How to use the Matrix View in Cakewalk by Bandlab

in this video we're going to be learning how to use the matrix view in cake walk by band lab [Music] hi folks i'm mike and i hope you're well so if you've ever dived into the matrix view and cakewalk by bandlab without reading the manual then you may have been there for a minute or two before you just went not sure what this is all about maybe not useful to me and then you left well i'm gonna demystify the matrix view for you in this video and i'm going to show you that it's quite simple to use and really could be very very useful to you as a composition tool especially so let's get started with an overview so i thought we'd start off with an overview of the matrix view so you can get a good idea of what it's all about and how it may be useful to you then we're going to delve into exactly how to set it up and fine tune it so it becomes really useful to you so i've got the matrix view open here in my cake walk there's a couple of ways you can open up you can go up to views here and then click on matrix view or you can press alt 5 on your keyboard to open it up with a keyboard shortcut now when you first open it up you're going to see a blank grid of these light gray squares these are what we're going to call cells now i think the best way to think of these cells as pads on a drum pad machine okay don't think of this as any kind of timeline there's no sort of these are not bars we're not moving along with the timeline or anything like that here in fact any of the contents of these cells i'll take some here can be anywhere on this grid that you like okay well there's some restrictions to that we'll get on that onto that later but essentially you can reorder these as you wish and just think of them as triggers as pads on a drum pad which are going to trigger one of two types of things that we can put in these cells we can either put midi data in there so some midi notes which we can use to trigger either an external instrument or a virtual instrument from cape walk and the other type of thing that we can put on there is audio data okay or just audio clips is a nicer way to say it so i've got a couple of thing or a couple of types of things in there already so we'll start off by clicking on this cell here and i'm going to click on the play button here to actually play it i've got some midi data in there which is being used to trigger the si drum kit which comes with cakewalk i'll click on it so you can have a listen now with the way i've got that set up at the moment it will play in a continuous loop until i click on it again then it'll wait till it gets to the end of that loop before it stops playing it doesn't stop playing immediately with the way i've got it set up at the moment you can set it up so it will stop immediately but just so you understand what's happening the first click on it is starting the loop and the second click is stopping the loop now as i say we can either have midi data like that on there or we can have some audio data so let's click on this one here this is a some guitar let's have a listen so we've got those two types of things that we can play now how can we mix them up a little bit well there's some rules about how we can mix them up so first of all let's look at this first row this is actually made up of the midi data and there's some variations on the beat that i've got here so i'll play this one and then have a listen to the second one it's just a slight variation on the snare drum there okay now the important thing to understand is that with each row we can only play one thing at a time so i couldn't play those two beats at exactly the same time okay now if i did want to play two beats at exactly the same time then i'd have to put them on different rows okay now columns are quite different within a column you can play one two three four as many as you like within the same column okay now let's demonstrate that so i'm going to start off by playing this beat here which is the first row the first column i'll play on that there's the beat now let's add in some bass guitar i'll play that now [Music] so i've got those two things playing simultaneously and then i'll add in some [Music] guitar so you can see there i'll just wait for that base to stop you can see there that if we start to mix and match some of these cells then we can actually start to really improvise some different parts to our songs as we go along now there's a couple of different ways that we can trigger these cells the way that i'm showing you here is with the mouse it's probably the least useful way because you can only click on one thing at a time what if you wanted to trigger two three four or more of these cells at the same time well the best way to do that is to have it triggered with the keyboard now i've got some triggers set up with my keyboard so i can play for example i move my mouse over here so you can see i'm not using it so i can play that first bump drum beat by with a key on my keyboard like so and the same again the first time i click on the compressor on the keyboard it starts the loop the second time i press it it will stop the loop when it gets to the end of that measure so that makes it really handy because i can start two at the same time i can do this [Music] so you can see there that the bass guitar and the drums were triggered at the same time another way that we can trigger several at the same time it's slightly less flexible but you may find it useful is to actually trigger a whole column you can see up here i've got some columns named as main main variation two break one break two so i can click on the top of that column and it's going to play everything in there let's have a listen let's go to break one [Music] so very very useful you could actually sort of set up if you like um just some really straightforward variations say verse verse two you know variation chorus chorus variation and just have it set up so that you can then kind of improvise that as you go along so that's the basis of how it works but there's lots of changes that we can make to this so that we can trigger these cells in different ways and have them have sort of different behaviors now you may wonder well what's the point of just sitting here and improvising things what's the end result well the the end result is that you can use the record feature here and then capture a performance and improvisation or just a performance of you using those cells and that's actually going to record on your main timelines at the top we'll get on onto that much much later but that's an overview of how the matrix sort of works and how you may find it useful next we're going to go into exactly how i set this demo up and you can follow along with me so i've got a blank project open and i want to add some midi cells to my matrix view here but i'll need to be able to hear them so i've got to load in a virtual instrument so i'm going to load in a virtual instrument which comes with cakewalk for free it's called sr drum kit and if we go over to the right here i'll just make sure plugins is selected here then i'll make sure instruments is selected then i'll go to the cakewalk folder and i'll double click on si drum kit there double click on that now i'm going to insert this just as a simple instrument so i've just got simple instrument track selected there and i'll click ok and you'll see that appear as a track i'm just going to click on these double down arrows here so that we can expand that and see what we've got and then i'm just going to double click or click on this icon at the top here which is actually going to open up that instrument we can hear it now cool now i want to change that to a different sounding drum kit so i'll just go up to the top left here click on that i'm going to double click on garage kit there just to open up a slightly nicer sounding drum kit in my opinion cool so we've got our sound now now we want to actually create some midi data in these cells to trigger that sound and i'm actually going to use some of the grooves which come with this plug-in so you can see them here on the left-hand side i'm going to expand the hip-hop folder i'm going to grab this groove here hip-hop 01 just going to grab it with my left mouse button and drag it over to this cell and drop it there now if you didn't know this is quite a common thing to be able to do with plugins not just cakewalk plugins lots of commercial plugins do this where you've got some grooves which are essentially midi data you can drag them out of the plugin now in this case we dragged it to the matrix view but you could also drag it up here to a midi track there and you can see that there now that's very handy because then you can go in and edit that so you can create variations i'll undo that now the key night amongst you will have noticed something when i did drag it onto the matrix view not only did i drag it there and it created that row it also created a new midi track up here in the main view i'll click on those double arrows again so that we can expand that and you can actually see that we've got this midi track called matrix midi row one that's what it called it by default i'm just going to rename it to drum matrix so it's a bit more user-friendly we can see what we're doing now it created that midi track and then it's also added the midi data in there however if we click on play now we won't hear anything at all and that's because it hasn't been routed through to the si drum kit so we need to make sure the output for this midi track if i just drag this bottom part down here so we can see the output has the si drum kit selected so i'll go down i'll click on that and click on si drum kit so now the output for this midi track is to the si drum kit i'll click on play and now you'll hear the drums so we've got our first basic cell set up and it's playing that drum beat now i actually want to do a slight variation on this drum beat that i've got there but in order to do that rather than drag another one of these variations that they've got there i want to make it my own i'm actually going to drag the same one out of here onto the si drum kit track up here okay so this is just a regular sort of midi information i can close my drum kit now i don't need it anymore i'm going to double click on that little clip that i put there to open up now the piano view and i'm just going to add a couple of snare beats on in the last sort of bar there so this is the snare note here i'm just going to add one in there by double clicking add another one in there double clicking and i've got two snare beats at the end i think they're probably going to be a little bit too loud so i'm just going to drag their velocity down so they're a little bit quieter and i'll just return my playhead back to the beginning click on play and you can hear those two little snare beats at the end there close my piano roll view now and now what i can do if i open up the matrix view it's on this tab down here i can now drag this little bit of midi there down to that second cell okay and there we have our variation so we've got the original drum beat here and then the variation [Music] cool so that's another way that we can add midi into a cell we can actually drag it off of a track which is already there now i don't need this anymore so i'll select it and i'll click on delete and that gets rid of that you can also drag midi information um straight from your desktop or from your computer and drag it into catewark and drop it there or you may have some midi here in the media folder if you've got that set up for some different folders there for example in here i've got the midi groove clips folder and i could select some midi from there and drag it onto those cells there's a few different ways that you can get it in so now that i've done that i've got my drum kit with its two variations i'm going to rename these cells so the first one i'll rename to drums01 pretty original naming scheme here and i'll rename the second one to drums two okay cool so that's some drums let's go ahead and add some bass so again at the top here on the right hand side i'm going to need some bass so i'll go to plugins make sure instrument is selected and this time i'm going to double click on si bass guitar so double click on that i'm going to keep it again as a simple instrument track i'll click on ok and you'll see that the bass appears there again i'll just click on the double down arrows and i'll just click on its icon there to open up that bass guitar and that's working fine and again i'm just going to use some grooves which come along with this one so i'm going to open up the hip hop folder there and i'm going to just drag on hip hop 01. now i'm going to do it to a new row okay because i don't want this to trigger the drum sounds i want it to trigger the bass i'll drip drag it onto a new row drop it there and as we can see a new row has been created and if we scroll here we can see the new midi track which is created there again i'll just expand that using those double arrows drag it out a little bit more and set its output there to si bass guitar okay so now that i've got that routed through to there i'm going to then just rename it to um of course bass matrix that just makes it easier for me so any sound is going to come from here is going to be played through the bass we'll just click on play here to test that absolutely fine and then i'm just going to grab this one here i'm just going to double check which one i want i think it's hip hop o2 i'll double check click on it yeah that's fine that's the one i want so i'll just drag that out down to here and that's that one will create i don't need to i don't need to edit this with the midi or anything on this occasion i'll just close off that plugin rename that to you guessed it base 1 and rename this one base 2 okay cool so now i can start off by playing my drums i'll click on there and i'll add in some bass [Music] let's do a variation on the bass [Music] and the second drums [Music] now we can stop everything by clicking here that just stops all cells from playing so that's a quick introduction as to how you can add some midi in there really useful that you can add some grooves from your favorite plugins or you can create or edit your own midi up in the timeline and then drag that down to cells and get rid of it after you've done your little bit of editing so we've got some midi available there now the other thing we want to add in is some audio so the next thing i want to do is add some audio it's really really easy there's several different ways you can get it in first of all you could drag it off of your desktop onto cakewalk you can add audio in that way the other thing you can do is add some existing audio from your project so if i scroll down here in my project i've got some audio here some guitar recorded i'm just going to drag it from there onto my matrix view and there you can see that's appeared now for this demonstration i'm not going to do it in that way so i'll undo that and i'll actually get rid of that audio the way i'm going to demonstrate it to you for this tutorial is to drag it from my audio live up here so i've got my media tab open i've got the audio library selected here from the drop down and you can see in there now i'm going to make this audio available for you for download from my website i'll put a link in the description i'm not going to go into how you get it into the audio library here okay that's beyond the scope of this tutorial you can just drag it off of your desktop into the project if you want to follow along but i'm going to be dragging it from my audio library so i'll take the first one which is just called guitar and i'll drag it across now importantly i can't drag it onto one of these first two rows because they are midi rows okay which i've already created and you can't mix and match midi with audio on the same rows in the matrix view so i'll drag it to a new cell down here on a new role i'll release it there and you'll see that it's appeared there and also up in our main view up here it's created this new audio track i'll click on the double arrows again to open that it's called matrix audio row three i'll re i'm going to rename that just to make it a bit more pretty to guitar you know guitar matrix okay so i've renamed that now i can just go ahead and play that guitar let's have a listen okay it's a little bit too loud for me actually um so i'm just going to make sure that's selected and then i've got its uh fader available here i'll just drag it down like so somewhere down there should be fine a bit louder and that's it i've got my audio in this it's not quite as complex as adding midi audio now the next thing i'm going to do is add a variation to that so i've got guitar variation and i'm just going to drag that to this cell here okay now they're both going to be coming out of the same output so that's cool i don't have to say anything to set anything up new there so here's the variation [Music] okay so i've got my little sort of loop of guitar there playing with that now i actually want to do some variations for the break for the guitar break so i'm going to drag that onto a different row so i'll grab guitar break one here and i'll grab it onto a different row now as we can see the default thing is when we drop to a new row there it creates a new row depending on whether it's midi or audio it creates a new track up here so it's created that new track me sorry matrix audio row four now i actually don't want it to do that i want my audio to come out of the same guitar channel as the first ones that i had adhered so i'm just going to go to the drop down selection here on that new row and select the output as guitar matrix okay so now this one and this one are actually coming out of the same output in my console so i don't need this new row or this new audio output which was created here so i'll select that right click and delete it okay so i've just got one audio track for the guitar so that's very cool um actually we can play these at the boat that's both at the same time so like this and that can be very useful of course now i'm going to add another guitar break in their guitar break two and you'll hear if i play these they're just a harmony of each other so this one and this one so of course the problem there is because it's harmony i can't play it at the same time as this one because remember the rule we can't play two things on the same row at the same time so i'm just going to drag it down to a new row and again the same thing happens it's created a new audio track up there matrix audio row five i don't want that so i'll just select guitar matrix as my output there and i'll delete that one that it um it created there so i'll go to delete and that means because these are now on separate rows they can be played at the same time so like so [Music] very useful indeed let's put the whole thing together a little bit now so i'll start off by playing my drums let's have some bass guitar [Music] let's add in the first guitar oh didn't press it [Music] okay very cool now let's go to another variation with the base let's add in those guitar breaks [Music] i'll click up here clicking on the exclamation mark up there stops all of the cells from playing so very very quickly there i've created a situation where i could kind of improvise and put together a composition on the fly very useful indeed now as i mentioned earlier you can set this up a little bit easier than i was doing it there so if you just click um on this here for example this top row of the top marker on the column there or just click on that place everything in that column and we can right click on there and rename it to something like uh i've no verse fine oops if you spell it right so we can play the verse if we click on that click on it again to stop it as per normal so obviously you can rearrange some of these you can make copies of these cells really easy so if we just drag it like so it's just going to drag it around but if we hold control on the keyboard and drag it'll actually make a copy of that so you can make copies of these rows of items and then create variations for different verses courses that kind of thing that's the basic setup now let's look into a little bit of how we actually control the behaviour of these cells by the way are you finding this video useful if you are go ahead and hit the like button for me do it right away so you don't forget and if you do like this kind of content make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you're notified about my other videos now back to this video so let's look at how we can change the behavior of these cells first of all we've got it set up to its sort of default setting at the moment whereas if we click on a cell it's going to play that cell all the way through as a loop and when we click it again it's going to stop when it's completed the measure and that's because we have this set to measure up here that's the kind of stop behavior now if we want to stop immediately we can just change this to a media and then when we click on this i'll click again and it stops right away so just like so that's an immediate stop we could change it to beat so that at least plays to the end of the next beat that makes it more musical in terms of stopping so i can't do anything too unmusical there and then we've got some sort of different variations or segments of beats that we can choose there as well i'm going to change it back to measure for now and continue this demonstration the next thing that we can control is whether it loops or plays through once or not so we can change this from looping as it's set here so it only plays each cell once we'll click on that when it gets to the end i don't have to click again to stop it okay i'm going to set that again back to loop the next thing that we can control is the latch mode now this one's really really important at the moment we're clicking once to start and clicking again to stop but with latch mode um on like so or off like so then what we actually do is it plays as long as we're holding down so i'll hold down with the mouse key and release and it just stops as soon as i release now this applies as well later on when i've shown you how to map this to your midi keyboard the same behavior applies that can be very very useful indeed i'll switch it back to its default state at the moment now the next thing that we control is the re-trigger mode now this relates to when we have the main timeline playing so i've clicked play up here when we have this set at the moment when we click on this you'll see it just continues to play around in a loop and then when we click it again it stops if we have this set on we start and it will play in the loop but when we click again it will go back to the beginning like so click again click again and it's continuing to go back to the beginning switch that off click again and it stops okay that's more of our normal behavior so in other words um this means that when the main timeline is playing every time we click it will go back to the beginning when it reaches the end of its cycle normally when we click for the second time it stops yeah so that changes that behavior the next thing or the last thing i'm going to show you here is the cell start mode so what this does is again it synchronizes what's happening here with the main timeline up here so if the main timeline is playing and we start um if we click on this for an immediate start i'll just set this to on then if we're in the middle of a bar it will start playing from the middle of this sort of little loop here so i'll try and hit it in the middle of a bar like now so that didn't work because we have to have this on immediate in the middle of a bar and you can see it plays from the middle of the bar but as you saw there i did have to have it set to a medium so that's ways of controlling the way these cells behave globally to switch this off so i'm going to set it back to default at the moment now the keen amongst you will have already noticed that this is useful but not that useful to have all of these cells behaving exactly the same way so you can do some variations in terms of the loop mode and the latch mode and you can see those two icons relating to that here so if i want to change this guitar so that it doesn't loop i can just click on there and it's only going to play through once when i click on it okay wait for that to go through and it just plays through once likewise i could change the latch mode so that if i want to play this guitar i have to hold down on it while it's playing [Music] because i've set that to immediate i can do some cool things so it can be really useful if you really want to sort of freestyle with a sample that you've got in there may not necessarily even be a loop it could just be a chord or some sort of sound that you want to play and trigger it and then you'll just be using this matrix view more just like the way that you would normally use a drum pad okay so we can change individual behaviors in terms of the way that we loop and also the latch mode if we want to set that back to it's whatever the global setting is or just sync it with the global settings just hold ctrl on the keyboard and then click on those icons and it will make sure they're the same as the global setting so it's obviously incredibly useful if we can trigger these cells using our piano keyboard or something like drum pads then we can trigger more than one cell at the same time it's very easy to do we'll start off by triggering this bass here now remember this is a midi cell and that midi is then playing the bass guitar instrument so what we have to do is right click on that cell and then click on midi learn and then press a key on our keyboard now i'm going to choose the middle d so i'll press that [Music] now you heard that note of d being played on the bass guitar because i've got it selected at the moment that's an issue we need to get around but let's just first of all press that key again and you'll hear the pattern start i'll press it again now the obvious issue there is it's playing that pattern but it's also playing the note of d the note that i'm pressing on the keyboard now if you've tried to get around this already just by changing the input here you may have done what i did originally which is go to input and then select none cleverly thinking ah then it won't it can continue to receive the input we'll select none but look what happens on cakewalk it actually goes to omni because selecting none here is a way of saying i'm not selecting any of these and therefore cakewalk selects all of them so that is not a workaround that works we will still get the same result we can still hear that note of d and the problem is is that we actually stop that the problem is we actually have input mod or input echo switched on if we try and switch it off it won't switch off and that's because we have this track selected cakewalk by default i believe is set up so that whatever track you have selected um will be we'll have that input echo on now i've changed it to drums now i'll again press the d on the keyboard of course it starts the bass guitar but now it's playing the drum i don't want that so we'll get around that by going up to edit preferences and then we'll go down to midi and then playback and recording and we'll go down and switch off always echo current midi track we'll switch that off click apply close that off now we can select a track without the echo automatically coming on we can switch on if we want to but it doesn't automatically come on that's very very useful because now if i press that d on the keyboard press it again to stop then that's actually just going to play that little loop without us hearing the sound of the note itself okay the same goes for audio except we don't have to worry about that issue so if i was now to go to this guitar cell here which is an audio cell i'll right click i'll click on midi learn and i'm going to do middle e this time i've pressed that on my keyboard you didn't see it but i did it now when i press it again it starts that cell from playing so now i can press two at the same time and all is good now something like this at the top here one of these functions which is the stop all cells function you can also assign that to a midi key so i'll right click on that click on midi learn i'm just going to do a note down here the b now that's going to stop everything from playing if it is playing so again i'll start those two if i press b it stops everything okay um now the other thing that we can do is set it up so that we can actually play whole columns here so if i just want to set it up i'll do a little further up my keyboard so this one here i'll right click um i'll click on midi learn and i'll click on a c and octave up to start that and then with this one over here i'll click on right click and click on midi learn i'll do another note for that so now i can use the two notes on my keyboard to start off with the main part [Music] go to the variation [Music] and then i can stop it using that one key so the midi learn function really easy to use on here now you can take control of the whole matrix using either keys on your midi keyboard or as i say with drum pads as well now that you've got all that happening and you can start to improvise a really sort of cool beat how do you go ahead and then record your performance that's what we'll be looking at next so it's all very well being able to freestyle with the matrix view either by using your mouse or by using keys on your keyboard or drum pad but how do you capture that performance well it's very very easy you go to this kind of record type icon up here above the matrix view you click on that and that's now going to capture what you do with either your mouse on these cells or with keys on your keyboard now the other thing i like to do is synchronize it with the main transport so i'll click that on there and you'll see the effect of that in a moment because i'm going to start off by pressing a key on my keyboard which is the c key now i've got that map so it plays the whole column you'll see that flashing there it's ready to start playing those cells but it's not playing those cells yet because i have got that synchronized switched on as soon as i hit play up here [Music] you'll see that it starts to record the action from those cells i'll press the variation [Music] then i'll go to the break [Music] okay so that has recorded that performance you can see it all there you can see that where is a midi cell it has recorded so i just switched this off here it has recorded midi dash in there which you could go in and you could actually edit that and then it's actually recorded all the audio now in the case of where i've got um several audio things playing at the same time but i've got assigned them assigned to one track as you saw me do earlier it actually records them to different take lines you can see it's created there in cakewalk so it's actually all still coming from the same channel and you'll see it from one channel on your console but you've got all the individual bits of audio on each take lane there very very handy indeed now a couple of times during this tutorial you will have heard that when i press stop and it happened just those there will be a bass note or something that will continue to play that's because there's a midi cell and it's already triggered that long bass note and just because i've stopped the cell or stopped the transport it hasn't stopped that note from playing just as a little tip it may be handy if you're getting a lot of that to actually convert that from a midi track to an audio track that just involves freezing the track capturing the parts that you want and then grabbing them as audio and dragging them down to cells just a little tip in case that's happening for you as it was for me so if you tried and failed to use the matrix view before let me know in the comments down below if you're still confused ask questions down there and i'll try my very best to help you out while you're there check out the description you'll find the links there to some of the files that i used in this tutorial so that you can follow along and also check out the link to my patreon page where for as little as one dollar per month you can help me help you by making more videos like this and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 12,542

Rating: 4.991199 out of 5

Keywords: How to use the Matrix View in Cakewalk by Bandlab, Cakewalk Matrix View Tutorial, Cakewalk by Bandlab, cakewalk, free daw, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial, cakewalk tutorial, how to use cakewalk by bandlab, how to sample in cakewalk, matrix view in cakewalk, how to use the matrix in cakewalk, how to load samples in matrix from cakewalk, how to use matrix like mpc, mpc style in cakewalk, hip hop beat in cakewalk, how to use midi in cakewalk matrix, live loops, creative sauce

Id: E8VHm2X7aPw

Length: 36min 7sec (2167 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CreativeSauce2B]

Hi folks! The Matrix View in Cakewalk by Bandlab allows you to improvise a composition and record your actions! Check out my video, demystifying the Matrix!