in this cakewalk tutorial I'm going to do a cakewalk MIDI keyboard setup and
then I'm going to show you how to record with your MIDI keyboard I'm Zane welcome
to simple green tech where I do weekly audio tech tips tutorials and reviews to
help you conquer the tech and unleash your creativity
now the MIDI keyboard that I'm using for this cakewalk by bandlab tutorial is
the m-audio keystation mini 32 I've linked to it in the description below in
case you want to check out the latest pricing on it or get some more
information I've also included a link to the video review that I did on this MIDI
keyboard now before you open up cakewalk make sure your MIDI keyboard is plugged
in all right now with cakewalk open let's go up to edit and then click on
preferences and you want to go down under the MIDI column here and click on
devices and you should see your device listed in
the inputs here and for this cakewalk tutorial I'm just going to focus on the
input devices if you want to send MIDI out of cakewalk to an external MIDI
instrument you can set it up in the output devices but for this cakewalk
MIDI tutorial I'm only focusing on the input device so if you see your device
here click the checkbox beside it make sure
it's checked and then you want to go down here and click OK now you can
either open an existing project or start a new project
for this I'm going to start a new project
and now over in the browser area over here click on this keyboard looking icon
and then you'll see a list of your instruments in here and if you want to
add more third-party instruments and you don't know how to add plugins I've
linked to my video showing you how to add VST plugins into cakewalk so you can
check that out to add more plugins into your cakewalk library but for this I'm
going to go to the piano and I'm just going to use the piano plugin that comes
with cakewalk so you click drag it over to this section here let go and you'll
see that it's now created a new instrument track and you can click here
to see more information but to see the interface of that plug-in you want to
click on this keyboard here and here's our plug-in interface now
press a key on your keyboard make sure it works all right so my keyboard setup
it's working now if your keyboards not working you might want to go back into
the preferences and make sure that your keyboard is actually checked off in
there so just go back check it off click OK and then you can come back and it
should be working and we're now ready to record so you
want to hit this red button right here and this arms the track to record
basically it tells cakewalk that you want to record what you're playing on
this track and if you left it unarmed you could still play along with your
song but it wouldn't record the MIDI before we get into the recording I just
want to ask if you're enjoying this cakewalk tutorial so far can you please
give it a thumbs up it really helps my channel out and I appreciate it so much
now let's get back into the cakewalk tutorial now before we hit record make
sure that this button right here is clicked on and this enables the
metronome while you're recording and then we just want to click this button
right here and it will start to record you
you
and we now have our MIDI clip and if our playing was off a bit we can just double
click on it like this and it's going to bring up the piano roll
so you could just manually click on your notes and then drag them over so they're
in line like that or you can press
ctrl-a on your computer keyboard and that's going to select all of our notes
and then you can press Q on your computer keyboard and that's going to
bring up this quantize menu and you can select where you want to quantize it to
I usually go with the eighth note click OK and you'll see that it's
automatically lined up our notes to the eighth note you can also see some other
information in here these orange lines or it might look like this on your
screen depending on if you have this button clicked in or not and what this
does is it controls the velocity of each note so if you played a note too hard or
too soft you can go in and edit that so you just want to make sure you're
clicked on the note that you want to edit that's this one here
and then we'll just click and drag that down or up however you need to now what
if we wanted to control a second instrument so let's go over here
and this time I'm going to bring in the strings instrument so click and drag it
in here I'll bring up that now watch my I press
my MIDI keyboard it now controls the strings so if I wanted to record these
now I want to make sure that I uncheck the arm for record on the piano and arm
this track now for recording and if I wanted to go back and play the piano
again I would just click on that track here and I'm now playing the piano of
course I can play both and listen to both at the same time all I have to do
is click on this button here on the instrument that I'm not currently
controlling and now watch I am controlling both you
can hear the piano in there a bit but the strings are really overpowering and
of course you can record both of them at the same time if you wanted to it's just
going to record the exact same MIDI information so you could only record one
and then just copy that information on to the next track if that's what you
really wanted to do but armed both for recording hit record and it's recorded
the same thing on both tracks now if you want to add some more VST plugins' to
your cakewalk library click up here for some of the best free VST plugins out
there or click down here to see what youtube thinks you should watch next if
you like this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel
if you'd like to see more videos for me thank you so much for watching for
simple green tech I'm Zane keep creating and we'll talk soon