 In this video I've got five more cakewalk secrets you should know. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well. When you're navigating cakewalk it's handy to know those little tips that make life a lot easier. I've got five more for you today and I bet with one of them. Even the seasoned veterans amongst you don't know about it. You can tell me about that later but let's get started with some zoom tips. So perhaps you've been in cakewalk you've moved your mouse over the rule at the top and seen this magnifying glass appear and you thought to yourself what's that all about? You're about to find out. If you hold down your left mouse button when that appears and then drag up and down then you can easily zoom in and out horizontally like so. Now if you are zoomed in and you drag your mouse from side to side then you can also scroll through your project like so. Now if you want to zoom in and out vertically then just do the same hover over that ruler wait for the magnifying glass and hold down your right mouse button. Drag up and down and you can see my track's getting bigger and smaller there. Now if you don't like the zoom that you've just performed then you can just go to the track area here anywhere in the track area hold down your right mouse button and click your left mouse button and that will undo your previous zoom. Likewise anywhere in the track area here hold down the left mouse button and click the right mouse button and you can redo that zoom awesome stuff. Now let's say you have made a selection I'm just going to go to my top track up here just wait for that sort of eye beam cursor to appear and then I'm just going to make a selection by dragging across and dragging down okay so I've selected a whole bunch of things there. What you can do again if you go to the ruler at the top in an area where you've previously selected a loop okay you can see that with the sort of yellow markers there go up there again wait for that magnifying glass to appear and then left click and bang suddenly your selection is reflected by where you previously had the loop awesome stuff eh. So I was in the creative source cakewalk group on Facebook the other day by the way you should definitely check that out if you haven't done so already there's lots of great tips from users across the community there follow the link in the description down below for that we'd love to see you there anyway I was reading a post in there from a user who was saying that he'd recorded a vocal and unfortunately the click track had bled through the headphones into the microphone and he could hear the sound of the click track in a quiet passage of the vocals he wanted to know how to get rid of it and that is a subject for another video that is not a quick tip however it made me think it's many years since I actually had that problem the reason is I always create my own custom click tracks at the beginning of each project how do I do that and exactly why do I do that let's find out we've got a blank project here and I've started off by creating just four beats of hi-hat now I use the built-in drum kit that you get with cakewalk here and as I say I just recorded those four beats sounds like this and you'll notice that I made the first beat a little bit louder you can see the velocity here is a lot louder with this beat so that emphasizes the first beat and you get that on the metronome anyway so the next thing I like to do is select that clip and then press ctrl l on the keyboard to turn that into a groove clip and then just hovering over the right side there I just drag the edge of that out and I can drag that click out for as many bars as I need it for my song so it now sounds like this I bet you thought I was going to play it for the whole song there didn't you no no no I wouldn't do that to you so why is that useful haven't I just recreated what the click track does already well no because I can automatically have this click track stop whenever I want it now this is very useful at the ends of songs especially you probably have had that situation where you just play the last chord of a song say on a guitar and you don't want that click to be there and you don't want it to bleed through the headphones so you can just make sure the click track ends exactly where you want it to on other occasions you may be doing a little slow down at the end just a freeform slowdown with the rhythm and it's very hard to do that if you've got a constant click track going now you could reprogram the tempo and I do sometimes do that but more often all you need to do is just end the click track when you start that slowdown and then just do a freeform slowdown on one of on your main instrument that you're recording at the beginning okay so it's very useful especially at the ends of tracks now if you did have a situation in the middle of the track where you just didn't want to have the click track for a while that's easily done you can just select say a bar here like so and then I'll just press delete on the keyboard and that gets rude of the click for those few beats I'll undo that now because the other thing that I want to demonstrate is what's really handy is if you do have a break in your song so all of the instruments sort of stop for a few beats or a whole bar but you want to know when to come back in yeah so you want that click track well what you can do is just go to the bar wherever that's happening I'll just go to it here on the piano roll and of course you can just select those particular hits there which I'll do like so yeah and then you can just adjust all of the velocities down alike so you can make it nice and quiet now if there's just a vocalist who is waiting to come in or just you know other instrumentalists even they probably just need that quietly they don't need it to be very loud now if there's really nothing else there you could edit it out on all of all of your tracks but more often than not it's not going to be heard or it certainly makes it a lot easier to edit out in any case so those are the main reasons why I do this and I very very rarely get a click coming through headphones in quiet passages did you know that if you hit the like button it lets youtube know that it should tell other people about this video so if you have found this video useful go ahead and hit that like button it's a great way to help the community as a whole also if you do like this kind of content make sure you subscribe and ring the bell so that youtube lets you know about my other videos now back to this video so because of the ways that our lives have changed in recent years I've noticed that a lot more of you are collaborating remotely with each other so you often need to send cakewalk projects to each other via email or dropbox or what have you and indeed many people send me copies of their projects by email and I've noticed that perhaps because we don't do it very often some people don't know exactly how to do it or they need some tips and tricks about how to do it the best possible way so let's go up to file here I'm in a project we'll go up to file and instead of clicking save I'm going to click go down to save as and then as the file type I'm going to select bundle this is going to create a cakewalk bundle what's a bundle well it's one single file that you can send to other people that they can open in cakewalk and it contains everything they need for that project all the assets especially things like wave files or audio recordings now I want you to be careful about this because if you've got several versions of your project perhaps like me you save several versions version one two three etc it's only going to contain the assets the things that are needed for that particular project file okay it's not going to include sort of temporary recordings that you made earlier on etc etc so do be aware of that when you do it now it's also not going to contain other files that you may have stored in that project folder perhaps you've got text notes or perhaps you've got samples that you haven't yet used in your projects and you've popped them there it's not going to include those things it's only going to include the things that are actually needed to make this project function well kind of we're going to talk about something in a moment but this is the simple way to do it and as I say it creates one single file so you can go ahead and do that when the person receives it it'll ask them where they want to sort of expand or put all of those files as is needed they will need to save the project at least once to have it saved on their computer that's how you basically do it now the thing that I want you to take into consideration and the thing that may not be included with this bundle are plugins they can be virtual instruments or effects so if you're not sure you should be communicating with your the other participant but if you're not sure the best thing to do is freeze the tracks so if you've got something like this I've got a piano track here it's a virtual instrument I think it's a piano tech this particular one a great plugin and it's also got this reverb on there from Arturia which is a great reverb many people may not have that so all you need to do is freeze the track okay now that means that the other person when they receive it is going to be able to listen to that track they can adjust the fade they can mix it and all that kind of thing they just won't be able to actually change the composition in this in this case they won't be able to change the MIDI and they won't be able to change the actual effects themselves but they will be able to hear it at least now when this comes back to you when they've changed things and they send it back to you if they've left that and they've it's remained frozen as it were you can unfreeze it and you can get access to all of those things again so it's very very important when you create bundles to communicate with other participants find out which plugins they have available if they don't have them available definitely go ahead and freeze those tracks this is just finished freezing mine now and you'll see what I mean that piano has now become a WAV file when you create your bundle that WAV file will be included with the bundle so Cakewalk actually has some wonderful features for having several versions of mixes within your project but they may be a little bit hidden away from you so I want you to start off by going up to the top control bar here and in a blank space right clicking going to modules and then going down and making sure that mix recall is selected how does the mix recall feature work let's have a look so I've got this mix here and to make things really really obvious I'm going to select four tracks down the bottom here so I'll select number 12 here and then go to number 15 holding shift on the keyboard I'm just going to hold control on my keyboard and push all of those faders down this is just to make it visually obvious for you say that was my mix I want to save that so I can come back to it later go up to the top and in that mix recall area just look at that little icon there looks like a piece of paper click on that to save a new scene let's give you a name we'll call it mix one okay so there is mix one with all of those four faders down now I go ahead and I make some changes again holding control on the keyboard or just push all of those faders all up to the top and let's say I want to keep that as a mix so again I go to the top click on the same icon and let's call this one mix two okay I think you can probably see where I'm going but we're going to do one more okay we're going to push those faders halfway down like so go up to the top again and save this as mix three okay so now I can easily flick between these three different versions of my mixes I'll go to this drop down at the top right here and I'll select mix one now it takes a little moment if you've got a complex project for this to load up and make its changes and that's because it's actually saving and recalling quite a bit of information I mean you've got information about your faders about panning etc you've also got automation which is being saved you've got things like um ccs with midi just a whole bunch of stuff is actually being saved here so that's why it just takes a moment or two you can see it's loaded in mix one there I can go to mix two like so and of course all the faders have then gone back up to the top and as you'd imagine if I then go ahead to mix three all of those faders as we set them earlier and they're going to be halfway now if you want to make changes to the particular mix you're working on it's easily done so if I just push a few of these faders around like so I can go up to this camera type icon here and it'll just update the current scene that we're using so I'll click on that that is mix three which has now been updated handily you can flick between two mixes so we've got mix three on here at the moment the last one that we used was mix two and if we just click on this arrow icon here we can quickly revert back to the last mix that we had loaded so that is mix two and again if I click that again it's going to go back to mix three so this is just a way of quickly alternating between two mixes so that you can compare now there's some there's lots of other options with this if we go to this dropdown menu of course you can do things like delete scenes rename them all that good stuff but you should probably pay attention to this option down the bottom here mix recall settings if you click on that I would advise that you just open up the advanced panel and there you can kind of filter out particular things that you'll recall when you actually recall a mix so at the moment it's set to the entire project and most things are selected I could just do it for example for selected tracks or buses and only recall for those selected tracks as well as filtering out you know automation all that kind of good stuff as well that you can see there really handy feature if you want to test out some particular or various versions of your mix and get back to them really easily okay so here's a tip that I bet some even seasoned cakewalk users don't know I bet you all know the trick of resetting a fader right yeah I'll show you on this bass guitar here we double click on a fader and it immediately goes up to zero or unity gain there okay so we can move it around double click on it and it immediately goes back to zero very handy when you want to set everything back to zero but what if you don't always want to set it back to zero when you double click on it well you can change that so say I've got this perfect position in the mix for my bass I know that I'm going to move it around temporarily but I want to go back to this position I can just right click on that go to value and then go to set snap to current click on that and then after I've moved that fader around I double click on it it goes back automatically to that new value in this case minus 7.1 now this works not just on faders but on lots of other controls so I could use on say this send up here for example just move it to that I'll right click go to value set snap to current yeah and then if I move that send then double click on it it goes to this different value but here's a really clever thing that I bet only a small percentage off you know let's say I've got this track selector this base now you can see I've got the track view open up here as well and I've got this other view on the side which also shows this base channel and indeed if I move the fader up and down on the right hand side you can see it moving up and down on the left hand side as well well what if I want two default positions well I can go to this one over on the right here and I can right click set the value you know set to current there do that and now if I move it around and double click on it it goes down to this new position but if I double click on this one over here it goes to the position that I set there a kind of a handy way for having two presets for positions on your faders or your pan controls or what have you let me know in the comments down below if you're a season cakewalk user and you didn't know that so if there's some particular tips or tricks to do with cakewalk you would like me to cover let me know in the comments down below that's really helpful to me so I know which videos I should be making next now I know I keep going on about it but I'm so enthusiastic about the new cakewalk by BandLab creative source Facebook group there's some great members over there already they're so creative they're so positive and there's some awesome tips that even I didn't know about follow the link in the description down below for that and if you do join let me know that you came from this video and I'll say hi I'll see you over there and I'll also see you in the next video