 Cakewalk by BandLab comes with 11 free Sonatas effects, but perhaps like me, you're not a huge fan of the way they look. And whilst that grey and blue emboss design may have that Cakewalk logo in the bottom corner, it's hard to say that it fits the rest of the Cakewalk aesthetic. But, as they say, looks can be deceiving. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. If you've overlooked the Sonatas plugins which come with Cakewalk, I think that may be a mistake. So, I hope to inspire you by taking a look at my favourite three. Now, if you're looking to release some music soon, don't forget to check out the link in the description down below for the sponsor of this video, DistroKid. If you follow that VIP link, you'll get 7% off of the sign-up fee. Let's dive in with the first of my favourites. Because we already have some useful reverbs included in the Pro Channel of Cakewalk, I think it's easy to overlook this one, the Sonatas Reverb which is also included. And one of the reasons you may overlook it is because of all of these sort of complex controls here. But I think you'll find over the next few minutes as I break this down, it's really not that difficult to understand. And once you do, you've got an incredibly powerful reverb plugin available to you. Let's start off at the bottom. Okay, looking at these three sliders, this is our mix area. I'm starting here because it reveals the basics of what goes on with this reverb. Normally, you will see a mix control here on a lot of reverbs just between dry and wet. But they break it down a little bit more for you here. We do have a slider to listen to the dry signal. Let's just mute the others and listen to our female vocal with just that. And the next slider is for early reflections. Let's have a listen to those. So that's just the reflections off of nearby objects etc or walls when the person is singing. And then we have the reverb which is that much more distant effect. And the three combined sound like this. Now can I just make note of another interesting control nearby here, that's the width control. You probably understand what it does, it just makes the stereo image a little bit wider. Okay, so this on 100% at the moment. If we turn it all the way down to zero, then we get a much more sort of mono sounding reverb. But did you know, we can not only turn it back up to 100, but we can go above 100. We can do 200% of width here for an incredibly wide sounding reverb. So that's sort of basics. Yeah, we've got that dry, the early reflections and reverb mix. Okay, so let's go back up to the top and look at some of the other controls. First of all, we have a low and high cut filter here. This is so so handy. There's no really, there's not really any rules in recording. But if there was a rule, I would say always EQ your reverb, especially on the low end, because we do tend to get a build up of low end frequencies as they're bouncing around that reverb. And if you've got it on lots and lots of tracks, then you can create an awful lot of muddiness in your mix. In fact, if you've got muddiness in your mix, this would be the first place I would start to look at, get rid of the low end in your reverb. Let's just do that on this vocal, I'd probably put it right up here quite aggressively for me actually, maybe about 500 Hertz. Obviously, you're going to adjust that to taste for your own likes. And on the other, we've got a high cut. Now, I don't use this as much, but it can be quite useful because sometimes, especially things like sibilances can become quite harsh when reverb is applied. So you may want to sort of control that there with a high cut. Okay, so that's my first thing I would normally always do with a reverb. The next controls, the first one of these is called a pre delay. This is common to many reverbs, and it essentially is what it says. There is a delay when we push this up between the start of the sound and when the reverb kicks in. That means you can keep the beginning of your sounds a little bit dry for a while here, which can really help to keep them present and not make them sound too distant. So you can play around with that. The next two controls I'm going to mention together, because they're fairly sort of subtle, okay, especially diffusion, which is sort of mimicking, you know, what objects are in a room and how hard they are, et cetera. Okay, so it's very, very subtle. I'm not going to play with it now. You can play with it yourself, but it's going to, you're not going to hear too much difference, right? But it is there, however. Now, room size may be confusing to many of you, though. I know it was for me at first because I thought, wow, if I want a cathedral, yeah, I'll just chuck it all the way up to the top. Yeah, let's have a listen. Oh, it's not all that big. In fact, there's a very subtle difference between the two, yeah. Well, I have to tell you, you can make some really big reverb sounds, but it's not here. So don't get confused by this room size thing. That really happens down here with these next four controls, bass multiply, crossover, decay time, and high damping. Those last two are really about bigness. So let's just look at those last two first. We can actually control both of them by pushing this little white box around here. You can see it's like a sort of almost like a joystick type of a control. Now, to get that long decay time that we're after, yeah, let's just push it all the way up to the top. You can hear that's much bigger, yeah. But we're doing some damping here on the high frequencies, okay. And it's really those high frequencies when we've got a long sort of tail, which really stand out. So if I was to go all the way up here, just wait for that to finish, that is where you start to get your really big sounds, okay. So, you know, if you were you can do is do a big sound but cut out those high frequencies now you get a much sort of lower rumbly sort of sound if you like. It's that very muffled but long sound, okay. So I'm doing extremes there just so you can clearly hear what's going on. But those two sort of control that now within that we've also got a relationship between what we're hearing there and the low end frequencies what they're calling bass here, okay. And we can sort of change that relationship here, yeah. So we can really sort of accentuate those low end frequencies or cut them a little bit again mostly for most of us we're going to be cutting them. And then finally as we move left to right we can see that the crossover but the point where what is considered the bass frequencies ends, okay. So we can control that there. That's the overview of everything with this reverb. Don't forget there's some presets that you can go to at the top if you just want to get started quickly with this but it's really an incredibly effective and versatile reverb plug-in. I've chosen the Sonatis Multiband Compressor because although there's lots of free compressors around there's not so many useful free multiband compressors and we do get this with Cakewalk. Now if you're intimidated by this interface it may be partly because you're a little bit intimidated by compressors overall perhaps you don't really understand them. Let me know in the comments down below if that's you. I'm going to do a quick one minute sort of rundown of compressors to quickly help you up to speed and then we'll talk about this multiband compressor and I'm going to do that by actually looking at the compressor plug-in which comes for free with Cakewalk the Sonatis Compressor plug-in. So a compressor actually adjusts volume and it focuses on the peak volumes the loudest part and it says hey once we get too loud let's turn things down. Well where is too loud? We determine that with the threshold. The threshold control is here on the left and that determines at what volume we start to turn things down. How much we turn them down is controlled by something called the ratio and we have that here. So if we want to turn it down a lot then we'll just put a high ratio like so and then once we go over that volume it's going to turn the volume down okay. Now it may do that gently over time as it gets to the threshold yeah it will gradually turn it down more and more or it may do it instantly and that's controlled with the knee and if we adjust the knee control you can see this is what they call a hard knee so once it goes over the threshold it turns it down right away but a soft knee would gradually turn it down more and more as we go over that threshold okay. So that's the first few things we need to understand about compressor. How quickly we turn it down yeah how quickly after we go over that threshold do we turn it down is controlled with the attack control yeah that's down here at the bottom and then finally once we go back below the threshold once the sound gets quieter again when do we return our compressor back to its normal state and letting all the sound through that's controlled with the release that amount of time okay. So that's a crash course in compression. Now how does this work within the plugin I want to focus on the multi band plugin well you can think of this plugin as the one we were just looking at but five of them and each of them focuses on a different area of frequencies a different range of frequencies okay. Now at the bottom you can see those five different zones yeah and we can control exactly where those zones begin and end by just pushing these sliders around yeah. Now when we first load this plugin up it's going to be with this tab over here set to COM we're going to see all of the controls for all of the different bands or ranges all there that can look a bit sort of nerdy and complicated can't it but if we just go into one of these bands at the top here and we start to adjust the threshold by dragging a slider like so then this area actually the bottom right area here changes to controls just for that particular band that we're adjusting okay. So if we want to for example just you know control the low end of the volume of the low end of a sound then we would do that with this band yeah and we can adjust the threshold as we did and we can then go ahead and adjust the ratio the attack and the release okay. So that's essentially how we use this plugin we can click on the different bands like so let's reset it and have a listen to this acoustic guitar but pay attention to the percussive element of this acoustic guitar where I'm kind of hitting it. Did you hear the last one there it was much louder than the others have a listen again and that's the kind of thing we may want to control with a multiband compressor there's actually many uses but this is just one example. So what I would do here is think to myself right most of that slapping sound is actually in the higher frequencies here perhaps in these top two bands of frequencies I'm going to go for the highest one first of all with that very high sort of snap to the sound I'm just going to bring that threshold down to a point where I think that that slap goes over the threshold here just going to move the playhead forward so we're just hearing that yeah it goes well over the threshold just there so let's just we just quickly we'll just grab the ratio and we'll just slam it down so it's just completely crushing that sound right when it goes above that threshold okay it's getting there I think I probably want a hard knee so it's implemented right away and a very quick attack here almost instant attack and also a fairly quick release that's have a listen now okay that's not too bad that's a part of it but there's some other information in this band I think I'm just going to drag that threshold down here doing this real quick by the way guys I would take a bit more care normally on this but we'll just do it real quick now we'll pop that knee down again yeah we'll do a quicker attack sorry turn that ratio down and then give it a hard knee have a listen now okay I'm just going to push that up a little okay now it's still there and it's still louder than the other slaps but it's just not so extreme yeah it's not poking out quite so much have a quick listen with a bit more context with a few slaps before okay now let's bypass and see what we started off with originally okay so you can hear quite a reasonable difference there so I could you know delve into this in more detail and probably get a little bit more control over that but you get the idea now why would I do that why would I not just grab an EQ and then reduce those frequencies so we're not hearing those high slaps well the problem with that would be it would reduce the high frequencies for all of the rest of the performance so all that nice sparkly end of the guitar that airy end of the guitar would all start to sound a little bit muffled for the rest of the performance so this is when we just want to control a certain frequency range a bit like we would with an EQ but momentarily when it gets too loud an incredibly useful plugin talking about multiband maybe you've got multiple band members and if you do release some music you'll want to equally split the funds between each of you right how about that for a segue let's imagine I'd worked with my good friend Joe blogs on a recent single I'd released through distro kid and I want to make sure that he gets paid for his part in the project here on my distro kid account I'll just go to splits up at the top here click on that and it brings up this page where I need to select a release so Joe worked with me on this song I'll never know and I click on next okay so it brings up this page at the moment you can see that I'm getting a hundred percent of the revenue share woohoo I do want to make sure that me and Joe stay friends so I want to make sure he gets his part for the project so I'll click on add collaborator and then add in Joe's email address like so now I can select an amount of revenue share to be paid to Joe with this drop down so let's say look Joe was getting 20% here for his input it automatically adjusts mine to 80% here and then if I continue with this split if Joe's already a member he'll get an email but if he's not a member he will get an email and he'll have the opportunity to join distro kid for 50% off of the normal fee so it's going to be less than $10 so that he can go ahead and collect his share of the revenue now apart from regular percentage splits like that we can also do recoupments perhaps Joe paid $100 up front for some piece of equipment for the recording in which case we can click on add recoupments here and we can reimburse him his $100 let's make sure we get that correct and then after that he will get his 20% it's very easy to do here on distro kid you know it's amazing to me that although I own many commercial delay plugins I keep coming back to this one why because it just does what I want in a very straightforward manner especially when I've got an idea in my head about what I want to achieve now I'm going to apply it to this acoustic guitar have a listen and I'm going to start off by trying to replicate those early reflections that we heard in the reverb plugin earlier but here I'll have a lot more control over what's happening here so I'm going to want some very short delays I want only one repeat and I want it to be slightly different for the left and right channels okay so let's go and set that up because I want it to be really short I don't want to be based on beats per minute or anything musical I want to work in milliseconds so I need to go down to the bottom here see where it says tempo sync at the moment it sets a manual which means everything's going to be based on 120 beats per minute if I click it once it goes to host that's going to then be based on the tempo of the door that we're working Kate walk of course all right so that's set to 120 in my door so 110 in my door at the moment don't want that I want to work in milliseconds so I'll click it again it goes to off okay that means up here at the top I can set my delay times in milliseconds now I want them to be different the left and the right channel so I'm going to click this button so link is switched off all right so now I can adjust the left and the right channel separately I want a really quick delay yeah so I'm going to drag this all the way down to around about what have we got there about seven milliseconds on the other side I want it to be a bit different yeah so I'm going to go to I don't know what about 15 or so that's fine I just want one repeat on each side so I'm going to put the feedback control down to zero zero controls the number of repeats sorry feedback controls the number of repeats and when it's set to zero it's just one repeat okay cross feed controls the interaction between the left and right channels I don't want that so I'm going to turn that down and then finally we've got mix which is the blend between the dry signal and the delay okay so that's my basic setting for a quick sort of early reflection style of delay let's have a listen see how it sounds so right away it's giving that guitar a bit of space do you want to hear how it sounded before it's like this very kind of dead studio sound yeah turn it on so it's actually quite subtle it creates a bit of space I quite like it if we wanted a bit more of a kind of a slap down slap back delay I can't speak today my birds are waddled all right we'll just push this up a little bit have a listen yeah that's more you sort of slap back delay kind of sound awesome and then of course we can work into much more creative delays we can link them to the tempo of the project of course as I said earlier and then we start to work in with the factors up here in terms of musical timings okay so we can for example set this to one six let's set this one to one eighth we'll put a little bit more feedback in there like so a bit of interaction between the left and the right channels have a listen to this push those feedback up a bit yeah so just really it just is a very straightforward plugin to use and just very quickly of course it's starting to sound a bit muddy there so of course I would use the low cut we've got a high cut as well but I would use the low cut to get rid of some of that muddiness have a listen don't ignore this plugin now earlier we talked about the multi-band compressor and I gave you a quick explanation of what a compressor does this is a topic which often confuses people sometimes for a few weeks when they start out sometimes for a few years if you feel confused about compression you don't know where to start then I highly recommend you watch this video right here I made this just for you