 So I'm here in Cakewalk and I've got this acoustic guitar part which I like, however it's got a little timing issue in one little section which I want to fix. I'm going to play it for you now from back here bar 71 but as a little heads up I'll let you know the issue actually happens between bar 74 and 75 here about halfway through yeah with this note here. Let's have a listen see if you can spot the timing issue. Okay it's subtle it's only just a little bit off if I just snap the playhead to that position you can just see in there that that note occurs just a little bit before and when the other instruments are in there I feel like it's going to sort of stick out a little bit. Now thankfully I recorded some other takes and I'm going to show you how quick it is now to take a section from one of those takes and then just use it within this part to fix the whole thing you won't be able to hear the difference. So I'm going to click this icon on the bottom left here to reveal my other takes. Now I'm just going to go down to one of those other takes we've got the top one here which is the one we're using it's in green I'm just going to grab that bar from one of the other takes I'll just highlight it down here and you can see now something's changed down here you can see that this part's green take three then it goes down to take one then it goes back to take three and it's done some nice joins there for us. I'm going to show you exactly how to do all of that a little bit later but first of all let's just have a listen and see if we can hear that join I'm just going to mute the click track so we're just hearing the guitar let's have a listen. Okay so now that's in time I think it's pretty seamless there's a few things we can do to make it even better but the main thing I want to tell you is to use this system of guitar comping you have to prepare and start off in the right way so let's just go back in time a little bit for the considerations that I had to make right at the beginning of this process. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well now whether you're recording electric or acoustic guitar I reckon the key to great guitar comping is right at the beginning with the recording phase so I'm going to give you three tips right away for this phase which should really set you up for great comps the first of these tips is record all of your takes in one sitting what do I mean by that well here I am I'm set up for recording with this acoustic guitar I've got this lovely RODE NT1A condenser microphone pointed at around about the 12th fret and around about 12 inches away yeah it's a great recipe for a good acoustic guitar recording I record my first take and I go away and have a cup of coffee a bit of a break and I come back now when I sit down I don't notice it but I'm around about 10 inches away now and it's pointing say at the 10th fret there will be a difference in the sonic qualities of those recordings and you'll most likely hear it when you go to do your comping later now all is not lost if that happens you will be able to sort of get it close probably with some clever EQing but it creates an awful lot more work so tip number one record all of your takes in one sitting if you can tip number two requires a little bit of a change of mindset for some of you and that is record all of your takes from beginning to end let's say you're one of those guitarists like me when you're traditionally recording you're playing for a little while like so and then you make a mistake and you think oops and you stop recording you rewind you delete your recording and you start again it's a really long process often hey so that sort of is against the grain with comping we don't really want to do that we really want to get that freedom just to record all the way through get it nice and fluid and it's often a lot quicker to record with comping in mind because if you do make a small mistake in the middle for example just keep going and there may be some absolute gold that you play after that now I will say that if there's a specific part of the performance where you're always making the same mistake over and over again then just record that section of the song maybe two or three recordings or at least until you get one that you think is great now this leads me to my third tip and it's really important this one a lot of people fall into this trap don't record too many takes it's really tempting to think more is more if you have 20 takes you'll have 20 to choose from more choice the part will end up sounding great no what will happen is it'll be a long boring process you'll get frustrated you won't want to listen to all 20 takes and you'll end up just listening to three so I recommend around about three recordings is good you maybe do four maybe do five but normally it's a waste as I say if there is some specific section where you know you keep getting it wrong then record that section over but I'd say stick to around about three takes okay so now you're ready you've recorded some great material let's have a look at the last kind of setup we need to do in cakewalk so it's actually super simple to prepare cakewalk for recording with comping in mind just go up to the record button at the top of the interface and do a long left mouse button press on that that will reveal this menu and you just need to make sure that you have comping selected there now there are some other options for the way that the take lanes behave at the bottom here you don't need to worry about that too much at the moment just make sure as I say comping is selected now I have this track here ready for recording I'm just going to quickly record my voice on this occasion I'm just going to press that record button and this is the first take which I am recording one two three so I've pressed stop you can see that recording there now notice that when I record my second take you can't hear this take okay it's muted so it doesn't distract you so I'll do my second recording now so that is recording I'll go ahead and press stop now we saw both of them there while we're recording but now we see the last one is on top here and we'll do a third one just for good measure and this is our third recording and I'll stop right here so I've got three different recordings there if we press play we'll only hear the last one and this is our third recording but if we go down to the bottom left here of this track and press this icon here you can see our three different takes here so we have indeed recorded three takes and we can now use them for processing the comping so let's fast forward in time to the stage where I've recorded that guitar and let's see how we really do our comping okay so I've recorded my acoustic guitar and I'm about ready to start comping there's just one thing I want to check before I do I'm going to go up to the top here where it says options click on that and then just make sure that auto crossfade is selected it's not for me at the moments I'll select that and that's just going to make sure there's a nice smooth transition between the different takes as we select them now if you don't select this sometimes you'll get some nasty little pops and clicks as we go from one take to another so make sure that's selected now I want to make sure I can see these takes that I've made so I'm just going to go to the bottom left of my track here click on this icon to show the take lanes and I can see all three here now I can see that the last take I did which was take three is being used completely here I know that because it's highlighted in green which is the same color as my track up here now if you don't know how to change the colors of your tracks just go to the edge of your track here click on that little sort of bar there and you can make a different color selection there I'm going to leave it on green there so I can visually easily see here which take is being used the others are in light gray here now as I did earlier I'm going to select between bar 74 and 75 with one of my other takes but I'm just going to go into a little bit more detail than I did earlier so you can see exactly how to do it the first thing to make sure of is when you hover your mouse over the the take that you want to select that you're in the bottom half of that take lane the cursor will change to this kind of weird one you can see here which has got three horizontal lines and one vertical one that means you're ready to start selecting a different take now you just need to drag out the area you want now I've got snaps selected here at the moment okay I find that easier I can just select a certain number of measures or bars but we'll look at some issues with that in a moment but when I release that that take is automatically now being used within that selection and you can see because it's changed the green the color that I'd selected for my track now if I go to just before that and play it you shouldn't hear any of those pops and clicks okay let's just have a listen it's pretty good you may be happy with that but let's just refine it just a little bit now the first thing is if we do look at these transitions okay even visually you can see that this first sort of chord being played with this transition has got a very flat beginning to it if you like we don't get the beginning of that transient of the chord so what I'm going to do is turn snapping off okay I'm going to do that by pressing N on the keyboard and then I'm just going to go down here to the bottom where I can see all of my takes this little cursor appears and I'm just going to drag that slightly off to the left but I'm looking at the top okay at the final result and I can now see the beginning of that chord there as the way it should be okay and I'm also just going to do it to the end of this little section here I'm just going to drag it around and I can see a much more natural transient to the beginning of that chord so we'll have a listen again that's sounding really really good now I personally feel that there is still a little bit of a volume difference between those two takes and indeed you can kind of see it there can't you you can see that first chord being played there it's just quite a lot louder than anything else around it so what I'm going to do is go down to the take which is being used I'm going to hold control on my keyboard so I can adjust the clip gain I'll just drag with my mouse this red bar's going to appear and I can adjust the volume of that clip so I'll just push it down a little bit you can see it change at the top there let's just do it again I'll just drag that down holding control on my keyboard and then that looks a lot more natural to me I'll just listen to double check and I think that's absolutely seamless now I've been kind of fussy there with it just so that you can see what can be done you may not want to be quite that fussy now the reality is is that when you're doing this for a long track you'll be going from one take to another quite often this would be a kind of a slow process if it wasn't for the keyboard shortcuts that I'm going to show you right now now a little confession I actually find what we're about to do kind of fun let me know in the comments if you find it fun or not so down here I've got my different takes I'm going to start off just by randomly selecting some different sections okay I'm just going to check I select a bar at a time from different take lanes here okay so I'll just go over select one there then a little bit further I'll make another selection here a little bit further down here I'll make another selection and a final one up here okay so as you can see it's swapping between one take and another that's my starting point but what I actually want to do really is to be able to listen to each of these so I know which one I want to select here that's called auditioning so I'm going to go back to the beginning here I just got one of these selected to start off with now normally when I play a track I will press space on the keyboard okay but on this occasion I'm going to press shift and then space or hold down shift and press space now that's going to play the track now after I've done that I'm going to use the up and down arrows on the keyboard to listen to each track so let's do that now shift and space to play and I'm going to press up to listen to that one down down again so visually you can see it changing there showing me which one it's playing now finally when I want to select one I press enter on the keyboard and that one is then selected okay so just to recap shift space to play up and down arrows to audition each one as it's playing and then press enter to select one now that would be fine that's okay that's one way to do things but what about when I then want to move on to the next little clip here in my selections and then further on from there or maybe go backwards for that we use the left and right arrow keys I don't need to stop playing to do this in fact I don't really want to stop playing so I'll give you a demonstration I'll press shift and play press the up and down arrow keys to make a selection press enter to make that selection and then I'm going to press the right arrow key to move further on again pressing up and down to audition I like that one I'll press enter okay and that selection has been made move on again to the next one up and down to have a listen press enter and that will get selected so you can see that you can actually move through your track very very quickly if you'll just learn these few keyboard shortcuts makes life very easy indeed now of course once I've done that normally and you know obviously I've got snapping turned on here and I've selected a bar at time I then want to go back and do some tidy ups like I did earlier I may turn snapping off press n on the keyboard and just look at some of those transitions and drag them around a little bit just to make them look a little bit or sound a little bit more natural okay now when you've done that you're pretty much done of course you can make those volume corrections I made earlier as well but I just want to tell you that you don't always have to stick to the beginnings of bars or even beats if you like you can just find the best place because occasionally even though you've got a nice sort of smoothest transition you've checked the volume you can still hear that transition so don't be scared to be brave with it in this case for example I could just drag this transition and just use the very first part of that section there maybe just that first chord we'll have a listen just to make sure that sounds natural which it does so you can actually select very small sections if you need to and generally you will find that it's a seamless transition which you and the end listener will never hear now of course you'll want to get the best possible recording of your guitar and if you don't know about the different ways to record acoustic guitar then I very much suggest that you watch this video right here in this video I explain five different ways of recording acoustic guitar to get different kinds of results I suggest that you watch this video right now