How To Use Cakewalk by Bandlab - MIDI Basics

in today's video we're going to be learning about MIDI recording in cakewalk by band lab hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well now if you're a beginner and you'd like to learn how to record MIDI in cakewalk by band labs I will be taking you through the steps to do that in today's video but first of all if this is your first time here and you like this kind of content all about DWS home recording plugins gear reviews that kind of thing then please do subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you get to see my future videos now let's get to learning all about cakewalk by band Lab and MIDI ok so I want to start off by clearing up some confusion that I see amongst beginners about what MIDI actually is now in cakewalk and other da w's there are basically two types of things that you can record that is audio and MIDI information now there's some terminology which gets used in cakewalk which confuses us a little bit but I'll explain that later let's start off with audio when you record audio tracks you're recording actual sound for example you may be recording a guitar which is recorded with a microphone or a voice which is recorded with a microphone and you can see that here in the session that I've got open you can see the waveform here and that is the guitar in fact I'll just play it so we can hear it [Music] and that was recorded with a microphone now if we go down a little bit further here you'll see another type of track down here and this is what I call a MIDI track it's actually called an instrument tracking cakewalk but essentially it's MIDI information which is being recorded now if I click on that and it expands this is some bass guitar MIDI now what's important here is no actual sound is being recorded let me say that again there is no sound recorded with a MIDI or instrument track in fact what's happening is is we are recording a series of events or instructions if you like instructions like start playing the middle C note now stop playing it now play it this loud etc then when you hit play on your D aw cakewalk in this case it actually plays the instrument back again now that instrument may be a virtual instrument which is in your da W and that's what we're going to be focusing on today or it may be an external instrument such as a synthesizer or a drum machine which is plugged into your computer that's for another tutorial we're going to be focusing on what everybody has and that is the virtual instruments which come with cakewalk okay so let's go about adding a MIDI track to our cakewalk project now I'm starting off on the cakewalk Start screen and I've already created some projects before so they show here and with the recent projects tab is selected but I'm actually going to click on the new project tab over here and then I'm going to go over and click on the empty project template so I'll click on that and that creates an empty project now there are a couple of different ways of adding MIDI or instrument tracks to cakewalk I'm just going to do one way today so I don't confuse you but there are some different ways to do it so you're aware I'm gonna look over here on the right-hand side and you'll see some different tabs here media plugins and notes so we're gonna select the plugins tab and then we're going to go over to where this little sort of keyboard icon is here and we're gonna click on that and that shows the virtual instrument plugins which are installed on our system now the list may look a bit different for you so I encourage you to go up to this little arrow here and select let's have a look sort by manufacturer now if we click on sort by manufacturer you will see your display should look similar to this there may be some missing but the one you should have is this one here which is cakewalk so we'll expand that by clicking on the plus and then we're actually going to take this cakewalk TTS one plug-in and we're gonna grab it and drag it all the way across to the left hand side and drop it there now a pop-up appears at this time and we are going to make sure that we just have a simple instrument track selected and none of the other things not only other checkbox are selected I click on OK now what that does is it creates an audio track for the output of the TTS plug-in and it also creates a MIDI track alongside it here to actually trigger that plug-in so I'm going to just drag this down a little bit so that we can see all of the options there now it says cakewalk TTS one up here as the name of the track and right next to that is a little icon which I'll click on and that brings up the actual plug-in the cakewalk TTS one plug-in this plug-in can actually load up to 16 instruments at one time but by default it loads up the piano instrument on all but one of these one of them actually just has a drum instrument on there but all of them have the piano instrument loaded up and we're just going to leave it like that for now so that we can just have a nice piano sound so I'll close that there and then we're going to go on to set up a metronome ready for recording now in terms of setting up the metronome there's a couple of things we want to do we want to make sure we can hear it when we're recording and we also want to make sure the tempo of the track is set correctly now to set the tempo there's one easy way to do it if you happen to know for example that the track is 90 beats per minute you can just click up here where the tempo is and I'll click on that and I can just type in 90 and set it but you may not be sure what the tempo is so what I would do in this case is make sure that the playhead here is set right back to the beginning of the track so I've just dragged it there to the beginning of the track so everything is on zero and I'm going to insert a new tempo there so I do that by going up to the project menus I click on project and then going down to insert tempo change I'll click on that and this pop-up appears now so if I'm not sure what tempo it's going to be what I can do is click on this button here for probably I don't know at least a few seconds a little bit more than that to set a tempo so I'm going to do that now and it's worked out to about 71 beats per minute so I'll click on OK and my metronome is set to 71 beats per minute now if I click play we don't hear anything so we can't double check that in that case what we need to do is go over to the metronome icon here and I'll click on that and it brings up the metronome settings and if I want to hear on playback I need to make sure that I've clicked here for playback now I also want to make sure of course that I hear it when I'm recording so do double-check here that it is selected for recording I'll click on apply and close that window and now when I hit play I should hear the metronome there is and I'm almost ready to record my MIDI track so now that we have our track and we have our metronome set up we now have to select a way to input actual note information now there's going to be two categories of people here those who have a keyboard of some sort which you can see in front of me here now that may be a synthesizer electric piano or just a MIDI keyboard controller which is connected to your computer and those of you who don't yet have a keyboard if you're just starting out it's quite likely you don't have a keyboard I'm just going to deal with that group first quickly and show you how you can actually input notes using your computer keyboard what you will need to do where the input selector is here for the instrument I'm just going to click on that and I'm going to go down to where it says virtual controller and then select MIDI Omni now after I've done that I need to go up to views and then go all the way down to virtual controllers here and open up that and select computer keyboard now when this window which is opened is selected I can now play actual notes on my computer keyboard [Music] so as you can see there I could use that to actually record notes into my D aw the problem with it is of course and well there's lots and lots of problems with it it's going to be very hard to play for piano pieces in real time using just a piano keyboard and it doesn't record things like velocity and it doesn't do a great job of doing things like pitch Bend and modulation so it is only really useful if you're really stuck and you don't have a keyboard and you just want to get on and make some of your first music but I do highly recommend getting an actual physical keyboard they're not that expensive these days so I'm going to put some links down in the description to a couple of keyboards that I've used in the past which I'd recommend which aren't all that expensive and they are by far much better than using your actual computer keyboard now if you do already have a keyboard you'll have it connected up to your computer either with MIDI cables going into your audio interface or perhaps a USB cable connected to your computer it's going to be different for each person now you should have set this up already in your preferences and I did cover this in my sort of cakewalk basics video about how to set up MIDI devices and you should have some selected here in this menu if you don't then I recommend go ahead and watch that setup video which I created now what you'll need to do instead of selecting for your input the virtual controller you'll actually need to select whatever Hardware you have connected now my controller is actually connected via video MIDI cables to my you a25 interface so I'm going to select that and I'm going to select MIDI Omni so that it gets information from any MIDI channel that's for another tutorial indeed now we are ready to record this piano and I can now play it on my piano keyboard [Music] okay so we're all set up and we're ready to record now to start recording this piano track we're first of all going to have to select this red circle here on the track hit that and that arms it ready for recording so you can see this big red area over here also indicates that now all we have to do to record is actually hit on the record button up here I'm gonna let it play for about a bar or so just to give myself a little breathing space let's go ahead and do that [Music] okay so that was kind of okay there was a couple of bits in it which I wasn't quite happy with my use of the sustain pedal wasn't quite right and we're gonna go in how to fix we're going to go into how to fix those things a little later so let's have a listen to that recording I'm just going to move the playhead up to where it starts and I'm going to hit the play button [Music] okay that seems to have worked okay now it is still playing the metronome on playback and I don't like that so I'm just going to click on the metronome Settings button here and turn that off here by deselecting playback there clicking apply and closing that and now we can listen to the piano without the metronome [Music] and that all works fine now I just want to go into something about this record button up here because we have several different options if we wanted to record over this and sort of wipe it out as we were going then we would just leave this on the setting is now but if we hold left click on that button we can see some different options and I just want to look at the sound on sound option we'll click that and what I'm going to do is give myself some time again I'm gonna move the playhead back to the beginning I'm going to show you how you can record over with a little piano part at the top end of the piano let's have a go at that [Music] okay you can see how that's working so now if I move the playhead to here and play again now as you can see in cakewalk here the second recording is placed on top of the first one I'm just going to select that and then I'm going to hit shift on my keyboard and select the other one and now I'm going to right-click on all of that and click on bounce two clips and now we can see both parts together there so both of those piano parts are showing on the display there now I'm going to show you how to go into that and actually edit it okay so now that we've recorded our piano I'm going to go in and actually edit the MIDI so I will disarm the track for recording so I'll select that there I'm going to go ahead and select this section here which is the MIDI notes I'm actually going to double click on that at the top and that opens up what is called the piano roll which I am obscuring with my camera at the moment so I'll move myself up the top there and I'm actually just going to take the top part of this and drag it up a little so that makes that a little bit bigger in fact I could go a bit further than that couldn't I'll move that out there and I'll drag this all the way up like that so that makes that display nice and big okay so we can see on the left here the piano notes and we can use the scroll on our mouse to scroll up and down now the information we have over here as I explained at the beginning of the video is the MIDI information this shows where a note starts and where it ends and it shows the pitch of the note now down here also you can see this is selected for velocity and we can see the velocity of the different notes and we can change them down here now I should point out in cakewalk here I actually have the smart tool selected so right at the top on the left hand side I have this star icon selected that means as I roll over each note some different options appear so if I'm right in the middle of the note I can use that then if I hold the left mouse button down to drag the note up and down just like so I'll put it back to where it was and if it's over to the left I can actually change just the start position of the note which leaves the end position intact and also of course I can then also drag out the end position of the note the other thing that I can do is actually change the velocity so if I go over here and I select this note I can then actually go down here and if I'm hovering at the top of that velocity I can drag it up and make it very loud I'll play that play from here it's a very loud sudden bass note airplane if I wanted to make it quieter just drag it all the way down and have a listen now okay so that is how you're going to edit the basic things on your piano role here this is the most useful thing about MIDI in my opinion that you can change the odd fumbled note that you've got or the note that you played a little bit too loud or too long now I also would like to point out here that I was using the sustain pedal so if I click here that is on this thing called cc-64 which is where sustain is transmitted transmitted in MIDI and if I drag that up I can also go in and change the sustain point so this is a very handy section indeed if you find that you didn't quite use that sustain pedal in in just the right places you can go a red go around and actually drag the start points of that now there are lots of options on the piano roll which I will go through next okay so I'm not going to go through all of the options that we have here but I'm going to go through the main ones which are going to help you out if you're just starting out here the first thing I want to draw your attention to is this part over here where it says 1/32 just below where I am on the screen there and slightly out of view now that where it says 1/32 it might say something different for you is highlighted with a sort of a solid orange color this is the sort of snap control so if I just click that so that it goes to a dull orange that turns snapping off that means when I come over and want to drag a note I can freely drag it anywhere just like this and it will not be placed in a very precise position this is really actually very good if you want to have things which sound reasonably natural if you don't want to put them on exactly the beat then this can be quite handy so you can learn how to use that just by dragging it slightly off the line etc now if you do think what want things to be very accurate and you want to snap them in place and you want to make sure that that's selected so if I select that now and drag it around it's going to be snap to 1/32 of the bar so in other words if I want to snap it to each beat of a 4/4 bar I would actually hold left on this and then select this setting 1 4 so I'll do that and now it will snap to beats now you'll notice here that I can actually drag it freely in between but it will just snap when it gets close to the actual beats so I can just go a little bit in between but as I get closer it snaps to that beat so that's very handy indeed for if you're doing a mixture of very accurate notes and then you want to slightly offset some things you don't have to keep going up here and changing that so that is one of the main settings in this interface and that is the snap setting so I'm going to set it to say something more like eighths and then I can drag that around now the other thing that you can actually do is add new notes and you can do this a couple of different ways you can go in and just use this tool and drag out a note like so and it will snap its beginning position according to the snap setting and it will also snap the end position as well according to that so I can actually put in a note just like that the other thing you can do is just select say a beat and double click and that has added a note in there now it's out of the note according to the settings I've got up here for the note length so that's the last thing that I want to show you here you select the note length the default note length for adding notes up here so if I just want to add in a crotchet I'll just select crotchets there and double click on a beat and it's added that in in actual fact it's added a dotted crotchet because I had dotted selected so I'll deselect that go again and double click ok so that is the sort of basic settings or the basic options for editing MIDI now the last thing I want to touch upon is called quantizing now quantizing is a process where you adjust the start and maybe the end times of the notes according to specific timings within each bar meaning imagine you could place a grid over the bar and divide it into four what quantizing will then do is look at the start time of the note and move it exactly to one of those four lines on a grid you may set it to 8 or 16 etc etc it depends on the actual music or go into this a little bit further in a moment at the moment you can see that in actual fact if i zoom in to the beginning of these notes here which I played on the keyboard you can see for example these three notes here just a little bit before the beat some of these later are on the beat and maybe some of them are a little bit after with quantizing we are going to put them exactly in time as if I was this amazing piano player who could play perfectly in time I am of course so what we do is we can select our track up here and I'll select it to highlight it and that selects all the notes in the track and I hit Q on the keyboard and that brings up the quantizing interface now at the moment the resolution is set to 1/16 I happen to know that's just right that is a way of saying if you take the whole bar and you divided it into 16 that's the resolution that the quantize is going to use to determine where to move the beginning or the end of the note to now talking about the beginning and the ending down here with change we can say see it's set to change start times and you also have the ability to change the end times or the note duration I normally don't have that set normally I'm just interested in changing the start times now I've set it to 1/16 and I'm going to click on OK and you see all of those notes just shuffled around there so if I play it now [Music] okay that's okay maybe not quite what I wanted but I will undo that now if I had not selected the right resolution I'll hit Q again and let's say I'll put it on 1/8 click on OK and you can see [Music] it's really messed things up there and that's because the resolution wasn't high enough so what you can actually do if you're not sure is select a resolution I'll put it back to 1/16 and we can audition [Music] and that will give you an idea if you've made the right selection now the other thing that you can do is only quantize certain notes so I actually selected the whole track up here in the track view so if we go down here to the piano view and I right drag across this group of notes that's a right drag I'll use that to select them and I'll hit Q on the keyboard to bring up the quantize and I'll click on OK because I like the settings it only actually changes the notes which I've selected so please do remember you don't actually have to quantize the whole track you can just do parts of it if you wish so I really hope that helps get you started with your journey of recording MIDI in cakewalk if anything wasn't clear to you at all then please to ask questions in the comments down below and I'll try my best to answer each and every one of them now if you did like this video help me out by hitting the like button if you didn't like this video at all then 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 notified about my future videos now talking about my other videos I think that you should have a go at one of these two showing on the screen just now with the lovely yellow background and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 233,173

Rating: 4.8868194 out of 5

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

Id: _2izQxY_x3Q

Length: 25min 11sec (1511 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CreativeSauce2B]

Hi folks! I hope Cakewalk users find this video I have made about MIDI useful. Especially good for beginners I hope!

[u/stickman393]

I find your videos a bit of an acquired taste but they are always high quality and content-full. Well done. Thanks.