 To keep the creative source flowing, you need to use Cakewalk much faster. Now, I think there is one vital key to this, and that is the control key. If you're using your mouse for everything, that's guaranteed to slow you down. I'm gonna give you 32 ways, and we can count them down here, that you can speed up your workflow in Cakewalk by using this magical key. And I bet there's some that you don't already know. So first of all, I've gotta get this out of the way. If you're not already using Control-X to cut, Control-C to copy, and Control-V to pace, you're already slowing yourself down, not just in Cakewalk, but in Windows as a whole. Like any other keyboard shortcuts, start off with one or two for a few days, muscle memory kicks in, and you're away. But I don't want you to think that you should never use the mouse. Indeed, combining it with the control key can be very powerful. For example, we all know that left-clicking these little zoom icons down here will zoom our tracks in and out vertically, okay? But what if we hold the Control key while we do it? Then we're zooming the contents of the tracks in and out. You can see it happening here with both audio and MIDI. Now, do remember, we're not actually making anything louder or quieter. It's just a visual thing. If we did want to make, say, this audio track here louder or quieter, we can adjust the gain by holding the Control key and then dragging up and down. And right away, we can adjust the gain of that clip there. Now, if you did want to adjust the height of these tracks altogether, you can press Control A to select all of the tracks. And then while holding the Control key, drag the bottom of the tracks up and down. And you can see they get resized relatively. Another reason for combining the Control key and the left mouse button is for deselecting items. So let's go ahead and select all of these channels here by pressing Control A. Now, if I want to deselect a couple of tracks because I don't want to affect them, I can just go down to the bottom, hold Control and click on the channel number next to the name down the bottom there. So I'll do it there with the snare and with the kick drum. Now, as you know, if you want to adjust a fader, you just left click on it and then drag and you can adjust that fader. But if you do that while holding the Control key, it's now going to adjust the faders for all of the selected tracks here. And they keep their relative position with each other. So you're maintaining their kind of mix with each other. Now, that also works with mute. You can see that happening there with solo. And if we go up to the top, it also works with the gain control there. Now, another thing you may want to do is adjust the output for a channel. If I go down to the bottom here and then just click on this output drop down here, I can select a different output. Now, if we do that while holding the Control key, it's going to change the output for all of the selected channels. So I'll hold Control again, just go to one of them, select the output drop down and I'll change this to master. And now all of the selected tracks output go to the master output. Well, by the way, it's common to change the same value with multiple selections using the Control key in Cakewalk. For example, I've got all of these channels selected here. You can see that by the orange background to the channel numbers here. Now, if I go ahead and hold the Control key while I insert an audio effect to one of these channels, let's do that now, you can see that that audio effect got inserted to all of the selected channels. Or in my drum map manager, when I want to change the output for all drums, I can hold Control shift while selecting my output and all of the drums will change to that output. Or what if you had a number of tracks selected and want to show automation on them? Just hold Control while selecting automation, volume from the edit filter and they will all show automation. I'm just about to show you one of my favorite uses of the Control key in Cakewalk. But before I do, let's just have a quick word from Morgan Freeman. Thanks, Mike. You know, I really enjoy these Cakewalk videos. That's why I'll be hitting the like button. For those of you who are not enjoying, hit the dislike button twice. So I'm going to demonstrate to you one of my favorite uses of Control and that is to hold the Control key while we drag something to make a copy. But I want to demonstrate it within a feature of Cakewalk which you may not know about. But first of all, we need to do a little bit of setup. So I'm going to go up to options up here, click on that, go down to drag and drop options, click on that and this dialog box appears. Now I want to make sure I've checked this, copy entire clips as linked clips. Okay, so I'll click on that, click on, okay. So of course we're going to go ahead now and make a copy. I'm going to use this clip here and you can see the piano roll is open showing the notes within that clip. So let's hold down Control and then just drag off to the side here. And that indeed does make a copy but it's made a linked copy, okay. We'll do the same again a couple of times. I'll just do it over here, one a little bit further along like so. So what is a linked copy? Well, what it means is now if we make any changes whatsoever to any one of these clips, the same changes will be reflected in the other clips. So if for example I take this note here and just drag it all the way down like so, that change is reflected in the other clips. If I change its duration like so, that change again is reflected in the other clips. Cool, huh? All of this reminds me of another really cool feature in Cakewalk involving the control key. I've got this clip selected here and I'm going to press Control L to make a groove clip. Now the great thing about groove clips is if I drag the edges of the contents out like so, it will repeat whatever the contents were in the original clip across that area. I can do the same over to the left over here as well. Very, very cool indeed. The nice thing about groove clips is I can now change the contents of those kind of loops if you like. So if I go up here and drag these notes around on this particular area of the groove clip, you can see that only the notes in that area are updating. So you can create variations like that. Also groove clips work with audio tracks as well as these MIDI tracks. Now I'm going to undo all of that to go back to my original little clip there and show you another way to duplicate. So we can actually select our clip like so and press Control D and then off to the right we will see duplicates appear. D is for duplicate. There are a number of control shortcuts that use the first letter of their function. For example, Control N for new file or Control O for open file, Control S for save and Control P for print. Okay, you probably don't use print that much in Cakewalk but it's there if you need it. It's really worth learning these shortcuts because they're commonly used amongst other Windows applications. A little bit more exciting than that is pressing Control T for a new audio track. T is for track and if you press Control Shift T you get a new MIDI track. Now that you do have that lovely new audio track you probably want to see the pro channel. So go ahead and press Control I. I is for, I love the pro channel. Now I want to draw your attention to something that Cakewalk called the now marker. That's that little marker up here which sits on the ruler and it indicates where our play head currently is. Now for most of us we will start and stop playback using the space bar on our keyboard. And if you've got it set up like me when you press space to stop then the now marker returns back to where it was at the beginning. So I'll demonstrate that. Now I'll press space on my keyboard and I'll press again to stop and you can see that we return back to the now marker. Now we can toggle that behaviour by pressing Control W. Now when I play and stop the now marker is positioned wherever I press stop. Okay, so I'm going to press Control W again to toggle that back on. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to press space to start but I'm going to press Control space to stop. So here we go. Space to start and then Control space. And you can see what it did there was it stopped wherever the play head was and the now marker now moved to that position. All of that can be very handy indeed. Another couple here to do with transport. If we press Control and the home key on our keyboard we go right back to the beginning. We rewind to the beginning and likewise, if we press Control and the end key on our keyboard what do you think happens? You guessed it, we go to the end of our song. Now you may remember at the beginning of this video that I pointed out these little magnifying glass icons used for Zoom. But in fact, they are the slowest way to zoom the interface. It's much better to use Control plus the up and down arrows to zoom vertically like so or Control and the left right arrows to zoom horizontally. Now while you've got Control held down and you use the scroll wheel on your mouse you can scroll through your project horizontally like so. Talking of the scroll wheel if you did want to zoom say the waveform up here of this track or even a MIDI track you can hold Control plus Alt and you can zoom that track like so. Now this is just a visual zoom of the waveform in this case. I'm not actually changing the sound in any way. Now if I wanted to go ahead and hide that track I could select the track and press Control H. H is for hide. Don't panic you can get it back by pressing Shift H. Oh Shift, well that's for another video. There are many ways you can improve your workflow in Cakewalk by BandLab. So I've made a series of videos stuffed full of tips. Even seasoned veterans have mentioned to me that they didn't know about some of these tips and it's really helped them out. So that's why I've made this playlist for you to click on so that you don't miss out. And by the way if you want to close down your project in Cakewalk press Control F4.