Hey guys, in this video we’re going to cover how to use Cakewalk by BandLab.
This is a completely free digital audio workstation that’s great to create your own music and
beats, using both audio and midi tools.
In this multi-part series, we’ll cover all the important features you need to use this
program.
The first thing we need to do is go to BandLab’s website and download the program.
I’ll link the website in the video description below.
Download the installer for the program and run it.
When it launches, you’ll be asked to sign up for BandLab or log in with your existing
account.
Once that’s done, the program has a software section where you can download Cakewalk.
When you do this, make sure you choose to download it with the instruments suite.
Once that’s done, you can install the program.
It will pretty much do all of this on its own.
Now that the program is installed, just run it.
When it starts up, it will run a VST scan to check for previously installed plugins
on your computer, and it will add them to the software.
Next, we set it to open an empty new project.
I don’t want to start with a template or previous project for this tutorial.
Let’s get started with the layout for this software.
Before we go in too much detail, I just want to point out the help module located in the
bottom right corner by default.
Highlight any button in the program, and this section will tell you what that button is
used for.
This will be very helpful for beginners when trying to learn how to use Cakewalk.
In the top left section, we have our different tool options.
The Smart tool does pretty much everything at once, depending on where you click.
I use this tool most of the time just for convenience.
The Select tool allow us to click and drag to select multiple sections of clips on different
tracks.
With the move tool, you can move audio and MIDI tracks.
If only a section of track is selected, it will move that section and split it from the
rest of the track.
The edit tool is to adjust MIDI notes, fades, volume, and note velocity.
The draw tool allows you to draw MIDI notes on a MIDI track.
The erase tool allows tracks or sections of track to be deleted.
The next section is the snap tool.
Click the large square button to turn it on and off.
Right click the bottom button to change the time resolution.
The switch allows you to snap to that note resolution on the timeline, or move it along
the timeline by that much.
The 3 allows you to snap to triplets, and the dot to dotted notes.
The little flag allows you to snap to landmarks, such as markers, clips, and MIDI notes.
To the right is the transport module.
This has all the buttons to navigate through your track, play, and record.
If you right click the record button, it brings up a menu with more options.
The recording mode can switch between comping, which creates different take lanes, overwrite
which overwrites previous recordings on that track, and sound on sound, which plays everything.
There’s also the setting to change the project tempo.
Next to the tempo, we have the time signature menu.
Use this to adjust the time signature of the project.
You can open up the menu and set different time signatures throughout the song if you
want.
The tools for the metronome are also in the transport section.
The top button turns on the metronome during playback.
The middle button turns it on during recording, and the bottom button opens the metronome
menu for more advanced configuration.
There’s quite a few different buttons to look at in the next section.
In the top row, we start with the mute and solo buttons for all the tracks.
The red dot is to arm and unarm all the tracks for recording.
Then there’s the input monitoring for all tracks.
The next row has a button to turn on and off all the effects.
Then there’s a button to turn on exclusive solo, which makes it so you can only solo
one track or bus at a time.
Then there’s the envelope offset tool and a button to enable and disable automation.
On the bottom row, there an option to turn on delay compensation while you’re recording.
Next there’s the dim solo mode.
With this enabled, unsoloed tracks still play, but at a lower level.
Then there’s a button to upsample the sample rate for compatible plugins.
The last option is clear automation write enables for all armed tracks.
The next section we have is for looping.
If we select a section of track by clicking and dragging on it, we can click the loop
region from selection.
Above that there’s the button to turn looping on or off.
To the right, we can manually adjust the start and stop of the loop.
I like using the looping with the snap tool on, since then it can create a seamless loop
that doesn’t jump in time whenever it starts over.
One cool feature we can see next is the mix recall.
This will allow us to have separate mixes.
This is really useful, especially if you’re doing a mix for someone else.
You can save a copy of the mix you sent them, and make changes on a different copy.
That way if you make a change that didn’t work out well, you can go back to a previous
version really easily.
Just a tip though, if you see that the options are greyed out, it’s because you need to
have a saved version of the project first before it will work.
Next the mix recall is the performance meter.
The top section shows your hard drive space, so you don’t run out of space in the middle
of a recording.
There’s also a section for ram usage, since using too much will seriously start to degrade
the performance of the program.
We’ve already seen how to make a time selection earlier by highlighting sections of the track
with the looping tool, but we can also do with the selection section.
The top button sets the start of the selection to the cursor location.
The bottom button sets the end position to the cursor location.
The Punch In/Out section allows us to select a section of track.
When we record without enabling this, it records the entire section.
When enabled, it only records between the punch in and punch out sections.
The top button turns it on and off.
The bottom button sets the punch in and out times to the time selection.
You can also manually enter the time by clicking on the in and out time and typing them in.
There’s a few more options on the right side of the top menu.
The Screen menu lets you switch between different screen views.
If you select a different one, you get set back to default and can move sections around
and change what it looks like.
Then you can easily go back to a different view by clicking on it again.
The ACT menu lets you set up a control surface.
We’ll look at this more in a future video.
Markers lets you jump between different markers that are on your project timeline.
Under this menu, there’s also the option to add a marker.
It will default to adding it where the cursor is on the timeline, or you can manually change
it.
You’ll also be able to give the marker a name, but you don’t have to.
The events section gives us information about a particular MIDI event.
It shows information such as the time, note, velocity, and duration.
The Sync module allows you to sync with external sources, and you can set it up with different
framerates used in video production.
The custom module is for assigning different shortcuts.
The left section has tools for the clip, track, ProChannel and mixing.
The clip section gives us specific properties about a recorded clip.
Here we can rename a clip to keep the project organized.
Some are tools allow us to mute a specific clip, lock it in the project, and add effects
to a specific clip.
The track properties allows us to rename tracks, change automation settings, and change the
entire track to a different color.
The ProChannel section gives us options for mixing.
We’ll go into more detail on this in a future tutorial.
The entire center section of the program is used for the track layout with different recording
and editing options.
I’ll go over this in the next tutorial on how to record audio tracks.
On the right side, we have a few more sections.
The Media menu lets us look through different folders.
We can access all our audio and project files that are saved elsewhere on the computer from
here.
The plugins menu lets us browse all the effects we can apply to our tracks.
It’s organized into the types of effects and has all the plugins that were included
in the program, as well as those that it found when it was scanning VSTs earlier.
Finally, we have the notes menu.
You can set the track name, album, artist, and copyright information here.
You can also add whatever other notes you want to help you during the mixing process,
or just with the project in general.
The Behringer UM2 is the perfect audio interface for someone that just needs a simple way to
plug in an XLR microphone or instrument into their computer.
This USB device features a preamp for the XLR microphone with 48V phantom power for
condenser microphones, and an instrument level input for recording guitar and bass.
Check out the link in the video description to get one for yourself.
Thanks for checking out this introductory video on Cakewalk by BandLab.
If you found this video helpful, don’t forget to give it a like and subscribe to the channel.
There’s also links to our social media in the video description, as well as the software
and products featured in this video.