How To Use Cakewalk Tutorial For Beginners 👉 Creating Your First Song

in this video i'm going to get you started creating your first song in cakewalk by bandlab so if you're just starting out and maybe you're a little lost in the user interface this cakewalk tutorial is for you as i'm going to go over all the basics that you're going to need to start making music i'm zayn welcome to audio tech tv where it's my goal to help you conquer the tech so you can unleash your creative beast and i know the user interface can be a little overwhelming at first especially if you're just getting started with creating music on a computer but after this video you should have all of the basics needed to start making music on your own so the things i'm going to go over are setting up your audio recording audio working with midi using plugins using the mixer arranging your song in the timeline and then rendering your song so you can share it online so now let's quickly look at your audio settings so we're ready to record so with cakewalk open let's go up to edit preferences and this is where people can get confused in the beginning because the way they have this set up is a little weird so first i want to say if you don't have an audio interface and you're just using the built-in sound card in your computer then you don't need to worry about this step unless you plan on using the free azo for all driver and then you can follow along with this so if you have an audio interface that has an azio driver or you plan on using azio for all you go into the playback and recording tab here and you want to make sure that your driver mode is set to azio and then you want to go up to devices and in the input drivers section up here you want to make sure that every input on your audio interface is selected so if your audio interface only has two inputs then you select two some audio interfaces like mine combine the two into one input so it's a left and right because it shows stereo inputs here so you might only need to click off one thing or if you're using azio for all you would only need to click off azio for all and then you want to do the same thing with the outputs so your audio interface may only have outputs one and two just check that off or check off azio for all if you're using that or check off all of the outputs that your audio interface might have then another setting i just want to show you you may not need to do anything with this right off the bat but i want you to be aware of this is the driver settings tab so in here you can change your sample rate if you need to but the default setting as long as it's 44 100 or 48 000 should be fine for starting out and then down here you have your buffer size and this controls the latency when you're recording so the faster setting means lower latency and the safe setting over here means higher latency so you may be tempted to just turn it to the fastest and leave it like that but that takes up more computer processing and it can cause all kinds of jitters and pops and clicks and that sort of thing so you might want to play around with this to see what works best with your computer and what i find is i'll set it at the lowest setting just for recording and i'll start to record all my stuff in and then when i get into the mixing as you start adding more and more plugins into your project then you may need to increase that buffer size you might start noticing the clicks and pops or some random weirdness in there so you may want to go in here and increase your buffer setting if that happens to you also if you're using azio for all or any azo driver you can click on the azio panel button it will bring up the azio panel for your audio interface and then you can change settings in that if you want to that's up to you so i recommend just leaving this as is to start out with but be aware of it if you start noticing clicks and pops and other weirdness you know to come back to this setting here then once you're done you want to click on apply and then you just close this down and now we're ready to start a project or open a project if you don't have that start screen you can just go up to file start screen and then we have it here now we can go to new project or if you were opening one that was existing you could go in here but we'll start a new one and i'm going to create an empty project as this has no tracks in it there's nothing in it it's just an empty project these other ones have tracks and may have some other things set up in there and i just want to start from scratch so i'm going to use empty project and your screen should look something like this the first thing i usually do is close down these sidebars just to free up some space on the screen we don't really need those right now and if you want to open them up later you can just click these arrows again and they'll be open later on for you so now let's set this up so we can record some audio in we're going to click on this plus sign right here to add a new track you want to make sure it's on audio not on instrument so click on audio if you need to then you select your input so the one i'm using is input 2 on my audio interface so that would be the right audient one and two so i'm just going to select that and we can set this to record enable or set the input monitoring right from here but i'm going to show you another way to do that i'm not going to click it now but you may want to do that right off the bat when you're doing yours so i'm going to click create and then if we click this down arrow here we can see more of the track information i'm going to record a guitar in first so i'm going to name the track guitar one and you just do that by clicking in there and then we want to arm this track for recording so we click this little red dot here then if we want to hear what we're playing you click this icon here that kind of looks like a wi-fi icon and that's going to enable monitoring so let me show you how that works so i have my guitar here and it's plugged in i'm going to strum something right now and you can see there's no signal going in so you'll notice when i press the red arm for recording button and when i strum my guitar [Music] you can see that there's a signal going through but you can't hear the guitar through the program but if i click on this icon right here and i strum you can hear the signal coming through the program so what i want to do now before we record is i want to add a guitar amp sim onto the track and there's one that comes with cakewalk so i'm going to click on this arrows over here and you want to make sure that it's on the audio effects right here you can see we can change it up but we want audio effects and you can sort through all of these if you have a lot of plug-ins it might take a long time like i do here but if you just have a few you can probably find the ones you want and easily drag them over but what i'm going to do is type in the name here so the amp sim is called th3 and you can see it is right here now i just click drag that into the effects section of our track and you don't have to do this if you don't want to use an amp sim that's fine if you're just recording it in through a microphone or something like that that's perfectly fine i just want to show this step so i'm going to close down the side panel again i'm just going to quickly select one of these presets you can see you have banks here and each bank has a selection of presets so i'm just going to click on the clean and let's hear what that sounds like that works for me and i'm just going to close the interface down and if you close the interface down and then you want to bring it back up you would just click on that again and it opens it up so i'm going to close that down and we're going to start to get ready to record here now one more thing you might want to do is make sure that your metronome is on and if it's yellow like this on the record icon here that means that the metronome is going to play when you're recording and if it's not yellow then it's not going to play so you want to make sure it's yellow and then the one up here is so it plays while you're doing playback so you can turn it off during playback and have it only come on during recording and if you click on this right here it brings up your metronome options so you can have it do a count in which i'm going to do i'm going to do one measure of account in you can also change the sounds and the levels of it i'm going to leave everything the same except for the record count in press ok and now we're ready to record alright so now i'm just going to hit the record button right here and you'll hear the count in and then it's going to start recording and i'm going to let it go for one measure before i start playing [Music] all right let's say we're happy with that and we'll keep it now i'm going to record another track this time i'll record a bass guitar so we're going to create another track make sure it's audio and it's going to be the same input as before because i'm just going to plug my bass into the same chord so i'm going to click create then i'm going to name this bass and i want to change this to none because we're not going to be recording anything into there right now and we're just going to record into this track here and then we're going to arm this track for recording click this icon so we can hear what we're playing and i'm going to copy this plugin down to there so all you have to do is hold down control on your computer keyboard then click and drag then let go and you can see i've copied it here and i'm going to see if there's a bass guitar preset in here alright so here is a bass preset let's hear how it sounds [Music] alright so we're ready to record our bass guitar so i'm going to set the cursor back to the beginning so it starts from there then i'm going to hit the record button [Music] all right so we now have our recorded base and our recorded guitar we can now bring some drums into our song all right before i get into the midi section of the video i just want to ask if you're enjoying it so far getting some value out of it can you please hit the thumbs up button maybe even subscribe if you want some more cakewalk tutorials it really helps my channel out and i appreciate it so much now back into the cakewalk tutorial so what we'll want to do is open this sidebar again and this time click on the instrument looking icon right here it says insert virtual instruments just click there and click that and you can see everything's categorized in here so i'm going to use the drum plugin that comes with cakewalk i can see drums here click on this this is the drum instrument then i just drag it over into this section here and it's created our drum track here which is a midi track i'm going to close this down again so we don't see the instrument what we want to do is click on this icon right here and it's going to bring up the interface for the drum plugin you can hear the drums when i click on them now there's several different ways we can go about adding the drums in we could use the piano roll by double clicking anywhere in the open space on our drum track so i'll just double click you can see the piano roll comes up down here then what we have to do is figure out which keys control which drum so i know that it's usually around c3 there's our kick and there's our snare so we could just draw them in like this [Music] might take a while to do that but you know good things take time then you can add in your hi hats draw those in as well so that's one way you can do it another way that we can do it is through the step sequencer which is more geared towards drums so you want to right click in this area here go to view you can see you can also access the piano roll from here as well but we're going to click on step sequencer and here's our step sequencer now and you can see it only has four beats in it so i'm going to increase that to at least eight beats and you can also increase the number of steps within each beat if you really wanted to by clicking here but i'm going to leave that at 4 and then we're going to listen to what this is kick drum [Music] so let's hear how that sounds right now i'm just going to solo this track with our drums so we only hear the drums you click that s [Music] all right so there's a drum beat and of course you can add your hi hats in there and i've done a whole tutorial video on just using the step sequencer i'll link to that down in the description if you want even more details on so that's another way that we can add drums to our track now a third way that this plug-in allows us is to just drag and drop one of these midi files over into here so we can listen to what one of these sounds like just by double clicking on it i'm just going to click here all right let's say i like this one right here i'll just click it drag it over into our timeline and you can see we have our drums in here now and if i wanted to duplicate this i could hold down control on my computer keyboard click and drag it to here or i can also press ctrl d on the computer keyboard and you can do that as many times as you want you can see it's duplicated it this drum pattern probably doesn't go with our song but let's hear what it sounds like actually that's not too bad so we'll leave it at that for now there we go and if we really wanted we could actually double click on one of these clips and you can change up whatever's in here you can move things around add drums or symbols whatever you want to do that's an option for you but i'm just going to leave it as is so i just showed you a few different ways of working with midi by programming it now let's look at recording midi so now we'll add another instrument in here and this time i'm going to add the piano plug-in that comes with cakewalk it's this electric piano right here i'll click drag it down here and again it's made an instrument track for us so we have that but we also need to make sure that cakewalk is recognizing our midi controller so now i just want to go up to edit preferences and then i want to go to midi devices and the midi device that i'm using for this is the usb action 25 and you can see there's a check mark there if yours doesn't have it make sure you put a check beside that and then you don't really need to worry about the outputs unless you're sending midi notes out of cakewalk to maybe an external midi instrument or something like that but i have it checked off you don't really need to worry about the outputs for this though and once that's set up you would just click ok and then this is where you control your inputs just like we controlled the inputs of our audio tracks and speaking of which i'm going to unarm that for recording because it would record some blank audio over top when we do this so we're going to click here go down to our usb action 25 choose one of the channels it doesn't really matter which one and i'm just going to play a note on my keyboard and you can see we have a signal going in which is great and i'm going to show you in a bit a way that you can record midi without a midi keyboard so if you don't have a midi keyboard stick around through this because you're going to see another way that we can do this and if we want to see the user interface we click there and you can change up the sound if you want i might add some tremolo to this see how this sounds [Music] all right that sounds good and then we can arm this for recording and you can see it's already clicked off so we don't need to worry about that so i'm going to move the cursor back to here and hit the record button [Music] all right so we couldn't really hear that we need to adjust our levels a bit but i did record something in there let's listen to what i recorded in just a basic little piano line there nothing fancy and if i wanted i could go in here and adjust my notes like this so they line up properly and if i wanted to i can zoom out i'm going to hold down alt on my computer keyboard and use my mouse wheel to zoom out here then we could select all of our notes that we recorded in here so i'm going to click there then hold down shift on my computer keyboard and click here so all of our notes are selected and if i wanted i could press q on my computer keyboard now and it brings up a quantize option let's say i wanted to quantize this to quarter notes i click that then click ok and you can see zoom in it's moved everything to the closest quarter note there it's lined it all up for us so we don't have to go in and do it manually and you must have at least one note selected in order to use that q menu if you don't have anything selected in here the quantize option will not pop up so that was recording midi with our midi keyboard there's another way that we can record midi though so i'm just going to create another instance of this here i'm going to do this and now we want to go up to views then you want to go down here to virtual controllers and you click on computer keyboard it brings up this little window here which is nice and if i press the a key on the computer keyboard [Music] you can see i can play with the computer keyboard if i wanted to and you can record this so let's just arm this for recording press record [Music] you can see i recorded that in just using the computer keyboard so you can record with your computer keyboard but one thing to note is you can't record whatever you click on so if you had the piano open and you wanted to record by clicking it won't record that because that's not midi information and it's not set to recognize that as midi information so keep that in mind so now let's say we have all of our pieces ready to start kind of arranging our song we can start to tidy some of this stuff up like you can see we have that blank space at the beginning here if you just drag your cursor over the edge of the clip like this and then click and drag it shortens it up you might want to just come back a bit because there could be a little bit of an attack right before that if you put the cursor near the top of the clip you can see it changes it to that ramp looking thing if you click and drag that creates a fade and if you want to change the fade shape just right click while it's like this and you can choose one of the other fade shapes if you really wanted to of course we can copy our clips like i showed you earlier and you can copy more than one clip at a time so if i wanted to copy all of these i would just select all of them and to do that you could just click the first one hold down shift on your computer keyboard click there we've selected all of them press ctrl d and it's copied all of that and you can do that on more than one track so say we wanted to copy all of this ctrl d it's copied everything so now our levels are kind of all over the place we haven't done anything with our levels so let's open up the mixer you can go up to views and then just go down to console view and this is our mixer if you scroll up you can see there's more to the mixer and in here you can add effects you can use sends if you wanted and you can also control the solo mute arm for recording and all of that and you have your faders for your level right down here so that's what we're going to work on right now so let's just listen to everything back [Music] [Music] let's say we're happy with those levels right there and maybe we want to add some effects in here so you could just click on the plus sign for the effect and then go to insert audio effects and choose from the list here and don't worry if you don't have all of these plugins i have a ton of third-party plugins installed on here and i do have a video showing you how to install third-party plug-ins i'll link to that in the description but let's say i wanted to add a compressor i could do it this way compressor and there it is and we can also do it like we did before by clicking over here effects cake walk and i could just drag this into any of these effects sections so i'll drag there and we have that compressor now if i want to get rid of it i could just click here delete and it gets rid of one of those compressors so let's just hear how it sounds with this compressor on there [Music] alright now let's say our song is ready we have everything lined up the way we want we'll just close down this console here now our songs ready to be exported so that the world can hear it and you can see we have an export button right here so let's click on export we want to go to audio and you can choose whatever type of audio file you want i'm going to choose wave then you can select wherever it is you want to save it to i'll choose desktop and we can give it a name i'll just leave it at test test and you can change the sample rate if you want typically cd quality is forty four thousand one hundred and bit dvd quality is the 48 000. once you have this set we just click save you can see it's doing the mix down up here wait for it to stop and now on my desktop i have this test test file [Music] and there's our song ready to go now if you want to get even deeper into cakewalk and maybe check out some more cakewalk tutorials click up here or click down here to see what youtube recommends if you like this video 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 tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon

Channel: Audio Tech TV

Views: 40,730

Rating: 4.9647112 out of 5

Keywords: cakewalk by bandlab, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial, how to use cakewalk, how to use cakewalk by bandlab, cakewalk tutorial, cakewalk, free daw, bandlab cakewalk, cakewalk daw, bandlab, cakewalk tutorial for beginners, cakewalk bandlab, cakewalk sonar tutorial beginner, cakewalk for beginners, cakewalk sonar, how to use cakewalk for beginners, step sequencer cakewalk, cakewalk step sequencer, cakewalk by bandlab for beginners, making music with cakewalk, cakewalk vst instruments

Id: vArFTYlAvDk

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021