in this how to use cakewalk by bandlab tutorial i'm going to show you four ways that you can
start to use midi in your projects and you only need a midi keyboard for one of these
ways so if you don't have one don't worry about that i'm zane welcome to audio tech
tv where it's my goal to help you conquer the tech so you can unleash your creative beast so
you want to use virtual instruments in your projects but you don't have a midi keyboard
no problem because this first way that i'm going to show you is we're just going to draw your notes
in to the piano roll so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to drag a synth in over here
and then i can just double click anywhere in this area here you can see it brings up
the piano roll and now we can just draw our notes in
you can see you can control the velocity by adjusting these down here
and you can move things around and shorten them however you need to
and another way you can access this is by going up here right clicking then go to view piano roll
and then we're in the piano roll again here or you could also go up to views and then
piano roll there as you can see there's various ways that you can get into the piano roll
so use whatever one's best for you and then start drawing your notes or your beats
in and if it is a drum plugin that you're using you might want to use this next method
but before we get into that i just want to ask if you're enjoying this video so far
getting some value out of it can you please give it a thumbs up it really helps my channel out and
i appreciate it so much now back into cakewalk so this next method is the step sequencer and
i'm going to delete this plugin here and we'll bring in a drum plugin
and now over in this area here instead of double clicking i'm going to right click
view step sequencer and here's our step sequencer you can see by default it has
just four beats and we can adjust that over here increase it to i would say at least eight beats
you might want to go up to 16 or something like that but eight's a good start and to
create our beat we just draw our notes in down here there's our kick drum and snare
and then we just have to find our hi-hat
all right so this is a little bit of a beat right here let's hear how it sounds that good but as
you can see how easy it was to draw that in there and if you want to access the velocity information
in here you can just click on this little triangle and you can see the velocity info here
and you can adjust that however you want you can also rename these if you wanted so
you could rename that to kick and this one snare
and so on and if your drum plugin has more pads than what's available in here already you can also
add rows in so you can just insert a row and then it's going to add more and you can also use this
for synthesizers too if you want that sort of fl studio kind of layout by using the step sequencer
you can make these notes longer all you have to do is just make
a bunch of them in a row like that and then you hold down the ctrl key on your computer keyboard
click and drag right across and now that is a whole note so if it was a synthesizer it would
hold that note for that long so you can see this method is very versatile it's extremely
easy to use and for making beats it's probably the way to go it's the way i would go for sure
just because of how easy it is and how you see the grid in here i really like the step sequencer for
making some drum beats all right this next way is the more traditional way to use midi and
it's recording it in using a midi keyboard or midi controller and you just connect
your midi keyboard to computer go into your preferences then you want to go into midi devices
and you want to make sure that there's a check mark beside yours and the inputs you don't really
need to worry about the outputs unless you're outputting to some external device but we're just
recording midi notes in make sure there is a check mark beside the input and then you would leave
here and we'll add a synth again to our song and then we want to go to this area right here click
on it and go to whatever your midi keyboard's name is go to that over here and then you would choose
a channel i'm just going to choose channel one and i'm just going to see if it worked
and it works so if we wanted to record that we would
arm this for recording by clicking that there hit the record button
and you can see we have our recorded midi just double
click that and you can edit it if you wanted to
you can also add more notes in and build more of a structure around whatever midi you record it
in maybe you want to turn one of these into more of a chord you can add more in there
again another very easy method and it's probably the easiest method in my opinion is using the midi
keyboard but whatever works for you and now this fourth method is very similar to the previous one
except for we're going to use our computer keyboard as the midi keyboard to record the
notes in and if you want to do this go up to views and then you go down here to virtual controllers
and you click on computer keyboard you can also see there's a shortcut there by pressing alt
and zero so here is our virtual controller and you can see the keys here that you can use
to control the notes so let's just test it out and you can also change the octave that you're on
and you can change the default velocity if you wanted by using
these here and you can also use the arrow keys on your computer keyboard as well so let's just test
recording and again you want to make sure that your track is armed for recording hit record
and there's our midi that we recorded with our computer keyboard
it's that easy and all of these methods are going to get you into using virtual instruments so
figure out which way works best for you or maybe it's a combination of these methods
use any and all of them that work for you and if you want to check out even more cakewalk tutorials
click up here or click down here to see what youtube recommends if you like this video please
give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos like this
thank you so much for watching for audio tech tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon