 In today's video I'm going to give you my five steps to a better mix in Cakewalk by BandLab. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well. So recently I released a series about recording a song from beginning to end to the world using your home studio and within that series over a period of around about four to five episodes I covered mixing the song. But I thought it would be nice to have one video where we can take it as an overview and look at the major five steps I go through when I'm mixing a song. Now these are techniques which I've learned over a number of years and I've really found them valuable and they've really improved my mixes. However they're not prescribed to you that you have to do them. You can pick and choose any elements of these. Just try them out and see if your own mixes improve after you've done them. So I'll be getting to all of that in this video. But before we do get stuck in, if you do like this kind of content, all about home recording, DAWs, gear reviews, plugin reviews, that kind of thing, then please do subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you're notified about my future videos. Now let's get stuck into some mixing in Cakewalk by BandLab. So the first thing we're going to talk about is preparation and as usual preparation really is key. Now there's some specific parts about the preparation that I'm going to guide you through now which have a key impact upon later steps, especially the static mix. Spoiler alert, the static mix is step three and I'm going to be asking you to do it as quickly as possible. And in order to do it as quickly as possible, we need to organize ourselves well at this stage. So looking at what I have loaded up here with this project, it's a kind of a medium-sized project and it's got around about 61 channels all in all. Now for some of you that may seem large, for some of you you may have done projects with hundreds of tracks. I think it's kind of medium, especially it gets to that size when you get towards the end of the project and you start adding in things like backing vocals, harmonies, that kind of thing. Now that's already something quite unwieldy if we want to work quickly. 61 tracks is reasonably difficult to manage when you want to work quickly. So we're going to do a few things which enable us to work more quickly. So the first thing is to make sure that your tracks are named. I know this seems like a really obvious thing, but I'm going to mention some obvious things. So for example, with channel one here, we should easily be able to see it's the vocals for the verse. The second one, vocals for the chorus. Just name it something which is going to be meaningful to you. And also of course, if you are working with other people, make sure you name it something which is going to be meaningful to everyone. Now, I don't often have to do anything at this stage because I've usually named my tracks as I do my tracking. And there's a very good reason for that. If I just go to the track view at the top here, you will see, for example, let's scroll down to this guitar. You will see that my guitar here is named GuitarXY and also the clip which relates to it over here is called GuitarXY. Now, if I'd left that at least default name, which would be something like Track23, then the clip would be named Track23. And it's kind of a hassle to change that later. And that can get very confusing because you can't always easily identify your clips during the recording process. So I normally would have done that at the beginning, but if you haven't done it, this is a good time to check that. Likewise, another good thing that we can do in Katewalk, which so many other DAWs cannot do, is add icons to our channels. And you can see here as I scroll along, particularly the middle ones here, it should be fairly quickly, quick and easy to see which ones are guitars, which ones are drums, etc. I find this visual cue very, very useful indeed. And as I say, lots of DAWs don't even have it. So if you don't know how to do that, you would just right click on that area, go to Load Track icon, and it's going to open up to a default folder, which I think would be a couple up from here. Yep, Track Icons, it will go there. And you can see a bunch of folders which relate to different categories of instruments. And you can drill in there and you'll usually find an icon which is helpful to you there. The next thing that I will do is make sure the tracks are in a good order. Now I've already done it in this project, but what I'm talking about here is, for example, I do have these two vocal tracks at the beginning here. And then after that I've got a whole bunch of backing vocal tracks. It wouldn't make much sense if I have my main vocal tracks and then, you know, the backing vocal tracks somewhere else in the console. So I like to shuffle my tracks around and make sure they're in a good order. And the way you do that in the console view here in Cakewalk is if you hold down the Alt key and then go to Blank here of the track, which is in the actual control, say here, then I can click to the wrong place. I'll go just near this pan control here. I'll hold in Alt and then you can see that I can start to move those tracks around. So obviously when I've got things I could do further up here, where I had a guitar and then I had two extra guitars. It makes sense to have those together. Another cool one is to make sure you have your bass guitar next to your kick drum of your drum kit. That's a common one to do because obviously they have a relationship with each other and when you get mixing later on, you'll be looking at those two closely. So it's handy to do that. Now the next thing I would look at doing is starting to group these tracks into buses. Now this is really, really key. So an example of this would be the drums, for example. So we will take the drums which span over several tracks here. We'll go from there all the way up to here. I don't know how many tracks that is. I'm just clicking on the bottom here, holding Shift, clicking at the bottom again and then it selects all of those drums. And what I want to do, although I've got a mix for those drums, which you can see I've set up there, I also want to send them all through to one bus. So I've got one fader which just controls the level of the drums. So later on when I'm mixing, if I think the drums are too loud, I've just got one fader to deal with. I don't have to go through all of these faders and adjust them all. So what I want to do is set up that bus now. So I've Shift clicked at the bottom there to select all those drums. And then I'm going to select down here at the output of the first drum. I'll just open that drop down there. And I'm going to go to New Stereo Bus. Now it's important that I hold Control on my keyboard while I do this. And that will send all of those selected drums through to that new bus, which is now being named Bus B. And that is if I drag this divide all the way across, you can see that here. Of course, I'll go ahead and name that drums like so. And I could also add an icon there if I wish. Now the cool thing about this is it leads on to the next thing that I was going to mention, which was colorizing things or adding color to things. Once you've created a bus like this for the output of a bunch of tracks or channels like that, then when you change the color of the bus in Cakewalk and you can see there, it's changing the colors of all the individual channels which feed into that bus. So let's say I make my drums, I'll make them green like so. That makes it easy for me to, one, identify my drums in the main channel area. And also it makes it easy for me to identify which bus over here on the right hand side, those are feeding into. So that's the two things I would do at this stage. Now what I'm going to ask you to do, which may seem a bit strange to some of you, is do that with all things and create busses for all things. So that nothing in this main area over here is going to be controlled individually later. So for example, now that I've done the drums, I might also go ahead and grab all of these vocals here, these harmony vocals, which I think go all the way through to here. And then I might just go ahead and create a new stereo bus for those, which I've done there, call it backing, quickly typing, which is not a very easy thing for me, backing vox, and then I'll make them all whatever that color is purple. I know my colors. So that's that. And that's fairly obvious. Now I want you to do that for everything. What's maybe not quite so obvious is I also want you to do it for things that don't belong to a group. Just for example, let's go along to this piano here. Now, perhaps we might think, oh, this piano here actually is sort of a thing on its own. It doesn't belong to a group of anything else. I still want you to go ahead and create a new bus for that, which we'll go to in there. And it'll be called piano. You could call it a piano bus or something if that's better for you. And I'll give it a color as well, like so. The reason I'm doing that, which may seem just odd, why feed a single thing through to another single thing, is because in cake, all of those buses are created on the right-hand side, they'll all be grouped together. And what you're going to end up with later, and I'll show you this later, is just a few sliders all together, which you can use to sort of do a macro control of your mix. And that's what we're really leading to, is getting to a stage where we only have a few sliders, faders, I should say, to deal with, to do our mix. So very, very important indeed that you also include those single instruments. Now, what have I got on my list here? Let me have a look. Okay, so the next thing I'm going to ask you to do, and you're going to have to be brave here, because right up until now, you've probably got kind of a mix going on. A mix that, you know, you were listening to while you were recording each instrument. And it probably sounds okay to you. Okay, I want to ask you to be brave and just kind of abandon that. We're going to get rid of all of that. Save it for sure, just in case it happened to be epic. But I'm going to ask you to try and get that mix out of your mind. It probably isn't going to be the best mix, because you've become very, very familiar with it and you've lost objectivity. So, the first thing I'm going to ask you to do is flatten all of these faders. Just zero them. Now, I do this a particular way in cakewalk. So, I've selected the first one there. I've held shift and I've selected the last one like so. Now, there's probably an easier way to do this, which I don't know, but I'll show you how I do it. I then, holding control, I just drag the first fader all the way down to zero. So, they all go to zero. Yeah, and then I hold control again and I double click on the first fader, and ping all of those faders go straight back to zero. You may ask me, why didn't you just control and then double click on the first fader? Because it doesn't quite work. They don't all go back to zero or parity. They will retain their relativity. Anyway, try it. It doesn't work. The way I just did it works and that's the way I like to work. Now, you can do the same thing with your panning. Set them all back to zero as well. And the next thing I'm going to ask you to do, is going to take a lot of braveness on your part, is to delete all of the effects that you had applied. Now, the reason I'm going to be saying that, this is one of those things, you don't have to do this, but I'm going to strongly suggest you do it. I want you to start afresh with your effects as well. I want you to sort of get the effects out of your mind and start your mix off without your effects. Now, there are some exceptions to this, but I would say the exceptions are, keep in your sort of what I would call stylized effects. These are things which really have created the sound of a particular instrument, and if you take them away, you're just going to totally lose any sense of what that instrument is supposed to sound like. So for example, if you've recorded a dry guitar and you've created an overdriven sound with an amp sim, keep that one in there, because that is the sound of the guitar. You know, we can look at delays even. If you think of Edge from U2, the kind of delay that he has on his guitars really creates the style of that instrument. It really is a part of the whole sound of that instrument, so you might want to keep some things like that in. But in general, including things like reverb on vocals, etc., get rid of it. EQing you've done, I would get rid of it. Get rid of it at this stage. If you can't quite delete it, if you really feel attached to the sound you've created, then at least disable it at this stage. And that's going to prepare us for the next phase, which is gain staging. Now gain staging, it seems to me, is kind of unnecessarily enshrouded in this kind of mystique, is if it's something that only advanced mixes should do or will know about, or even capable of doing, and I think that's entirely untrue. It's something that beginners can absolutely do. It doesn't require you to have really good hearing or anything like that. It's just a very simple functional process. And once you know the steps, you can do it fairly quickly and efficiently. And I think it really does help to improve mixes. Now some people do debate about this. I will warn you, if you go to the forums or if you go on Facebook groups or what have you, some people will say that gain staging is not really necessary in digital recording. It was necessary with analog recording, but not really necessary now. And they've got some good points to make about that. However, I would say that my experience has shown me that when I do go through the process of making sure that my gain is healthy, that I get better mixes. Just time has taught me that. I invite you to at least give it a try before you discard it. Now I'm going to give you some specifics about sort of values to set on specific tracks in this video, but I'm not going to go into detail why. I have another video or another few videos, but I'll link to one other video about gain staging in Katewalk. And you can go to that and you'll get a lot more detail. And I'll go through this process a little bit more slowly than I'm about to now. I'm going to give you the basic information that you need here though. So let's start off with an instrument like a guitar because I'm going to treat instruments like guitars differently to drums and percussion instruments. So looking at something like this guitar, I'm making sure that I have its fader at zero as we did previously. And then what I'm going to do is play the track and I'm going to try and get its average volume, its RMS, at around about minus 18 dB, which is just about here where my mouse is wiggling around there. Now, roughly at that stage. Again, I'm not going to tell you exactly why you'll need to watch the other video for that, but that's what I'm aiming for. So I will play the track now just solo that guitar. I'll play it. It's maybe a bit high so I'll bring it down. Not too bad. Didn't have to do too much too. It's done. Then I can move on to the next instrument. Now, hopefully, when you're aiming for that average of minus 18, you're not peaking too high and too high means zero and above. Okay, that's just definitely too high. More often than not, I'm going to find that peaks are around about anything between minus 12 to minus 6, which is absolutely fine. That's what I aim for with those peaks. So if I find that it's definitely peaking that high, then I'll probably just drag it down a little bit, but I'm mostly focusing on the RMS. Then when I go over to things like drums, and I'll just go over here to this kick drum, then I have a slightly different approach as I mentioned earlier. I'll be looking just at the peak level of this because you really don't get that average RMS level. A sound like this is all about a transient, which is there, bang, and then it's disappeared very, very quickly. So in this case, I would play the kick drum and I'd be looking at its peak level and aiming for about minus 12, like so. So very high at the moment. There you go. It's about minus 12, roughly. Now, in the other video I mentioned, I talk about some plugins you can use there, which can just make this process a little bit easier than looking at just the meters on Katewalk, which I just find a little bit fiddly to kind of look at. But that is really what gain staging is all about. You just need to go through every single instrument like that. Just double check that if it's a percussion instrument, it's going and peaking at around about minus 12 dB. And all the other instruments concentrate on the RMS, the average value being at around about minus 18 dB. Three. So we're almost there. We're almost at the static mix, which we're going to talk about in this section, but there's a little bit more of preparation to do before we launch in. Now, there's a couple of things I've asked you to do, just to recap up until now, which are important here. One of the things I asked you to do was group some of your instruments and have them routed through to buses. So the example we looked at earlier was, for example, these drums here. And then I had them all routed through to a bus, which I'll just drag over so we can see it here when my bus is all through to this drum bus here. But of course, the other thing I asked you to do during the gain staging was to set all of your faders back to zero. So the drums themselves as a whole group of things are not mixed. So I'm going to ask you at this stage, before we do our static mix, is to do some little sub-mixes. Now, they're not necessarily going to be perfect because you're not going to be listening to them in the context of the song. But we'll get them in a sort of a ballpark. So for example, with this one, I would go to my drums bus right over the end here and I would click on solo so that I'm only listening to the drums. And I'll go ahead and play them. Now, another important thing I'm going to ask you to do when you're doing any of these mixes at this moment is to do them in the loudest part of the song. Usually for me, with my kind of writing, that's going to tend to be the final chorus of the song. I'm going to ask you to start there. I'll explain a little bit why later, but just follow me here. So we're going to listen to the last chorus of the song and I'm going to listen to the drums. So I might be saying at this point, you know what, that hi-hat's too loud and I'll rain it in and so on and so forth. I'd go ahead and get a sub-mix of those drums. I would also do that. For example, there's going to be a little backing vocal section I had there, a kind of a choir. I would do it with that. There's some smaller things here, like for example, the acoustic guitars. So obviously I've got one main guitar here for the acoustics and then I've got another couple here which are left and right channel acoustic guitars which kind of double up. I get a balance between all of those things. So I'm doing lots of little sub-mixes which are going to lead through, and as we said earlier, they all lead through to these busses. Now if I drag all of those main faders out of the way, you can see here that these are the final faders that I'm left with and these are the faders which are all busses which I'm going to use to actually do my mix. Now something incredibly important for you to do at this stage, and I cannot emphasise this enough, is to take a break. And when I say a break, preferably the next day, maybe even a few days is good, but certainly overnight is something I like to do. If not, at least take a few hours and listen to some other music in between away from this environment, because certainly by this time you've really sort of lost objectivity in terms of the mix. And the next thing I'm going to ask you to do when you go ahead and do the static mix is to try and do it as quickly as possible, usually 10 to 15 minutes, and to kind of work on your instincts. So don't be thinking this is about getting things exactly right in a very detailed way. It's about responding to your gut instinct about, you know, as soon as I play this song we're going to go, drums are too loud, they need to come down, so on and so forth. However, in order to actually start this mix there's a couple of things I'm going to want you to do which you may find strange. Well, one of them I've mentioned already, and that is to start off with the loudest part of the song. I used to do it in the sequence of the song, so say a song started off with a vocal and a guitar, I'd get the balance between those two right, and then as more instruments were introduced I'd add them into the mix. But what I always found every single time was by the time I got towards the end of the song and there was lots of instruments in there, they were kind of fighting each other and I always end up turning that guitar and vocals up louder and louder. So I started to, a few years ago, started to start with the loudest part of the song for the static mix. Now the other parts of the song we're going to deal with a little bit later. Now the other thing which may be very, very foreign to you, especially if you watch lots of YouTube videos on this subject, is the idea of starting off with the vocal first and then building the mix underneath. I've seen no end of YouTube videos where typically people start off with a bass guitar and a kick drum and start off with the rhythm section and then kind of add things in, and that's fine if those people want to work well, absolutely fine. So for me, with the style of music especially, is that to start off with the vocal, normally drag that vocal fade up to zero and then gradually bring things underneath. Next I might do the kick and the bass guitar and then sort of work in that kind of way, perhaps then some of the guitars. I usually leave things like additional vocals, extra vocals and things until last, all the little frills. I want to get the key components of the music in balance. I want to do it as quickly as possible and the reason we're doing it very, very quickly is because you will lose objectivity quite quickly and you'll get fatigued as well and you don't want that to happen. So trust your instinct. You've been listening to well-balanced music your whole life, hopefully, so you've probably got some idea of how things should sound in a natural way. Trust that. Go ahead, try this and make that mix as quickly as you can. Four. So you've done your final mix and at least in that last chorus everything feels just about in balance. There's nothing poking out as too loud and there's nothing buried and too quiet. You should feel just a nice sense of balance. Now it's not going to be perfect. It's not going to be the final sound that you're looking for but that's what you're going to start to work on now. Some of the details of those individual components and then looking at how they relate with each other as well. Now let me get something out of the way. There's no real rules about plugins. For example, I think people seem to think that say for compression that kick drums should always have compression to make them punchy. You know what? Sometimes you don't want your kick drum to be punchy. Some genres of music especially that's really not something you want. People will always say like I always say to get really wide sounding acoustic guitars double them up and pan them left and right and add certain effects. There's no real rules. You've just got to go with what is needed for the song and that sort of leads me on to the next point is always do everything with an intention. So don't just be throwing plugins at particular parts willy-nilly. Always know what your intention what you're hoping to get out of adding that delay or adding that compression or adding that EQ plugin. So that's very, very key because there are some instances honestly it's best left well alone. If something's recorded so well you should probably do very little to it. That can be the best thing at times. So always keep that in mind. I can't go through in detail exactly how you should do each component of a mix but I'm going to give you three rough guidelines as to what I'm thinking about. Three key components I'm thinking about and I'm doing my mix in detail. Now the first category is about tone and clarity. So when I use tone in this context I'm talking about the sort of sound of the instrument. In layman's terms I guess does that sound too basic or does it sound terribly? The way you would use a tone control on a stereo just the basic shaping of a sound to give it its character of course it's going to be a lot more detailed than that in that you can go into intricate parts of that sound and emphasise some parts and subdue some other parts. So that's something that you would be using EQ for. That's the primary plugin for doing that kind of thing. Not the only but the primary plugin for achieving that sound. Clarity is something that we also use EQ for in my opinion but what we're talking about here is rather than using EQ to shape the character of the sound is to enable that instrument to shine or to subdue it. A good example of this which we often use is a kick drum and a bass guitar. They can have the effect of kind of cancelling each other out so you're not really sure what you're hearing just because there's two things pumping away in that similar frequency. It doesn't necessarily mean that's kind of dumbled up and more impactful. They can kind of cancel each other out a bit. So often that's another big role in using EQ plugins. It's to kind of carve out space especially with instruments which are using similar frequency ranges. There's probably a whole tutorial about that I've done somewhere. Not sure if I can remember. I'll put it in the link but it's a really, really important part of using EQs. So that's the first main thing I'm thinking about. Tone and clarity. Space if you like in the sense of EQ space. The next thing that I'm thinking about is haven't we already addressed level with the faders? Yes we have. But now I want to control it a lot more. I want to get a bit more refined because there's going to be a little word here and there in the vocal which just gets a little bit too loud. Now, you can go into your vocal clips in this example and adjust individual words or have you. But of course another common tool that we use as a plugin to tame levels is compressors. Sometimes limiters as well. I'm thinking about compressors here. Compressors are very, very useful for taming those parts of the sound which get out of control. Now remember, a compressor is nothing more than an automated fader. All you're saying is when the sound reaches a certain level squash it a little bit. Now the other settings in a compressor ratio, attack, release determine the actual character of how much we'll suppress that sound by how long for, how quickly we'll do it. So basically a compressor is an automated fader and it's able to do things in milliseconds which you wouldn't be able to humanly react to. So compressors are very, very useful in the mixing stage when you want to control a sound. But again, I urge you, don't think you have to always use a compressor on everything. Some things just don't need compression. Something can be destroyed with compression, especially bad compression. A good example of that for me would be acoustic guitar. You can hear them over compressed and they just get completely ruined. So don't always think you have to use them is the message here again. But that's very important tool in terms of control on the level. And the third important thing that we'll be thinking about at this stage is what I'm going to call 2D space, two-dimensional space. So the first dimension being left and right. So we're really talking about panning here. And obviously there's different types of panning. Sometimes people will use panning to set up a very realistic sound. So they know that say an orchestra always has a way of setting up. So certain section's going to be more to the left and other section will be to the right. Some will be in the middle. So that's one way to use panning. Normally, of course the only things that we don't tend to pan in contemporary music are things like the lead vocal the kick drum and the bass. We tend to like those to be down the center. Now while we're talking about panning another really important thing to remember is to often check your mix in mono as well. Some people will do the whole mix in mono. What I like to do is I mix in stereo, but I flick over to mono when I've done some important panning changes just to make sure that the mix still translates if it's in mono. It's a really good way of revealing when things are not quite in balance. So do remember that. So the main thing to remember when we're talking about the mix is to make sure that the mix that we're talking about is in mono. So the main thing to remember when we're talking about the mix is to make sure that the mix that we're talking about is not left to right but backward and forward. How up front something feels and to a degree does it feel further away. And for me it feels further away. So you have to be a little bit careful. Recently if I just want something to feel like it's in a room rather than in a stereo studio I'll use delay as my primary thing to give it that kind of space. But yeah, the other dimension I'm talking about is forward backwards. Those are the way I like to keep it simple like that. Just those three things. The second one was level using compression and the third one was 2D space where they exist in those different spaces. Now a couple of other things I've got some notes here which I just want to check. So another important part which I haven't included in here because we don't always use it but it's probably going to be something you're going to think about is saturation. So saturation is another one of those things which can really affect the sort of feeling and the tone, the colour of a sound. And often you're not using specifically a saturation plugin. It's often a byproduct of plugins like tape emulators compresses, channel strips, EQs. So saturation is an important thing. It's another thing I think about but it's not sort of for me a primary part of the mixing process but I will think about it at this stage. Now the other important thing to mention before we finish off on this sort of detailed stage of adding lots of plugins is do remember your gain staging. Your gain staging is still happening here so make it a practice. You add a plugin and then once you've done that and you're happy with the sound of that plugin, check that the output from that plugin is the same as the input. So for example at this particular stage in the song it's very simple to do. If the vocal was peaking at minus 12 I just want to make sure after I've added a plugin that it's still peaking at minus 12. Now most plugins are going to have an output control of some kind. Sometimes it'll be automated. I love that and often they're done quite well. If you don't have any of those and you'll need some sort of simple gain control plugin to put in between. Not very common these days to have to do that most plugins that I use I have to say have some sort of output control. But it is important to check the gain after every single plugin because often I think it's a downside of plugins they tend to make things louder. There's two things which are bad about that. First of all your gain level has changed which means you could be too hot going into the next plugin and get undesirable results and secondly it just tends to sound better because it's louder and that's not really what we want. We want it to actually sound better. Not just because it sounds louder. So checking gain still at this stage is very very important. And now we'll be moving on to the final phase. So up until now I've asked you to focus on one part of the song usually the loudest part of the song and in my case for this song it was the last chorus. We're just looking for the place where most instruments are going to be present in the song. But this creates a little bit of a problem because then often in other parts of the song the balance isn't correct. You'll go to the first verse for example just feel like wow that vocals way too loud or what have you. So that's where automation comes in. You're going to go through the process of listening to different parts of your song and adjusting that balance using automation so that your movements are recorded. Now this is probably one of the more important parts of mixing and can really add that final finishing touch to your song so that throughout the experience of that song the listener always feels that everything's in balance. Now in practical terms in Cakewalk I'm just going to briefly go over the mechanics of automation so that you can understand that. But I have covered it in another video. I'll put a link in the description for that. So one of the main things that you're going to do is control the fader and the panning for example. So let's have a look at how you may record your actions here in the console view. So let's say with this track here, this main vocal track, I'm thinking right, I want to actually just change the level here and there in the song. So an easy thing to do is right enable this for automation. So you click on the W button there and you'll see the controls which can be automated there. They get that red highlight around them. You then go through the process of playing the song. You don't need to hit record or anything. Just playing the song is fine and you'll make your moves. You know, moving the fader up and down, moving the panning, whatever you feel you want to do. You don't have to do it all in one hit. You can do those controls separately. Then once you've done that, you turn the right enabling off and then make sure it's read enabled so that every time you play the song, it's going to look at the data which you created during that process and it's going to control those changes to those controls automatically for you. So that's the first main approach to automation. The second approach is to draw it in automation lanes. So if I just make this console a little bit smaller you can see a couple of places there where I've already done it. I'm able to see that because on those particular tracks, I'll just show you what I need to do. So I wanted to see the automation on this track here. Vox, Chorus, Unison. We go to this little drop down here, click on that. Go to Automation and I can choose whichever kinds of automation I want to use or want to see at this point. So if I just wanted to look at the level or the sorry, the bus output volume. I'll go for that. Click on that and now it's showing the bus output volume for that bus. And then what I can do is I can actually draw things in. So we can do things like this and that will make obviously make a change there and go back afterwards. So that's the two sort of main ways of doing it. This is a way for me when for some reason I want to be very very precise I could use this method and that's cool. But if I want it to be sort of organic and really feel it then I prefer to use the first method. However, I will go in and fine tune it. So I'll record it normally in terms of using the console here I'll record my movements. But if I just want to fine tune something because I didn't quite hit it right then I'll go in and make changes in the sort of graphs or the lines here. So that's the main mechanics of automation. Now what would I automate? Well anything actually. But the primary things I'm going to automate first of all a level. So level is just making sure I keep that balance. The other thing I might do is things like panning and panning can be quite useful. Obviously you can go for that effect that was used a lot in the 70s where things can pan from left to right. It's not so fashionable anymore but hey it's one of the things you can do. Now the other thing that you can use panning for is to create width. So let's say I've recorded a main guitar and then I've recorded two backup guitars left and right channels. I can change how widely those two extra guitars are panned to create extra width and you may want to do that say in a chorus or a bridge or some specific part of the song. So panning can be very very useful for that. The other thing which panning can be useful or very sorry not panning. Automation can be very very useful for is to automate effects. And you might be surprised how much you can automate effects in Cakewalk. Now the way that you can see if something can be automated and let's just go for an effect here there's a whole load of effects in there. Let's just double click on an effect there. Now if we take a look I'll just drag it into the middle and we'll zoom in there. You will see right away that at the top of this effect window here you can see the read and write enabling. That means that things will be available for reading and write enabling within that effect. Let's go for another example the same goes again for this fabfilter plugin. There's so many aspects of almost every aspect of a plugin like this can be recorded. So if I want to change an EQ during the course of a song I can do that. Occasionally you'll come across a plugin which doesn't have anything in it which can be automated and basically those read and write buttons won't be enabled if that's the case. That's the easy way to find out. In this particular song if we go back to the sort of graph view you will see here for example that I made quite a big change to the reverb. Now what I actually wanted for this particular sound was to have this vocal absolutely you know sort of caked in reverb and then gradually during the course of that passage of the music it became less had less and less reverb became more and more dry. I wanted to try and get the effect that that singer was actually moving closer towards you. That was a very unusual use of reverb I have to say for me I can't think of many occasions that I've done it exactly like that but it's just an example of the kind of thing you may want to do. Automation really does make the difference between a kind of a good mix and a really great mix. Now the other thing you may be tempted to use automation for is to make certain whole sections of the song louder. It's very common that you want to make say the initial impact of a chorus louder something along those lines. I would say at this stage that in my personal opinion I don't do that right now. Those big macro changes that you make to automation as a song I tend to leave that to the mastering phase which I won't be covering in this video because that will be covered in a different video. I'll leave that up to you but generally I would hold off from doing automation at this stage for the overall sound. So I really do hope that you found these tips useful and that you can incorporate them into your own mixes and get good results. Now if you're confused about anything at all please do ask in the comments down below and I'll do my very best to help you out. If you'd like to share some of your own experience with some of these techniques also let us know in the comments down below and if it didn't work out for you that's fine. It's fine for us to disagree and to do things in our own way. It's about finding your best method for getting the best mixes. Now if you did like this video do make sure you hit the like button because that lets YouTube know that it should show this video to other people and that really does help me out. 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