Cakewalk by BandLab is a free digital audio workstation with Windows with lots of professional
features.
Today, we’ll look at everything that can be done in Cakewalk for recording music, including
some of its special plugins and tools that not all other digital audio workstations have.
More for details on how to use Cakewalk, we have done a full tutorial series on this software
that could be helpful.
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I’m a big fan of Cakewalk as a free digital audio workstation since it’s completely
packed with features to do any type of recording, from electronic music to full band recordings.
Let’s go over what this software is able to do and look at some of the most interesting
things that not everyone is aware of as well.
Audio recording in Cakewalk is one of its main features.
With this program, we can connect our audio interface and record as many channels as the
audio interface has all at once on separate tracks.
So if I’m recording a drum kit, I can have separate tracks for my overheads, a few mics
on the toms, separate mics for the top and bottom of the snare and kick drum.
With my Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 audio interface, Cakewalk will allow me to record 16 microphone
inputs at the same time.
After that, we can trim the clips, cut them up and rearrange them, or even take multiple
takes of the recording and combine them to splice it up into one best performance.
The audio recording features in Cakewalk allow us a lot of control over these tracks.
After everything is recorded, we can use the included mixing controls.
Starting with the mixer view, we can adjust the volume and panning of everything to get
the balance right and position it in space.
Then we can add plugins, which can change our sound with compression, equalization and
more.
Cakewalk has the included Sonitus plugins, but we can also add our own VST plugins to
the software through the settings, so it adds some customization to the software.
Some of the plugins that are included are delay, compression, multiband compression,
noise gating, equalization, wahwah, phaser, modulation, reverb, and surround.
Cakewalk has another way to add effects and mix the audio through the ProChannel.
The ProChannel has more effects used to color the sound.
We have console plugins used to emulate console hardware, equalization, compression, driver,
and more through the ProChannel.
The effects can be subtle, but they can add warmth and color to the final song if we use
it on every track.
Moving on from audio, Cakewalk also has a lot of features of MIDI and electronic music
production.
MIDI allows us to record an instrument as events on the piano roll that have time, velocity
and note values, so it’s not actually sound until it runs through an instrument plugin.
MIDI can be added in Cakewalk through the piano roll manually by drawing in all the
notes at the right time.
The piano roll is also used to edit MIDI clips that are recorded from a MIDI keyboard.
Cakewalk supports MIDI keyboards that are connected over USB, or through MIDI cables
connected to a USB audio interface.
Using a MIDI keyboard lets us record the MIDI events a lot faster than with the piano roll.
For MIDI, I’m using the AKAI MPK249 USB MIDI keyboard with 49-keys, 16-drum pads,
and automation controls.
Since MIDI only sends signals to an instrument to make sound, we need to have some of these
instruments installed to produce any sound with MIDI in Cakewalk.
There is an included set of high-quality instruments called the Studio Instruments plugins that
can be installed with Cakewalk.
This gives us drums, bass, strings, and keyboard with a lot of different presets to change
the sounds, and knobs to tweak them more from there.
After that we can also mix the instrument track with plugins in the same way we did
for audio.
There’s also the Cakewalk TTS-1 synthesizer, but I don’t use this too much because the
instruments sound fairly electronic and there are better options available.
We can also install our own VST instrument plugins from different developers to work
with Cakewalk by BandLab.
I have some plugins that were included with my MIDI controllers that I use, as well as
some synthesizers from Tracktion.
There’s also a lot of free instrument plugins available online that can be downloaded and
installed, and we’ve done videos on some of the best free instruments available.
Like most digital audio workstations, Cakewalk also allows us to use automation on all the
tracks.
Automation lets us write changes in volume, panning, and plugin controls to our track
that are then read and played back whenever the track plays.
So this allows us to do things like set the volume level different for one section of
the song, like turning it up or down.
We can also change a plugin control for a section, or pan the track left or right for
a section of the song.
All these automation controls can be drawn on the track, written by playing the track
and changing the knobs, or added in with the automation controls like faders and knobs
on a MIDI controller.
After everything is recorded, MIDI is tracked, the song is mixed and the automation is applied,
you can export the song as a variety of file types to save or share.
Now let’s get into some of the more interesting features of Cakewalk by BandLab, starting
with the Overloud TH3 plugin.
This is kind of a demo plugin that’s included but has many options and presets to get started
with.
Overloud TH3 is a guitar amp simulator plugin.
That means it can take a guitar signal that we record by plugging the guitar directly
into the audio interface and process it to sound as if it were run through a guitar amp.
There’s different combinations of amps, speaker cabinets, microphones and even guitar
effects pedals included.
One of the cool things this allows us to do is use Cakewalk to practice electric guitar
through our headphones without having to use an amp.
We can apply the plugin to the track, turn on input monitoring, and listen as the guitar
amp processing is applied in real-time.
Another tool we have in Cakewalk by BandLab is a free autotune demo plugin called Melodyne
Essential.
We can use this for basic pitch correction or even changing the pitch.
Melodyne is also used to convert some audio clips to MIDI, but we did a separate video
on that and the results were not that great.
There are also free autotune plugins like GSnap that can be added as VST plugins, and
those even have the option to use a MIDI input from another track to determine what pitch
to snap to for the autotune.
The last tool we can use in Cakewalk by BandLab is drum replacement.
If we record a drum kit with separate microphones on the snare and kick, we can use the drum
replacement to track whenever there’s a kick or snare hit, then swap out that audio
for samples.
This can be used if we don’t have great recordings to reinforce the sound, or if we
don’t have a very nice sounding kit.
With this, we can add individual hits that are missed, remove hits, and really dial in
the drum replacement tool so it captures all the snare or kick hits.
We can completely replace them or blend them together.
One last thing this can do is allow us to drag the audio clip onto a MIDI track.
Then we can take all the events that the drum replacement program has capture and turn them
into MIDI events.
This lets us take our drum recording and play it through a virtual instrument plugin like
the Studio Instruments Drums plugin instead, but we can only really do this with isolated
drums like kick, snare, and toms.
Thanks for checking out this video on Cakewalk by BandLab.
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