anyone knows at all of any other free drum kits at all which do have separate outputs to go to the console and please let me know in the comments down below because that could be really useful so for some people here so I hope that gets you well on the way to making some awesome beats using cakewalk by band lab now if you have any questions at all then do ask in the comments down below I'd love to help you out if you like this video then you can help me out by hitting the like button if you didn't like this video hit the dislike button twice or even four times as someone did last week oh my now if you like this kind of content then please do subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you get to hear about my future videos and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 232,447

Rating: 4.956892 out of 5

Keywords: How To Use Cakewalk by Bandlab: Making Drum Beats, Making Beats, Creating Beats, Making Beats in Cakewalk, cakewalk tutorial, cakewalk by bandlab, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial, How To Use Cakewalk by Bandlab, beat making software, beat making tutorial, beat making for, beat making for beginners, beat making for dummies, Hip Hop Beats, making hip hop beat, making hip hop beat in cakewalk, creating hip hop beats, how to use cakewalk, cakewalk step sequencer tutorial, cakewalk

Id: 3JGFTWxacQM

Length: 32min 5sec (1925 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CreativeSauce2B]

Hi folks! For those of you wanting to make some beats, I've made a tutorial about different ways to do it in Cakewalk by Bandlab!

[u/shiitake]

This is really a godsend! The current documentation is not helpful at all.