 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you will. As you probably already know, BandLab recently announced that they'll be releasing two new products this year, Cakewalk Next and Cakewalk Sona. Now both of these are going to be paid for products, although we don't know the pricing yet or indeed the ways in which you may be able to pay for them. They also announced that their current product, Cakewalk by BandLab, which is free at the moment, will no longer be developed or supported once these two new products have been released. However, notably, they have said that you will be able to continue to use it after that date. Now at the time of this announcement, I made a live stream, which many of you watched. Thank you for that. And I made a couple of initial observations during that live stream, which I want to expand upon in this video. So one of these new products, Cakewalk Next, I'm going to set that aside for this video because it's a completely new product, which doesn't really bear any resemblance to previous versions of Cakewalk that we've seen. The new product, Cakewalk Sona, however, is very related to existing products that we've seen. Indeed, they have said publicly that it shares almost all the same code or much of the same code as Cakewalk by BandLab and Sona before that. And also significantly for me, they announced that the user experience will largely remain the same. Now, I think they meant this as a positive, which I'll talk about in a moment. However, for me, it did ring some alarm bells because over the last few years, whilst Cakewalk by BandLab has been free, I have not felt the need to criticize it in terms of its flaws because look, it's free. And for some of you, that was the main thing. However, now that it's no longer going to be free, or this new product is no longer going to be free, I feel like it has to stand alongside all other doors in the marketplace and be judged accordingly. And I personally feel that there's lots of room for improvement in terms of the user experience. Now, my point of reference for this is Studio One, because it's the only other door which I've used significantly over the last few years. So I feel qualified to compare these two doors. But there are other doors out there, some of them you may like better than Studio One. You may in the end still prefer Cakewalk. That decision is up to you. But I just wanted to give you some examples of workflow so you can kind of see or get an idea of what I mean by that and how it can just improve things that you do when you're recording your music. Having said all of that, I think there are a couple groups of people who even if they find workflow is better in another door, they're not going to move away from Cakewalk. Let's just address that quickly. The first group of people would be those who simply cannot afford to buy another door at the moment. For those people with funsatite, I would suggest continue to use Cakewalk by BandLab for the moment. It's going to continue to work fine, I think, for a reasonable amount of time. Now, the other group of people were probably delighted to hear that the user experience and workflow is not going to significantly change. Those are people who have used Cakewalk for some time, maybe years or even decades in some cases. And I completely understand that the last thing they really want to do is have to learn a new door at the moment. So they don't really want Cakewalk to change, because that would be like learning a new door. However, I'm interested in this product attracting new users. Okay. So I think for them, when they compare this to other doors like Studio One, then they are going to want to see that the workflow is good within the door. Now, if you do find by the end of this video that you do have a little bit more interest in how Studio One does things, you might want to check the link in the description down below for my other YouTube channel, which is all about Studio One. I've got lots of tutorials there. Also, while you're there, check out the link to the sponsor of this video, DistroKid. If you follow that link, you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music around the world. Now, let's dive into some workflow examples. Here in Cakewalk, I've got this vocal, which currently sounds like this. And I'm going to be doing something which is incredibly common in music production. I'm going to be adding some reverb to this vocal, but I'm going to be using a bus to do that. Okay. So the reverb will be on a bus and we'll send the vocal signal through to the bus. I don't want to go into why I'm doing it exactly that way now, but I can say it's incredibly common practice. And there are quite a few advantages to using a bus. I'll do this in both doors with as fewer steps as possible. Okay. Without any sort of optional steps. So starting off in Cakewalk with Step 1, I'm going to go down to the vocal channel and in the send section here, I'll click on the plus button and go down to New Stereo Bus and click on that. So that's Step 1. And what Cakewalk has done is it's created the bus over here on the right, which is called this default name, which is Bus D. Now I could rename that, but as I say, I'm not going to do those optional steps. We'll just accept Bus D for the time being. Now it's also in that step created the send from the original track to the bus. The next thing I need to do is add my reverb to the bus. Now in both cases, I'm using the stock reverb. And in the case of Cakewalk, we can see that it is called Sonatus Reverb. Okay. So I'm just going to drag that and drag that across to the effects section of the bus that we created. Okay. So that's Step 2. All right. So the plugin appears and then for Step 3, you may regard this as kind of optional, but I think it's so common, like 99% of the time we do this, I'm going to regard it as not such an optional step. And that is, I'm going to adjust the dry wet mix of this plugin so that we're only hearing the wet mix. The reason we do that with plugins which are on buses is that we've already got the dry signal over here on the vocal channel. Okay. So we don't need it sort of doubled up in the bus as well. So for my third step, I'm just going to be getting rid of that dry signal in the plugin here. Yeah. I could have done it with the mute switch here, but instead I used the slider. So basically there's three steps all in all. And the result we get is this. Now over in Studio 1, we can actually do it in exactly the same three steps if you really want to. Okay. But there is another way to do it, which is much, much quicker. How can you be quicker than three steps? Well, here you are. So let's have a look. We're actually going to start off in a different way in Studio 1. We're going to grab our plugin from over in the browser over here and just quickly acknowledge that the plugin has a little icon here. These are optional in Studio 1. You don't have to have them, but you can have them. I personally think that those kind of visual aids like that do make it a little bit quicker to find things, especially when you've got long lists of plugins. But if that bothers you, you don't have to have that feature switched on if you don't want. So in my first step, I'm going to grab this plugin and I'm going to drag it across right away to the send section here. Okay. We can't do this in Katewalk. We can only drop it in the insert section. So I will drop it in sends and what Studio 1 does is it creates the bus for me. It creates the send to the bus. It automatically inserts the plugin into the bus as a little bonus that actually renames the bus down here to room reverb. That's the name of the plugin by the way. And it does that final step, that mix step automatically as well. If we look over here on the right hand side in the plugin, the wet mix is up to 100% here. Okay. And it's actually locked it. It knows it's in a bus. It's adjusted the mix and it said, hey, most of the time in a bus, you don't want to adjust this. So I'm going to lock the control. You can unlock it if you wish and you can adjust it if you really, really want to. But it's taken the liberty of knowing what you normally do in this case and it's adjusted that thing for you. So basically we've done the whole thing in one step and as this is a really common thing to do, this could save you heaps of time. Okay. When you're working on many projects over many years. Now I very, very quickly want to mention another thing that we can do here in Studio 1, which we can't do in Cakewalk. Okay. Now let's imagine rather than just inserting the reverb, we want to use this preset I've got here somewhere down here. It's called nice Vox. Okay. Now I'll undo all my steps. So I'm back to where I was at the beginning and you'll notice in the browser for the actual plugins here in Studio 1, the next to the plugin name, there's this little arrow, which opens up another little menu. And in that menu, we've got all of the presets associated with the plugin. We can see my nice Vox preset here. Okay. So I'm going to grab that and as I did before, I'm going to drag it across to the send section. It does all of the things it did before. It creates the bus, it inserts the plugin, it creates the send, it renames the bus, it adjusts the mix of the plugin over here and it uses that preset nice Vox all in one step. And this is a kind of a theme I want to stay with here in Cakewalk. I've got this virtual acoustic guitar, which currently sounds like this. But what I actually want is the trio of acoustic guitars, all sounding different, but playing the same notes. And once I've got those three guitars, I want to be able to control the volume as a whole unit, as a whole trio. Okay. So let's go ahead and do that here in Cakewalk. I'll just get rid of this interface here and I'll grab a 12 string guitar and drag that into the project. I want it to be a simple instrument track. So I'll just click on okay. And that instrument will now load up. I can close this window. I don't need it. And then I'm going to go up to the first MIDI clip with the first guitar. And whilst I'm holding control on the keyboard, I'm going to drag it down to the second guitar. The important part of holding control is that it links these two clips together so that when I make a change saying the second one here and go to a different note, that change is reflected in the first one as well. So that's still both playing the same notes. Okay. So that's why we do it like that. Now I'm going to add in my third guitar, which is going to be a Taylor guitar. I'll just go ahead and drop that into the project. Again, I'll click on okay on this dialog box. It opens up that third guitar. I'll close this down and again, I'll hold control on the keyboard and drag this down. Now I've got all three guitars. And if I go over to my console view over here, we can see their faders. I can obviously adjust their balance, their panning and all things like that. I can also add in some effects and things if I want to. But remember I said I wanted to be able to control them in the mix as one unit, as one guitar trio. So what I'm going to do is select the first one here, hold shift on the keyboard and select the last one to make sure I've selected all three. Now holding control on the keyboard, I'm going to go to the output of any of them and I'm going to select new stereo bus. So I'll do that and it's created a new bus over here, bus D. And all three of those guitars are going to bus D. So now I can adjust the volume of all three at once using just this one fader. And that's kind of job done there. So how was that done in studio one? Let's go over to studio one. I've got the same guitar again. I'm going to close this window as I did before and I'm going to grab my 12 string guitar. But this time I am actually going to drop it straight onto that MIDI which already exists there. So I drop it onto there and it asks me do you want to replace or combine the instrument AG? I'm going to click on combine. And it opens up this window which we'll come back to in a moment. I'm just going to pin that there so it doesn't close. I'm going to grab my third guitar, which was the Taylor guitar. I'll grab it over and just drop it onto that MIDI again. Yeah, same question again. And I'm going to go for combine again. And you can see that's also been added to this little kind of flow chart we can see up here. So actually what we've got is all three guitars in one sort of unit. Okay, we can just see one MIDI performance there. Yeah, we don't need to link them to any others. We can still get the same controls we did in cakewalk. We can still adjust the fader for each of those. Yeah, and the panning, etc. We can insert effects, all of those things that we would want to do. We don't have to create a bus or anything like that. Okay, it's all done for us. And if we go over to our mixer view, we've just got one fader to control all of them. And I want to know, in case you were going to ask this, you could also do this in the same way as you do it in cakewalk. Both of these dolls use drag and drop, of course, but I feel that studio one is sometimes drag and drop on steroids. Now what I'm about to show you, unfortunately, I can't demonstrate in cakewalk because it doesn't have some of the capabilities necessary without some third party plugins. But I wanted to include this because it's a great demonstration of a drag and drop workflow in as few steps as possible. And what I'm going to achieve here is I'm going to take this guitar part, which is an audio recording. And I want the chords that the guitar is playing to be used with this synthesizer. This is the pigment synthesizer from Arturia. Okay, and I've got a nice big pad selected. Now the guitar recording includes some arpeggios like this. I'm going to achieve everything in just to drag and drop. So first of all, I'm going to grab this guitar waveform, and I'm going to drag it up to the chord track in studio one, I drop it there, and the chord track analyzes that audio recording and determines the chords which are being played. Okay, and it puts them up there in the chord track. But also noticed that in the actual waveform down here embedded into that waveform are those chords for the guitar track here. So my second step, my second drag and drop, is to drag this down to the synthesizer, just like so. And you can see those chords have appeared there. And I can play it now. And you're going to hear that synth playing the same chords as the guitar. So I feel like this is just an example of what could be a complex process really simplified and it's just quick and easy to use. Now of course, you can go ahead and customize those chords. And if you're thinking, well, how well does this determine the chords? In my opinion, reasonably well most of the time. But sometimes it does make errors depending on the recording, depending on the complexity. But you can go in and adjust the chords that it is determined. You can do it at the top in the chord track, or you can do it in the waveform. If I double click on that, go to one of the chords down here, D minor, for example. Let's say I think that's a D minor seven. I can just double click on that. It opens up this chord selector here. I can change it to a D minor seven and close that and it's done. It's now a D minor seven. So if I drag that again, it would be a D minor seven chord. One really great example of workflow is with our sponsor DistroKid. When you release your music through them, they automatically generate a webpage for you called a hyperfollow page. That one link gives your family, friends, and fans information about where they can listen to your music, whether it be Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, etc, etc. You don't have to do anything. It's automatically generated for you. Quick, easy, simple. Here in Keg Walk, I'm creating a drum part using addictive drums. Now, what I'm about to show you would apply to most of the commercial drum plugins out there, okay? While I'm in this mode, I'm only interested in composing. I'm not too worried about mixing at all. So I like to keep things simple. I like to have just one stereo channel for all of my drums to come out of. I don't want to deal with lots and lots of channels at this stage. However, at a later stage, I do want all of my drums to come out to separate channels in my console. Why do I want to do that? Because I want to be able to easily mix them without having to keep going into this plugin and, you know, using the mixer here. As well as that, I also want to be able to apply my own effects plugins and easily do automation and sort of things like that as well. But getting this from this simple interestment stage to all of those outputs is not all that straightforward in my opinion. Now, I do have another option. I can actually create all of those outputs right at the beginning before I even start composing. Let's just quickly take a look at that option. I'm actually just going to keep the media I've created up in this spare track up here. I'm going to go ahead and delete this track we've got here. Also delete the synth as well. And I'm going to go ahead and start afresh. So let's grab addictive drums. I'll drag it across to there. Now, what I just created a moment ago was a simple instrument track. And that would be having that checkbox checked there. However, I do have the option of choosing these two things down here. All synth outputs in stereo, all synth outputs in mono. Now, most of the drums in addictive drums are mono, not all of them though. Some of them like the rooms and the overheads are stereo. But because most of them are mono, I guess I'll choose mono here. I can actually change them later. I'll click on OK. And it takes a moment here because what it's going to do is create all of those outputs for me in advance. Okay, it's done it now. And I'll just close this for a moment. You can see them all here at the bottom. Now, I have to say I'm not crazy about the naming here because what they've done is they've prefixed each name, say like a snare with addictive drums too. But in the console view, I can't really see that easily. So one of the things I have to do is go down and actually rename some of these channels like so. Okay, when you have to do that for all of them, it does take a little bit of time. Now, the next step I have to do is go to my addictive drums instrument and then actually set it up in addictive drums. So if I go to the drum kit here, I can, you know, select each drum to go to a separate output. Now, to save time here, I've made a preset so that can be done quickly. This needs to be done in both doors. So it's not really different in each of them. So I will go to drum mix as my preset and it's already created all of those outputs to all of the different drums. Now, if I play it now, you can see all of those drums being played. Now, there's quite a few channels there that I don't need. I'd have to go through that and sort of check them out and delete them. Okay. And as you can see, we need to rename a lot of them. The problem is is that when I initially do this and I am in composition mode, I just don't want all of this complexity down here. Okay. So let's undo all of this. So I will sort of try and click undo. I don't know how long it's going to take. Oh, that's not too bad. Okay. So I've undone that and let me show you the way I'd actually do it. I'll drag in my instrument or make it a simple instrument. Yeah, like so. Just as we were before, wait for a moment. It loads up. Okay. I'll drag my MIDI on there. So we've got something to listen to. Okay. So I'm going to go into my drum plugin. I'll go in and choose that preset that I needed to choose. Yeah, which was drums mix. So now all of those separate outputs have been created in the plugin. But if we play, there's not much sound because only one of those outputs is working because we don't have corresponding outputs available here in Cakewalk. So what I need to do is go up here, insert audio track. Select as this audio tracks input, say addictive drums to we'll do this one as a kick. All right, then I'll go in and rename that kick. I do hate typing. I promise you I'll go in, insert another audio track. This one can be the snare. Yeah, I'll select the input, go to addictive drums, select the snare and then insert audio again. Let's do this just one more. You get the idea here, don't you? Hi hat. Okay. And then again, I'll select the input. Now these are mono drums here. You can see with hi hat is just that choice. But for some of the drums, I can choose for them to be stereo and the overheads and things like that. And that will create a stereo track as what I was talking about earlier. So let's do that. So I've got three drums there so far. I think in this particular performance about seven or eight drums were used. So I have to go through and create the tracks manually and rename them and all that good stuff. But it will work and it's fine. So let's see how the same thing is done in studio one. So going over to studio one, I've just got my MIDI spare there again. So I don't have to put the MIDI in again. I'm going to go ahead and grab addictive drums and drag it across to studio one like so. And it simply inserts it. I don't have to make any decisions at this point. I don't have to choose between, you know, creating lots of outputs or whether it's a simple instrument or what have it. It's always a simple instrument initially in studio one. Okay. So there is my drums. I'll just put that MIDI on there. So we've got something to listen to have a listen. So there I am in composition mode. So now I want to go to mixing mode. Well, the thing I have to do in both of these plugins is actually do that in the plugin itself. And again, I've got a preset. So drums mix. Yeah. And you can see because of these little green lights here that all of those outputs have been created. Again, if I play it, just like in Cakewalk, there's only one sound with only one output working at the moment because I need to have all of those other channels added. However, they're actually already there. We just can't see them. So to expose them to see them, we go over to our addictive drums in the instrument section over here. I'm going to click on this to expand it. And we can see all of our outputs are already there. Now in this case, I was using a kick, a snare, a hi-hat. I didn't use Tom one and two, just three and four. I didn't use any of the flexi drums and overhead room and bus. You can see all of the channels are being created there right away. I can easily switch them off and on as I need to. They've got nice naming because there was this prefix wasn't added to their naming. It's picked up from the plugin and I'm ready to go. So I realised during the course of recording this video that I just wasn't going to have enough time to run through all of the examples that I had prepared. That included things like the console view, the mixer in other words and how that gets used in both doors. Things like drum map implementation, hardware integration, the process of mastering a few other examples. But hopefully I've got the general idea across here. And I've shown you how sometimes just shaving off a couple of steps here and there or taking a completely different approach can really help your workflow. And hopefully I think help you just to focus on the creative process and not get bogged down with the details of the door. I'd love to hear your opinions about that in the comments down below. Now I just want to say I don't think the studio one has it all its own way. First of all, I think some other doors that I've seen actually do some things better than studio one. And also I think cakewalk does a few things a little bit better than studio one. However, I think on balance, having used both of these doors extensively, that studio one more often than not has a slightly better workflow. Now if you are interested in sort of looking at studio one a little bit further, then you can follow this link just over here for my other channel, which is called Studio One Revealed. There's some tutorials and things over there. In terms of cakewalk, I'm going to be just like you waiting to hear about news on pricing and what other features may be included with it. And I really hope it's going to be a great product.