Hey guys, in this video we’re going to go through all the virtual instruments in Cakewalk
by BandLab.
Before starting this video, make sure you’ve checked out the previous tutorials on this
series to learn about how to record both audio and MIDI in this program.
Cakewalk includes a few different virtual instruments you can use to create music completely
within your computer.
It comes with a bass guitar, drum kit, synthesizer, electric piano, and strings.
Let’s go through each of these in detail.
Let’s start off with the bass.
Before we go adjusting the sound, we need something playing so we can hear it.
To make noise with the bass, you can click notes on the fretboard.
You can also use one of the included bass lines on the left side.
For example, we can open up the Rock section and choose Rock 01.
Then press the loop button to get it to keep playing.
The forward and backwards arrows are used to switch basslines.
The stop button stops the loop and the play starts it up again.
You can drag these loops to the bottom pattern grid to collect the ones you like.
This doesn’t play them all together, but it makes it easier to drop and drag them onto
the MIDI track when you start piecing together some music.
Now that we’ve got something playing, let’s look at what options we have.
On the left, we have our default programs that have a bunch of different bass sounds.
It’s worth scrolling through these and finding something close to what you’re looking for
before you go and start adjusting the other controls.
Right now, I’m just using default, but I can change it to a picked bass or something
else if I want to.
The first control on the bass is the tuning.
This can be used to detune the bass by less than a half note, so it’s in between normal
notes.
Next is the slides tool to adjust how slides and bends in your music sound.
The poly or mono switch selects how many voices the bass has.
In mono mode, there’s only one voice.
It sounds fine when playing the low notes, but the high notes sound like a distorted
pitch shifted version of the low notes.
I tend to keep this in poly mode.
Finally, you can switch between the bright jazz bass bridge pickup and the P bass pickup
The amp controls are below the bass.
The volume and pans are on the left.
There’s equalization for the bass, mid and treble frequencies in the middle, just like
you would have on a normal amp.
The
right side has a drive knob, which emulates overdrive when a tube amp is pushed.
Finally, there’s a compressor to clamp down on the dynamic range.
Of course, you could always just use a regular compressor plugin instead if you wanted to.
The next instrument is the drum kit.
Like the bass, this is also fairly useful.
The features are similar to the bass with the programs we can pick on the side and the
different drum beats, but we need to cover the different controls to adjust the drum
sound.
Once again, make sure to pick a drum kit that sounds best to you first.
They’re actually different sounds, not just adjusted settings on a main drum kit.
The main setting we need to concern ourselves with is the tuning.
The panning and volume are pretty self-explanatory.
We can adjust the pitch of all the drums up or down, and we can even do this with the
cymbals.
The nice thing is it actually changes the voice of the drums, instead of just pitch
shifting it.
So a high snare sound sounds a lot tighter, and a low tom tuning has that characteristic
loose head sound to it.
On the right we have a master volume for the whole kit.
There’s also a reverb control to adjust the amount of room noise.
You’re not really in control of how the room sounds, but it’s nice to have.
You could always just create a dry sound after and run it through a different reverb if you
really wanted to.
Last we have compression, which decreases the dynamic range.
With the drums compressed, everything lasts a lot longer.
This changes the sound depending on the kit you’re using and the tuning of the drums.
It has a lot more of an effect on drum that is tuned low that one that’s high and tight.
The Electric Piano virtual instrument is another cool included effect.
Like the others, it has some default built in programs and patterns to start with.
For controls, there are a few effects at the top.
They’re basically like pedals, so hit the switch to turn them on.
The drive increases the distortion and gives it more of a sawtooth tone.
The chorus makes it sound larger and like there are more playing together.
It also expands it out in stereo slightly.
The tremolo creates a wave of changes in amplitude.
You can adjust how big these changes are and how fast they happen with the depth and rate
knob.
On the piano itself, there are controls to change the tuning.
Like the bass guitar, we don’t have to go to specific notes, and we can bend the pitch
between notes.
The tone control adjusts the brightness roll off, kind of like a tone knob on an electric
guitar.
Then there’s just the simple panning and volume controls like the rest of the instruments.
The last of the SI plugins is the String section.
This contains a bass, cello, and violin.
The plugin automatically separates the notes on the piano roll and piano at the bottom
to whatever instrument they are in range of, so you can create music without having to
worry about that yourself.
Each instrument has its own volume and panning at the top so you can adjust the balance between
them.
In the middle, we have a master volume that controls all of them.
The attack and release basically control the smoothness of the note transitions.
With a 0 or near 0% attack and release, the notes start and stop really abruptly.
As we increase that, they start to get smoother.
When it gets closer to 100%, it gives us more of a swell effect.
On the right, we have chorus and reverb controls, just like with our previous effects.
Finally, there are tuning and tone controls like we had on others as well.
The one thing I really like about this plugin are the options available from the default
programs.
This plugin is capable of anything from a synth string section to a full orchestra,
so it’s very versatile for creating string sounds.
The last plugin included with this program is Cakewalk TTS-1.
This is completely different from the other ones.
It’s a software synthesizer that can create electronic sounds from just about any instrument
you can think of.
I like this for its versatility with all the different instruments, but the individual
sounds are not as good as dedicated plugins, and they usually have a lot less options.
There’s also no included beats or programs that you can just drag and drop onto the project
track, so you’ll have to make all those in the piano roll view.
Luckily, they did include a preview button to hear the sound the plugin is making with
certain presets and settings.
Each track here represents a MIDI channel.
They all have a chorus control, reverb, pan, and volume.
At the bottom, we can click a button to hear a preview of the sound it makes.
For more options and to change the preset we’re using, we have to click the edit square
at the top.
This brings up the options for that track.
To change what instrument you’re using, click on the instrument name in the center.
Then go under presets and select the instrument you would like to use.
We’ve got a lot of different options for piano, guitars, percussion, wind instruments,
brass instruments, strings, and some various sound effects.
The drum sounds are good for electronic kits, but not good for a more natural sounding acoustic
kit.
If I wanted electronic drums, I would use this and play around with the presets, but
for acoustic sounds I still with the SI-Drum Kit plugin we looked at earlier.
Thanks for checking out this video on the virtual instruments included with Cakewalk
by BandLab.
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