 Why is it that when I open up Cakewalk and look at my recent projects on the start screen, they all look a little different from one another. The first one here is a really old project and back in the old days when you saved your project there was no image information saved with it and that's why we've got this rather boring CWP icon. If you wanted to spice this one up a little bit we could load it into a recent version of Cakewalk, save it again and it's going to look a little bit more like this second one here. With more recent versions of Cakewalk when you save your file a screenshot of the project gets saved with it and that makes it a little bit more easy to identify different projects from one another. But by far my favorite look is with this third one here. This is where I've actually got my own image in there which is the album cover for this song and I've added that one myself from within the project so let's open the project and see how I did it. So if you open up your project and you can't see the browser then just press B on the keyboard and that will open the browser normally on the right hand side there. So you can see that currently the plugins tab is selected. What we need to do is go over to this third tab here which is Browse Notes. I'll click on that and this is an area where you can add information about the project. I've got the song title in here, the album which it's on, my own information here and some notes about the song. This is really, really handy especially if you haven't opened the project for a few months or maybe even a few years and you can see of course here that I've been able to add an image and in this case I use the album cover as the image. Just click on plus there. It's going to take you to a browser where you can select like a JPEG file or something. Now it's that image which is also used for the project on the start screen when we're looking at recent projects. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you well. OK, so that tip was just for looks but often there are features which we overlook in Cakewalk even when we've used it for years and those features can make our workflow so much better. For example, recently in my Cakewalk Facebook group, a viewer named Norm Gray was asking about automation and it struck me that there are some automation functions that many of you may have overlooked. But before we get into those, let's just have a quick recap on the basics of automation. So for those of you who don't know, automation enables us to record actions in Cakewalk. Often they're focused around actions we take in the console view, but it can apply to other places as well, including plugins. Now in this example, I'm going to automate the fader control with this piano track which I've recorded. But before I do that, I'm just going to go up to this piano track and where it says clips in this drop down here, I'm going to click there and go down to automation and then select volume. Now you don't have to do this, but this is just going to make it easier for you to see what I'm doing when I record the automation for this fader. Now in order to record that automation, I'm going to have to right enable this particular track. So to do that, I can just click on the W button here in the console view or I can click on the W button on the track view up here. Either of those does the same thing. Now all I have to do now is actually play the track. I don't have to hit record or anything. I can just play the track by pressing space on my keyboard. Once I've done that, I'm going to move this fader up and down and we can record its actions. Let's do that now. We fade it out and let's fade back in again. I'll let it play through to the end and then I'll press space on my keyboard and you can see that it's recorded my actions there. Now in order to play those actions back in order to actually have that happen automatically when we play the track, we have to make sure that this right of this read enable button is pressed. OK, so that's the button here. Now it's white at the moment, which means it is actually enabled. You can switch off and I'll switch it back on again. Now when we just play the track and I'll just leave my mouse up here so you can see I'm not touching the controls. You'll see that that fader actually moves up and down. So this is really, really handy when you want to make sure that everything's just right at every single moment during your mix. So what happens if you play this track again and then you actually make some changes to this control and you've got it right enabled? How does that work? What happens to the old data? Well, I'll tell you what's going to happen and then we can see it in action. What actually happens is nothing is going to be written until you actually touch the control and move it. OK, then any new settings for that control are going to be recorded. But as soon as you release that control and don't make any changes to it anymore, it's going to go back to the old data. OK, so let's see that in action. I'll press play and I'll just let it go. It's faded out. Now I'm suddenly going to push this fader up and I'll release the control, move my mouse over here and then I'll press space to stop the song again. And you can see what's happened here. So it had the original data here, but as soon as I made any changes to that control, we got that action there. I pushed the fader up. But as soon as I released that fader, it went back to the old read data, which we had recorded initially. OK, so it's kind of like an overwrite function, but only while you're using the control. OK, that is the default action for the right enabled button. Now I'm going to undo that by pressing control Z on my keyboard. So we go back to the original data. And now I'm going to show you something that many of you may not know. And that's the different modes for writing automation. In order to change modes, we're going to make sure that our track is selected. And I'm going to press I on the keyboard to open up the inspector view. And then I'm just going to go up to the top where all these buttons are. And I'm going to press the one which has the three lines on it. And then we can see the properties for this track. And about halfway down, you can see there's a section called automation. And within that, there's something called the right mode here. Now, you can see that touch is currently selected there. And that is the default mode. That's the one that we've been using. But there's a couple of other modes. Let's select here the second mode, which is overwrite. OK, so I've got that selected. I'm going to press space again, but I'm not going to touch the control. And let's see what happens. OK, so I haven't touched the control. I'll move it now. Wiggle up and down a bit and release it. Now, I'm not touching the control again. OK, so with this mode, you can see that it overwrites the data which was written before, regardless of whether we touched in the control or not. So even at the beginning, when we didn't touch the control, it just recorded the current position of the position of the control. Now, when I moved around a little bit, it recorded those actions. But when I released it again, it just recorded wherever I left off with that control. It's current position, in other words. So that's where you just completely overwrite everything. And that may be useful to you. Now, I'll undo that by pressing Control Z again. And there is this third option. I'll select over here under the right mode. And that is the latch option. Now, this is kind of a hybrid of both of the modes that we've seen so far. What's going to happen is when we play the track, nothing is going to change until we touch the control and move it. OK, but then even after we release the control, it is going to continue to record the current value or position of that control. So let's see that in action. I'll press play. I'll let it just play. I haven't touched the controls just using the read data. Now I'll push it up again. Yeah, but I'll now release the control. I move my mouse over here and you can see it's continuing to write whatever the value was on the fader when I stopped touching it. OK. So that is latch mode. That's another very useful mode, useful for different situations. Now, if you want to be clever like Norm and make sure that you are a member of a great Facebook group with questions about Cakewalk, where everyone really helps each other out and check out the link in the description down below. What new things could you possibly learn about the humble solo button? Well, let me try you. But before I do, let's just have a quick listen to a short section of this song I'm working on. Only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. So of course, if I just wanted to listen to say this vocal here completely by itself, I would click on its solo button, press play, and we could hear it all by itself. Only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. Now, if I wanted to listen to it alongside, say, this base app here, I could also click on that solo button and now we can hear both of those two things. Only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. OK, that's fine. Now, have you ever done this? You want to compare, say, this vocal to the other vocal, which is alongside it, which are both very similar in this case. They're duplicate vocals and you want to kind of toggle between the two. So have you ever done what I'll call the solo shuffle, where you have one soloed and then you quickly solo the other one and un-solo the first one? Yeah, to kind of go between the two and you sometimes get a bit of crossover where you hear them both at the same time. It's kind of annoying and you don't have to do that because you can change the behaviour of the solo button. Now, in order to do that, I want to show the module called the Mix module. So I'm going to go up to the top of Katewalk here because I can't currently see the Mix module. I'm going to right click in this blank space here, go to Modules and then go down to Mix, click on that. And now we can see the Mix module here. I'm going to click on the solo button here just to un-solo everything. So we'll click that now. Now, what I'm just going to click on is this exclusive solo button. OK, so we'll click on that. And I'm going to click on my first solo button of my first vocal. I'll do that down here. And now when I click on the solo button for the second vocal, it switched the first one off. Can you see that? So it's toggling between the two. So now I can listen to this vocal. And toggle between them like this. Yeah. Now, you probably can't hear much happening there because they are very, very similar vocals. You may hear the odd click or pop here and there when you use this function, but it's really handy if you just want to use the solo as a kind of a toggle switch. But what if you want to do that but still have some things remaining persistently throughout like the bass guitar that we had earlier? Well, you can do that by holding shift on the keyboard before you press the solo button and enables this kind of exclusive solo button or sort of a locked solo button on that instrument. OK. So now when we play, we can toggle between these two vocals I've got here, but the bass will continue to play. Let's have a try with that. So we can still hear those vocals in context with something else, but toggle between them. OK, another way that we can listen to tracks in the context of something else or indeed everything else. I'll just switch that bass guitar off there is with the dim solo mode. So I'll go to my solo module. In fact, I'll click on the S button to un-solo everything again. I'll click on this to remove the exclusive solo function. And I'll just click on the dim button here to enter dim solo mode. Now I'm going to press the solo button on that vocal and play the track again. Let's have a listen. OK, now we can still hear everything else, but it was much quieter. It's dimmed, in other words. This is a great way to kind of highlight a specific track so you can still hear it, but you can still hear it in the context of the rest of the song. Now, if you try this for your first time, you may not have exactly the same effect. You do need to adjust a setting in preferences for this. So I'm going to click P on the keyboard. OK, and look under where it says audio and go to driver settings. And then you will see around about halfway down here, some different values that you can set for the dim solo gain. So this just controls how much everything's volume is, you know, turned down by OK, so I'm not sure what the default value is. You may have it on minus six, in which case you may not hear much difference. I had it on minus 18 there, which is the maximum setting. Now, something which is quite different when we're recording with digital audio rather than the old days of tape is that we don't record tracks as hot as we used to. You used to need to record tracks fairly loud, not clipping, but reasonably loud so that you could avoid the noises which are associated with that type of recording. But we don't recommend you do that anymore. In fact, I like to record quite conservatively. I have them on my levels down reasonably low compared to the old days. Now, the downside of that is you'll have waveforms where you can't really see much of what's going on. You can see here with this blue track, for example, here that you can't see much of the waveform at all. Now, if I click on that track, it's instantly going to become bigger. And that's because I'm using this function, which you can see here, which is called auto zoom. When I click on a track, that whatever track I select just becomes bigger. You do that by going up to view up here in the track view and then selecting auto zoom. Now, that's not what I actually wanted to show you, but just makes it a little bit handy. Now, if I want to do some edits to this waveform, it is handy if it's bigger. I don't need it to be louder. I just want the visual representation of it to be bigger within this track because there's a lot of waste here. Look at all this gray area here, which is wasted. So what you can actually do if you look on the left hand side of the track, you'll see this kind of area here. It looks like a sort of metering area. And you can see that my cursor has changed there to a waveform with an up and down arrow. As long as you can see that waveform, then you can click there and drag up and down and you can make you can make that bigger and smaller. OK. So that's going to make it much easier for me to see where I want to sort of make edits. So if I want to do a cut, I can make sure it's faded out here. And I'll do the cut just here, for example. Now, do remember it's not changing the sound at all. This is just a visual thing. OK, very, very handy. And perhaps when you've done, you just want to return it back to normal and you can just double click on that little area, the same area again, double click and it will return back to normal. Now, maybe you kind of you've got a lot of waveforms which are roughly around about the same size and you just want to make all of them bigger while you're working on your project. What you can do is just hold Alt on the keyboard and use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to make all of the way forms bigger or smaller at the same time. Now, when you're using a virtual base guitar, one of the things that you can do to help it sound more realistic is by putting in some slides, much like a bass guitarist would normally do. Now, you could just use the pitch controller on your piano keyboard to enter this, but we're going to do it here in the interface in Cape or to demonstrate. But first of all, let's just have a listen to the track that we're going to be doing this on, it starts off with some drums. And then the bass guitar comes in here. You can see there's a high note here and then there's a couple of lower notes here. Let's just have a listen to that in context. So there's no slide happening there. It's just one high note and then it goes down to these lower ones. So let's make it sound a little bit more realistic. Now, before we start entering anything in here in terms of pitch bend values, I just want you to make sure that you can see this area down here. At the moment, we're seeing velocity values here. But if you can only see the notes, then you may want to click on this button down here, which is to show and hide the controller pain. It looks like a little sort of eject button. So you can just click on that and you'll probably be seeing velocity by default. I want to show the wheel values for the pitch bend. So I'm going to go down to this plus button down here, click on that. And then with this pop up, I'm going to go to the type and then click on wheel here and then click on OK. OK, so now I can change my wheel values. Now, I want to explain the way it works here because naturally a pitch controller on a keyboard is centered. And then you can bend upwards and you can bend downwards. So the default value is zero in the middle of this of this display here. OK. And then if we want to bend up, then we draw changes going upwards. And if we want to bend down, we do them going downwards. Now, I actually I actually want to hear the sort of beginning of this long note just as it naturally is with the note and about halfway through, I'm going to bend down to the subsequent notes. So I'm just got my draw tool here. I'm going to start in the middle and I'm just going to draw a line all the way down through to the next bar like so. Now, if I just go to just before that note comes in and I'll solo that bass guitar, have a listen. We've got a problem. It's not playing the correct notes here because the the wheel is still all the way down here, the value for it is all the way down down to its maximum blow value. So I'm just going to go down to this line here and just drag that up to the sort of center near enough is fine for now. OK. And then we'll hear that happen. Try again and again. Now, it's OK, but it's gradually bending the pitch down. Yeah. Now, a regular bass guitar has frets on it. So even though we slide down, the pitch actually goes down in steps because of the frets. This is like having a fretless bass guitar where we can gradually go down through the pitches and we don't want that if we want it to sound really realistic. So I'd rather see that go down in steps. So what I'm going to do is right click here and just drag a box over all of that area and then click delete on my keyboard to get rid of all of that. So what I'm going to do is use the snap feature to kind of quantize these changes to the grid. We can see a sort of a grid on our display here. Now, if you don't already know, there's a couple of places where we can change the snap values when we use in the piano roll. We can either use the global settings by going up the top here, turning snap on and then changing the sort of the steps that we're going to use here. I don't prefer to do that. There's an override for each piano view and that's over here on the right hand side at the top of the piano review, this little grid icon here. I'm going to click on that and then we can change the step values here. Now it's on sixteenths at the moment and it's going to sort of have an odd value when I drag this line again. Let's do it. You can see the blocks are too big. OK, so it's going to step down. We'll play it. I'll push this back up again. We'll play it. It didn't even get very far. We'll just drag this one down and this one down. Oh, yeah, so we heard it go down in two bigger steps. OK, and that's because our resolution is setting correctly here. So again, I'll just undo and undo and undo and undo that again. And we'll try that again, but we'll have some different values. Now, I'm going to change this to what I know is going to be a good value, which is sixty fourths, I think. So we'll change that now and you'll see that my grid change here. OK, now, the reason my grid is changing to reflect the change I've made up here is because of a couple of settings which you may want to change yourself at the top of the piano roll view and I've covered this in other videos, go up to view and then go down to show vertical grid lines. That just makes sure you can see the grid lines and then go to grid resolution and then just click on follow snap settings. So that means that this visual grid here is just going to change to whatever we've got here. Now, the reason I reckon that's a good value is because during the course of making this pitch change, there's actually sort of like eight steps there. Now, in reality, there's actually seven steps in terms of threats between those two notes, but eight is good enough. It goes by fairly quickly. So I'll just click on there and again, I'll drag. Oh, sorry, I'll start from the beginning. I'll drag from the center down to the bottom here and you can see those steps have happened. I guess if I really wanted to make sure there was only seven steps that I could undo that and then I could just start from this section here and go through again. And then again, I have to make sure I correct that last step there and just push it back up to the center so that we finish on a note which hasn't got its pitch changed by the by the wheel. And then I'll play that and let's have a listen again. Now, it is subtle, I grant you and you're going to hear it differently depending on the different virtual instruments you're going to use. But it does make it sound just a little bit more correct. Let's have a listen to it in context now. OK, so that really helps to make sure the bass guitar sounds a bit more realistic. Now, I must inform you, if you haven't used this control before, these changes that we see here are not directly related to pitch. OK, they are just the values of the pitch wheel on your keyboard. That's a normal input method, at least. Now, the actual notes that will be played here depend on the virtual instrument you're using now, not all of them have an ability to change this. Happily, the one I'm using does. If I open up the virtual instrument I'm using this one here, this is the ample bass, really, really good bass guitar. If I go to the settings here for that, I'll click on there. There is this bend range setting here. Now, I've got it selected so that if I do the full range, it goes down by seven semitones here, but I could change that to different values. So that setting is obviously going to be in a different place for you, depending on what which virtual instrument you're using. And unfortunately, not all of them do have this setting. So it's worth looking out for ones that do. There's no shame in not knowing all of these features, but there's no excuse for not watching this playlist where I reveal many, many more. People often tell me in the comments down below that they've been using Cakewalk for years and didn't know about these tips and tricks. How about you?