 In today's video we are going to be taking a look at the new Arranger track in Cakewalk by BandLab. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. So the new Arranger track in Cakewalk by BandLab promises to be a useful tool for arranging and testing different arrangements in your music in a non-destructive way. So in today's video I'm going to be going through a quick tutorial about how to use the tool as well as talking about some of its pros and cons. So please do stick around for all of that. Now before we do get started, 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 are notified about my future videos. Now let's get stuck into that Arranger track. So before we get started you may want to make sure that you do have the latest version of Cakewalk so that you can see these new features. For reference I'm using version 2020.04 build179. Now as ever before you go ahead and update Cakewalk, do make sure that you back up your projects and all your data. I've actually lost projects before in the process of updating Cakewalk, it was a very painful experience. I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy let alone my beloved viewers so you have been warned. So what do we have here on the screen? We have a little project which I created late last night. I hesitate to call it a song or even a piece of music but it is some sound at least. It consists of some drums, bass and organ. They're all virtual instruments and they're playing an intro, a verse, a chorus and an outro and you can see that I've got some markers at the top there indicating those. I like to use markers, you don't have to use them for this process but I've used them for many many years, really great for helping you not to get too confused as your songs get more complex. Now the range of features are really handy at this stage especially. This stage I've just got sort of the core of a song, some basic parts and I'm perhaps not sure which order I want things to go in, whether I want it just to be a two verses and then a chorus or maybe straight into the chorus and the verses come later and I may want to experiment. Now that could be quite difficult, well not difficult but just messy, you end up having to doing lots of cuts and pace of different sections of the song and then you find you don't like it, you have to undo all your work. So what BandLab have done here is try to create a feature which makes it easy for you to experiment with some basic progressions and that's what we're going to do here. Now before we launch in and I'll show you exactly how to use it, I'm going to play this piece of music to you as it's very brave of me, I'm ruining my reputation here, but this is just to give you some context. I want you just to listen out for what's happening here and so that things will make a bit more sense later. As I say, there's an intro, a verse, a chorus and an outro. Let's have a listen to that now and I may even do some dancing to get me through the pain. I know, I know, amazing, amazing. So hopefully it wasn't too painful for you and I'm sorry that I wasted twenty seven seconds or so of your life, but hopefully you understand the basics of what's going on here and the things that I want to move around into a different order. So in order to use the Arranger, there's a couple of new views that we haven't seen before in Cakewalk and the first of them is the Arranger Track and we can see that by hitting A on the keyboard. Just like that and there's the Arranger Track. If you hit A again, it hides it. Another way to show and hide is to go up to the View menu up here and then navigate down in that menu and click that to show and hide it again. Now, the other view, which is going to be important to us is the Arranger View itself. We can get to that with this new icon up here that says A on it. We'll click on that and that shows it there. We can also show and hide it by clicking on Shift, Alt and I altogether. And that can show and hide it. I'm going to hide it for a moment so that I can show you another way to show it a little bit later on. So the first thing that we're going to do is sort of map out the different sections of our song and it's really easy. If I want to just map out the first verse, I'll just drag a box out like so. Release and it creates a section. Now, you'll notice that it's called Section 42. They're not always called Section 42. Only if you've done it 41 times already, which I have in this project whilst I was experimenting off camera. Yours are probably to say Section 1. Now we've got that section created. Let's create the chorus section. I'm actually going to drag over from this side and drag a section out. Now, you'll notice as I get up against it there, it just won't go any further. I can't overlap sections and that's a good thing. You wouldn't want sections to actually overlap. It would be very confusing for this whole process. However, if you do feel that you've made a mistake of some kind, you can do an overlap or create a new join by hitting Alt on the keyboard. And you'll notice that can overlap there. OK, so there we have a different section. And if we wanted to change a section, you can see that we if we just get to the edge of it, we can move things around like so. And I'll do that there. I've got those two sections there. That's my verse and my chorus. I'll drag out the intro wall on there and then just move this out of the way. I'll drag. Sorry, that was the outro. And this is the intro. And there I have my sections. And if I wanted to name them, I could just go over here to this part here, where we're showing them. In fact, that did appear without me showing you something. I'll just show you this. So hide it. So another way to actually show these sections is something I did there, which I didn't tell you about. I double clicked on one of these sections and that opens up that panel there. So, yeah, if I wanted to rename it, I can double click on the name. And I would call that, of course, intro like so. Now, you can do all of it that way. And that's probably a way that you may do it if you don't have markers. However, if you're like me and you already had markers in your project, there's actually a really simple way of doing it. And we do this by clicking control. Let me think control a on the keyboard for all, of course. And then we go up to the rule up the top, right click and we go down to create sections from markers. And if we do that, it creates the sections based upon where I had the markers and it names the sections as well. So that's really cool if you do happen to have markers. And I'll go in and I'm just going to call this one here, which is verse one. It's not really verse one, it's just going to be a verse section. So I'll just go in and rename that verse. OK, so I've got my sort of generic sections there. So the idea here is we want to be able to experiment with different orders. Now, there's a couple of different ways we can do that. You'll notice down the bottom here, we have the arranger window. Let me just actually zoom in so you can see all this a little bit clearer. So there's the arranger window or panel down the bottom there. And I'm going to just click on this button, this sort of down arrow button. That's just moving all of the sections down into the arranger window. Now, I can duplicate some of them. If I wanted to have two verses there, I could go to this menu and click duplicate. And that's fine. We can go ahead and do things like that. We can delete sections, etc. Or the other way that we can do is just drag sections from the top to the bottom using it kind of like a palette. So I think, you know what, this is going to be the radio, you know, edit. I don't want any intro just launched straight into the first verse. So I'll put the first verse there. And in fact, you know what, I'm not even going to do that. I'm going to sorry, I'll go in there and remove that. I'll actually start off with a chorus to begin with. So I'll drag my chorus down to this straight in. And then it's going to go to a verse. And then it'll go to another chorus and then it'll go to an outro. We won't even use that intro for this radio edit. Now, I can rename that here or call it radio. Well, I'll just call it radio. Fine. And then we can play it just to see how it sounds. So I'll just click on the play button here and you'll see. Obviously, even if we move the play head right back to the beginning there, if we play this, it's going to start off with the chorus. Now, if you haven't guessed already, when it gets to the end of this chorus, where do you think it's going to go? No prizes. Just guess for fun. It's going to go to verse. OK, so you can see what's going to happen. Essentially, what this feature does is it controls the play head. It just is a way of navigating it while it continues to play to different sections. So that's really, really, really cool. Now, you may think, well, I don't mind that version, but how about I have another version? So I'm going to go here and create a new arrangement here. We've still got that one that we created earlier. And I'm going to have this for the album version. The album version is going to have an intro, a verse, a verse, a chorus, another verse and then the outro. OK, that's cool. We'll call that album version. And of course, we can go ahead and play that and it's gone ahead and done that. As I suggested, I want to go back to my radio version, then that's already down there, the radio version. So you can go ahead and make as many versions as you like. Well, I say that I'm not really sure about that. I'm to my understanding is that you could make as many as you like lots. So once you've done that, that's really cool. You can start to play around with those and experiment with it and you're not having to do any editing here. Now, one thing I just love about this feature right away is I actually really like it as a navigation feature. I could stop using markers and start using this feature. I love the boldness of it. By the way, you can change those colors if you want. You can just go in there and select a different color for a section. But if I just want to go, I want to navigate to the first verse. I could just click on it there and the play head goes there. If I want to say, I just want to go to the chorus. I could click on it there and so on and so forth. So I think it's a really nice way to navigate. I kind of like that. Now, what if I'm not sure I want to perhaps play some of these in my car? I want to send them to a friend or what have you. You can actually go ahead and export these. Let's go export as audio. And this pulls up your usual export window. But you can see here in the bottom left hand corner that you can select different arrangements. You can select all of them. You can go ahead and create your, you know, your file name and click export. And it will append those names there to different files. And you'll have them all as waves or MP3s, however you export. So that's really, really cool. That's going to give you some different versions to listen to away from your cakewalk environment. Now, if you feel at some stage, this is the version that I want to live with. I love this, you know, Alba version. This is the one I'm going to stick with. Then you can go ahead and then commit that over here. So I'll just click on this commit button here and watch over on the main window. It'll ask me to confirm and I do that. And bang, it does all the work for me over in cakewalk. So so I just zoom out again so you can see all that it's done there. It's basically created the whole basis of my song for me. So very, very cool. I'll just undo that, by the way, very, very cool feature. And now I'm going to talk a little bit about what I think are some slight shortcomings with it. And to be honest, I don't mean to be critical. This is the first version of this feature, a very, very handy tool. Well, there was a criticism I was going to have and I was proven wrong in my experimentation because I thought to myself, what if I hadn't quantized everything here? Because I should explain that I had quantized everything here. So let's say look at this bass guitar. Let's go to the beginning. In fact, let's just go to the beginning of this chorus here. Here are these beats at the beginning. And let's say I hadn't quantized it. Let's say it had been played, you know, and kept very human. So I don't want to quantize that. And you may get a note like this, wouldn't you? Which was slightly before the beat, before the beat, which is here. Yeah. And you would think to yourself, well, the problem is, is that when it goes to the beginning of that marker, it's not going to play that note, is it? Because that note happens before that time. But in actual fact, I was proved wrong by this. If I just go to the chorus there and I play it. You heard that bass note there. So I think this has always been the case in Cakewalk, but I just haven't noticed it before. It works as long as it doesn't matter if that note starts before the beginning of that beat, as long as it does overlap that beat. So if the note is completely outside of that time, of course, it's not going to play it. Yeah, if I play the chorus now, it doesn't have that note there. But as long as some part of that note is overlapping that little beat there. Yeah, it it plays it and that's fine. So that was something I was expecting to be a problem, but it wasn't. Now, the only thing I think this is not a problem, but I did experiment with this on an actual song, kind of a complete song. And you do get some slight issues because of the nature of music. So you've got some vocals in there. And it's all very well if, say, those vocals start within a bar. So they the vocal other starts right at the beginning of the bar or sometime after that bar starts. But sometimes you'll get some lead in phrases, which lead in to say a chorus. It might be a couple of beats before the beginning of the bar. So of course, when you've got a vocal there and you start chopping up these sections like this, that doesn't quite make sense. So if I was going to suggest anything for the future of this feature, then I would suggest that you could have a kind of a pre-roll on selected instruments so you could create your section. But I need to face some of you could say, hey, for that vocal track, I want a one beat pre-roll on that something along those lines. That would be really, really cool if you do that. And that sort of reminds me of another feature that I would hope they're going to put in the future. And that is to have the ability to create a section like this chorus here and be able to say, well, over in here, when I put this chorus here, some menu where I could deselect some of these tracks. And unless I've missed something here, I don't think there's anything we can do. In other words, I may want to have, say, verse one, which is just bass and drums. And then I want verse two to have bass, drums and organs so that I don't have to, you know, create two versions of that verse. With and without particular instruments. I think it would be nice if they provided a way to include and exclude certain tracks from this specific instance of, you know, the verse or chorus or what have you that you put down that arrangement. So I think that would be handy. And that does remind me of just one thing I forgot to mention early. You do want to be careful of this when you select something like a section. Do take note if you see that it does actually select all of the content down below. Now, I got unstuck by this earlier because I was trying to delete a section. I thought, oh, just select this chorus and I'll delete it. I don't want that section. When I click delete, of course, it deleted all the content below, which was actually the notes in the music. So the way I found around that was to click it twice. The second time you click it, it's just just clicking that section there. And then I can just get rid of the chorus and the chorus section doesn't exist anymore. So I think that's it for this sort of little introduction. I've only been using this a little bit for the last few days myself, but I do hope that that's helpful to you. Let me know in the comments down below what your thoughts are on the feature. Let me know if you've given it a go. Let me know if you're going to use it, if you're going to make use of it and whether there's any ideas that you've got that perhaps if we're lucky, BandLab might read some of our comments and take note. You never know. We can live and dream. So I do hope that you found this video useful. If you've got any questions, whatsoever, please do ask in the comments down below or you can head over to the creative source forums and ask there. There's a link for that down in the description. Now, if you did like this video, make sure you hit the like button. That's helpful to me because it lets YouTube know that other people should watch this video. If you didn't like this video, make sure you hit the dislike button twice. And if you like this kind of content, then do make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you are notified about my future videos. And I'll see you in the next video.