this cakewalk tutorial might seem a little small but this one trick can help you to finish
every single song or track that you start by using the cakewalk markers or the cakewalk arranger
track which is far more helpful than the markers i'm zane welcome to audio tech tv where it's my
goal to help you conquer the text you can unleash your creative beast now i just started working on
a new song and i thought i would share this trick with you that helped me to finish every single
song that i've started and it's so easy to do you can even use this as a songwriting tool if you
wanted and like i said earlier this is about using cakewalk markers or the cakewalker arranger track
and what we're going to do is create the structure of our song before we even start to record it and
this is going to help when we do start recording as we're going to know what each section is what
needs to be worked on and where it needs to be worked on so this is like having a roadmap
for your song and don't worry if you need to change things up later on you can easily
do that and i'm going to show you how easy it is by using the arranger track but first let's have
a look at cakewalk markers you might have used markers before they're very easy to use you just
put the cursor wherever you want it say right here press m on your computer keyboard then
give it a name and you can see we now have a marker right here but one thing you're going to
notice is the font is really small and it doesn't really stand out it's kind of gray on gray so it
may not help you the best just using the markers but if you're cool with using just the markers
then you can continue on with what i'm going to do just using the markers and not worry so much
about the arranger track except a little later on in the video where i show you some cool things
that you can do with the arranger track that you can't do with the markers but if you're just going
to be setting up the structure of your song and you're happy with the font size and how these
look then you can go with the markers but what i'm going to show you now is the arranger track
and if you don't see it already you can click over here on this a you can see we now have
the arranger track also if you didn't have the little sidebar collapse like i did there
you'll see the a is right here and another way you can do this is to press the a on your computer
keyboard and you can see that's going to bring it up and down so we have our arranger track now and
this is extremely easy to use and it helps you a lot more than markers in my opinion so what
i'm going to do now is based on the idea that we have a song written either in our head on paper
or wherever you write your songs down to i use microsoft onenote for all my songs so that's where
i have them all written but like i said what i'm doing is based on the idea we kind of have a song
written out in our mind and that's what we're going to work on here so for my song i want it to
start out with an 8 bar intro so all i have to do is click here and drag for eight bars there we go
and you can see we have section one now we want to rename this to something else so you
can double click on that and you can see it brings up the sections view over here or if you have this
collapsed you can just click there click on the a again and you can see all of your sections over
here so we'll double click right here you can see we can rename that so i'm going to call this intro
and we can also give this a color so let's say i want to give it that color there we go and another
cool thing you'll notice right away is there's a play button here so when we start to get our song
put together we can just play the section back if we really wanted to which can be really nice
if you're doing some fine details for a specific section this can really help you with that so you
might be wondering we haven't recorded anything we don't have really our song and subverts in our
head how do we know how long to make each section well what i do is i typically grab a guitar or my
bass guitar or sometimes i'll even sing along to the click track so i'll just let the click
track play and i'll play along to that and it will show me how many bars that section was
so then i know okay well that section is eight bars so then i'll do that for the next section
which will be the verse let's say so then i just click and drag we'll say the verse is going to be
16 bars which would bring us to 24 here there we go so we have section 2 rename that verse
and i don't mind this color so i'm gonna leave that color there and by you going through each
section individually playing along it's going to help you to really understand your song a little
more and sometimes you might figure out oh you know what i don't like that little extra part that
i added in there i'm gonna take that out so the song fits together nicely or maybe i want to add
a little section in and you can do that as well so this really helps you to get that structure
of your song and get your song figured out before you even start recording and if you really want
to use this like a songwriting tool then maybe you can set it up with some typical lengths like
an intro the maximum i would do for an intro is the eight bars and for my song i actually have
singing in the intro so it's a little bit better but usually i like my intros to be very short when
you're an unknown artist you want to get to the point right away so try not to make your intros
too long and then your verses typically a verse is going to be between 8 bars 16 bars and sometimes
10 but there really is no rule on this you can even do 12 bars so you can look up song structures
on the internet so if you're doing like say a pop song you can look up typical pop song verse length
and then you'll see how many bars that should be and you can start to just create these sections so
say you know you want your song to be verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus something like that
then you can look up how long a pop song verse is going to be how long a pop song chorus should
be and that sort of thing and you can continue on to create your song and then build it within
those bounds and i've done that before it's very useful as a songwriting tool but typically i just
use this before recording to create that road map for my song all right so now i have a project open
that i just kind of threw some information in this is actually the song that i'm working on i
just wanted to throw some info in here to show you some of the cool features that we can do
by using the arranger track so say we wanted to move this between chorus part that i have here
maybe we want to take that right out so what we can do is just click on it and you can see
when we click on it it highlights everything underneath if we had more and more tracks it's
going to highlight everything that's under it so you can click on that then right click and we can
delete it and it's deleted everything then we can just click on to each one of these
you could either click and then hold down control and click on each one or you can
click on this one then hold down shift and click there and it's going to select everything
and now we can just move it all back and it's moved everything along with it so we just easily
took out an entire section of our song and moved everything with very little effort so another cool
thing is we can duplicate a section so say this verse isn't as long as i wanted it i wanted it
to be twice as long or something like that i could right click on it duplicate and you
can see it just created a duplicate of that whole verse and you can shrink things down if you want
you can do that and you notice everything gets shrunken down and we could move everything over
if that's something we wanted to do and if we wanted to copy this say to the end or any
section to the end let's say we wanted to copy this course right here and put it after this one
so i could just click on it make sure everything's selected hold down control on my computer keyboard
then click and drag to there and you can see it's copied everything to the end and you can also do
the same thing and we can put it in between sections so let's do that so i'm clicking i'm
going to hold down control on my computer keyboard then click and drag and let's say
we want it right here before this verse i'll let go and it's just moved everything over it's that
easy and what i normally do to go along with this is i'll create empty tracks for all the
instruments and vocals that i want to go in it and then that way i know okay i've recorded bass
for up to here i know i need to record base for these parts over here or i need to copy the base
and put it over there and i have these scratch drums in here but if i had drums and i only had
them up to here i would know i need to create drums for those sections and i would have my
guitar tracks in here and i could see where i need to put guitars and that sort of thing it really is
a road map for your song and it's going to help you to complete your song because you can see the
start and the end and you know exactly what you want to go in between if you decide to use this
trick let me know down in the comments how it goes for you and if you want to check out even
more cakewalk tutorials click up here or click over here to see what youtube recommends if you
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thank you so much for watching for audio tech tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon