 Have you ever been confused by the snapping features in Cakewalk or wondered why the inspector shows exactly the same thing as the console at times? Well let me help you out. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I have even more Cakewalk secrets that you should know about, whether you're a complete beginner or an old time walker. I reckon there is something here for everyone. Let's start off with a little curiosity in the inspector view. So perhaps you've been using the console view, which you can see here in Cakewalk, and you've also had the inspector open over here on the left hand side. And you've noticed that as you select different channels in the console view over here that over in the inspector, that channel that you've selected is also shown here along with any bus that it's routed to, okay? Often that will be the master bus. In this case for these drums, I've got it going to a drum bus. And it may have occurred to you, hey, what's the point of me selecting something here and it's showing exactly the same thing over here? There's kind of a duplication there, which doesn't seem very helpful. Well, it isn't very helpful if they both show exactly the same thing. But the point is, is you can get them to show slight variations of the same thing. Now you do that by changing the way it's shown in the inspector with this little menu down at the bottom left, which you may have missed where it says display. If we select this now, for example, we get a whole bunch of things that we can include or exclude. So let's say, for example, I'm going to get rid of the sends. I don't need to see them here, okay? I can just control my sends over here. But what I want to show in its place, well, in this case, I'm going to go down to display. I'm going to go to module options. Then I'm going to go across to effects and I'm going to click on show assignable controls. These are sort of quick access controls to attributes of a plug-in. In this case, it's the Sonatas compressor, which I've got in this guitar track. And rather than have to double click on this or click on it and open it up and go to the different options here, I've got quick access to the attack, the release, the knee here. Now, I may not want to show this all the time over here in my console view, but it's really handy, isn't it, that I can do that? I can have that available with any tracks I select over here, okay? So now we've got something different going on. Let's have another example. Let's go down to display at the bottom here and let's look at more options and then meters, okay? We'll go to meters and I'll go to playback meter options. Now, in the main console view, it's showing this. It's showing the peak metering. Let's change that to RMS metering, okay? In fact, let's just for fun go in there again, go across to more options, meters and go to, sorry, playback and go to hold peaks as well. Okay, so now when I play this track and you'll see the guitar plays, the metering is different. Over here, we have peak metering. Over here, it's RMS metering. It's showing the kind of average if you like. So you can use your own imagination here. Decide what you want to show in each of these two different places, but do make them different so that one of them at least becomes useful. Now, this next tip was inspired by a post in my Cakewalk Facebook group by a member called Lee Jackson. Now, before we get into that post, if you're not a member of that group yet, follow the link in the description down below and join up right away. Why? Because it's full of really helpful people, people who are willing to help you when you're stuck, whether you're a beginner or whether you're an advanced user. It doesn't matter. It's a great place, really, really friendly. So follow that link down below. Now, Lee Jackson was mentioning that although he'd used Cakewalk since 1993, he'd slightly embarrassingly only just discovered some of the docking features. And he asked me to include this with one of my tips for you. So here it is. Now, if you already know everything there is to know about docking, then this is a great opportunity for you to leave a comment down below and say, hey, thanks, Mike. Now I feel really smug. Go on, do that. Now let's find out about docking. Now, before I get into docking, I think there's a couple of things I'd like to mention about the interface. It's very kind of modular. There's lots of things that you can customize with it. There's lots of things that you can show and hide on the fly, depending on what you're working on. And I just want to touch upon those things quickly before we talk about how to dock those things. Now, if you want to show different things, you can of course simply go up to Views here and then just click on one of these things here. But it's really handy to learn at least three or four shortcuts which I'm going to show you now. First of all, if you want to show the Inspector, press I for Inspector. That's going to show the Inspector. So if you haven't to use your mouse cup to that menu, you can just show and hide it to your heart's content using that keyboard shortcut. Likewise, if you want to show the browser, think of B for browser, and that's going to show the browser over there on the right-hand side. Now, a couple of less obvious ones, which are very, very useful would be Alt and 2. So Alt 2 shows the console. You can see that appears at the bottom there. And also Alt 3 shows the piano roll view. Now, you'll notice with those two that they've both appeared in what's called the Multidock. We can switch between them with these two tabs here at the bottom here, or however many you've got open. There's the number of tabs there. And you can just easily access them from there. Now, the Multidock implies that things can be docked there. That means those things can also be undocked. One of the easiest ways to undock something from the Multidock is just to grab that tab there. Just left-click and then just drag away. And you can undock, in this case, the piano roll view. Now, if you double-click on that taskbar, you can bring it up to full screen, very, very handy. Or if you happen to have a second monitor, then you can drag it off to that second monitor. That's extremely handy indeed. And it can make sure that you're making great use of your screen real estate. Now, there's different ways that you can redock it. You can drag it around the screen. So if I drag it to the bottom here where the Multidock is, you'll notice that I get this lovely blue highlight. So let me know I can dock it there. I just release, and there it is back in the Multidock. What about docking options for things like the browser? So I'll press B to open the browser. Now, you'll see at the top of some of these sort of panels, these docking option icons, OK? So this one simply undocks it, yeah? And here it is. And now we can drag that browser around. And again, as we take it to different parts of the screen where it can be docked, they get highlighted in blue. So we can put it back over here on the right-hand side where it came from. If we sort of move it around, you'll see there's different options for the top area, sometimes for the bottom area of that as well. And then also on the left-hand side, we could drop it there as well if we wish. Also, if we go to the top of these panels, we have this little dropdown here, docking options. That's another way to change its position so I could dock it at the right here, click on that, and it goes over to the right. Just experiment with this. As I say, you can put it in different places. So I could even have this browser view over here. I've got it on instruments at the moment. I could undock it and I could even put it in my multi-dock at the bottom, for example. Let's just put it there. I've dragged it there and I have that available down there. So you've really got a lot of options. You can easily switch things off and on, as you can see. And you can also have things in the place where you want them. So this tip is more of a safety tip. Now, in order for this to work, there's something I want you to have in place if you can. That is this, save your projects to a different drive to your system drive. Now, mostly on Windows, the system drive is Drive C. So I encourage you strongly, always save your cakewalk projects on a separate drive. It can help with performance, but it also helps when you have catastrophic system failures. Sometimes a C drive will become corrupt, unusable, what have you. Now, you can lose your Windows system drive and often you can get things back gradually. You can reinstall Windows, reinstall your software. But that hard work you've put into your cakewalk project is hard to get back. So make sure you save your cakewalk projects on a separate drive wherever you can. Now, that may be an internal drive or you may have an external drive if your laptop's only got one drive, for example. But please try and do that. Now, this tip that I'm about to give you kind of depends on that slightly for it to work. I'm going to talk about file safety in terms of presets for plugins, okay? So I've got a plugin open here on a vocal channel and I happen to be using this VX64 cakewalk plugin. It could be any other VST plugin. It doesn't really matter. Now, it's got lots and lots of presets here. If you go to the top left, I can select some of those presets. Fine. And also make your own presets, yeah? So I may have fiddled around with the controls and I've found something I really like. And what I do is I just double click up here where we see the preset name, yeah? And I'll change this to destroyer mic here, okay? Destroyer mic, that sounds odd. And I'll just press enter so that's there. And then I'm just going to click on this little floppy disk icon. How cute a floppy disk to save that, okay? Now, what that means is that preset is now available, yeah? From that preset menu as I can see here. So destroyer mic is there. Now, that's going to become, that's going to be available in all other projects for this particular plugin. The problem is going to be if I do have a catastrophic C drive failure, those presets will often go with it, okay? And when you get back to using your project, if you're making use of those presets at all, that can be a bit of a pain to set them up again. So what I like to do and I think is a really good idea is go over to this menu here. In this case, I'm using a VST2. I'll click on that down arrow. I'll go to save preset. Then I would navigate to my project folder. I'm already there in this case, but you can see I'm here. The project's called only yesterday on there already. And I'm going to save that preset, okay? Let's just call it by its name. What was it again? Oh, God, that's a lot of typing for me. We'll just call it desk mic, okay? For destroyer mic. I'll just click on save. Now that is safely there in my project folder. So if I have that system failure, but at least I've saved my projects on a separate drive. I've got a really good chance of having that preset available to me again. I can get up and running and using it right away. Now snapping is incredibly useful, but it can be a little confusing in Katewalk if you don't fully understand how it works. Now, most of the confusion is going to stem from the fact that we can have global snap settings, but we can also have individual snap settings for each of our piano roll views. Let's start off with the default situation, the global snap settings and where the piano roll view is going to follow that. So we access our snap features at the top of our interface. You can see it here. And we can turn snap off and on by clicking this icon or by pressing N on our keyboard, okay? Now we can also change the snap resolution. We can do that by long pressing here on this dropdown menu. And we can either have a resolution based on sort of note or measure resolution. So we've got quarter notes selected here, or we could do it based on tick samples, frames, seconds, et cetera. We'll go back to smart grid at the end. Now at the moment I've got it set to quarter notes. So as you'd expect, if I grab this guitar clip here and I start to drag it around, it snaps to those quarter note positions. Very, very handy indeed. Now, if I go down to my piano roll view for that same guitar part there and I start to drag a note around, you will see it does the same thing. It snaps to those quarter notes just as I have it set. So if I now change that to half notes, then at the top with the clip, it's going to do drag or sort of going to snap based upon half notes. Let's just do that. And then if we go down to the bottom again, we're just going to select an individual note. We'll do that here. And again, it snaps now to half notes. Pretty obvious so far, right? Okay. So where does the confusion come from? Well, in the piano roll view, we can actually make it do or behave slightly differently. If we go to the top right of the piano roll view, you'll see a grid there. Now if yours is orange already, that means you already have the snap options for the piano roll view selected. And that's why you may get a different behavior down here in that view to the way you do at the top. Let's turn it on and then we can see it's options have appeared. So you can see it's set to 16th triplet. So let's just change that to something a bit more realistic. Say 16th notes here. I'll change that. Now as I drag that note around in my piano roll view, it snaps to those 16th. Now you'll notice that my grid lines actually changed there as I was doing that. If I change to a different setting, you can see the grid lines have changed. We'll get back to that in a moment. But what I want to demonstrate here is if I do have this set to 16th for those notes to be snapping to 16th, still when I drag the clip around at the top here, it's still snapping to halves, okay? And that's because I have halves set up here, okay? So we have individual separate settings there. That can be very, very handy or very confusing if you don't realize that is what is happening. Now let's go back to those grid lines. So as I said, it's really handy as I change this here to different settings, my grid lines have changed to reflect where the notes are going to snap to. What I'm going to do is go over to the right-hand side of the piano roll view, click on view and go down to these couple of options at the bottom here. First of all, show vertical grid lines. That's handy to have that on. So I've just switched it off there. I'll have it switched on. Now the second option I want to show you when I go to view here is to go down to grid resolution and I have follow snap setting selected. That's why the grid changed every time I selected a new snap setting, okay? Now you don't have to do that. You can have it fixed. If you just want to always show say 16th, you can have that selected. And then as I change to different snap settings, that grid will now remain the same, okay? So you choose which is best for you, but just so you know, that's how you make that happen. Now one of the last things I want to talk about is to do with snap to and snap by. I have it set to snap to at the moment. You can see the switch for that at the top. Snap to means that everything's going to snap to a grid line according to the snap setting. Snap by means it's going to snap according to that setting by that amount, not to the grid line. What does that actually mean? Well, I find it most useful often I've got to say when I have audio tracks, although it does apply to MIDI as well. Let's have a look at this guitar track I've got in blue here. It appears, doesn't it, on face value to be starting at the beginning of that measure. But if I zoom in using control in the arrow key and I zoom right in, you can see actually it starts just after the measure. Yeah. Oh, sorry, before the measure. Now I've got the clip cropped, which I often do to get rid of the silence, but I've cropped it to where the sound actually begins. Now often audio is not that accurate and sometimes you do want that guitar sound to be just slightly before or whatever instrument is just before that beat. Now if I have it set to snap to and I'm snapping say by quarter notes here, I grab that, I'll drag it along over here. So I'm not really zoomed out enough to show this. I'll zoom out again, control. Okay. Now you can see it is snapped over there. Yep. To those notes, to that quarter note there. And if I zoom into that, I'll just move my play head over there and zoom in. You'll see that actually this guitar now starts exactly on the grid line. I didn't, I don't want that to happen. Okay. Now my guitar could either slightly sound, well, it would sound slightly out of time. That could be irritating. It's not what I wanted. So I'll undo that so it's back to its original position. Yeah. And what I'm going to do is change this snap to by. I'll click on the switch up there and now what I can do is drag that across. It will snap, but you'll see it keeps its relationship to the bar lines. That's the effect of having that by select to switch up there. Very, very handy indeed. If you want to do it in the piano roll view, just go to your options over here at the top right of the piano roll view and you'll see that option is in their snap to or snap by. Those are the main things that I find useful about the snap feature. Is there something in this video that you didn't already know about and you've been using Kate Walk for absolutely ages? Let me know in the comments down below about that. I love hearing these stories from people. Sometimes they've used it for decades and these videos have helped them to discover something which is really helpful. Now, if you want to find out something else which is really helpful, then you should watch the whole series of these videos. I've put them together in a playlist and you can access that by clicking right here on this thumbnail. I bet there's something else you didn't already know about.