 The Pro Channel is one of my favorite features in Cakewalk by BandLab. We can access it on any channel in the console view by clicking on this little triangle icon to reveal it. We can then go ahead and right-click, choose Insert Module and choose from any of these modules here as well as these ones down here as well. In today's video I'm going to be talking about my top five favorite Pro Channel modules. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Did you know that you can get access to the sound of one of the most famous reverbs of all time or via one of the modules in your Pro Channel and all for free. We'll talk about that later. But first of all, I'd like to thank the sponsors of this video, DistroKid. If you follow the link in the description down below you'll get 7% off an already amazing price for their services. Don't forget to check that out. Now let's talk about my top five favorite Pro Channel modules. First up, I'm choosing the PC76U type compressor. This is actually the default compressor which is inserted when you use the Pro Channel. Okay, it's based upon one of the most famous compressors of all time, the 1176. Now they say it's faithfully modeled but I can't tell you whether it sounds exactly like the original or not. It doesn't really matter to me because it's still very, very useful. It has a few controls which are worth explaining though. First of all, just like an 1176 compressor there is no threshold control here. These types of compressors have a fixed threshold and you have to raise the input gain here to get above that threshold. Okay, now that means it's very, very important to make use of the output control otherwise you're just going to be making things louder maybe with no compression at all using the input control here. Okay, so do some volume matching just to make sure you're not just making it louder and tricking yourself into making it sound better just because it's louder. Okay, now the other things that we've got to take note of here is the attack control. We've got a very, very fast attack available to us here. That's one of the things that makes this useful to us and reasonably longish release time there over a second or so there. Now the ratios are four to one, eight to one, 12 to one, 20 to one. And then we have this button here. It's called the nuke button. I don't think this was on an 1176 originally. They say in the documentation this is like having all the other buttons turned on at once. In other words, you get very extreme compression, a very, very high ratio. Okay, now I happen to be using this compressor here on this bus. This is a bus which the vocals are going to I'm using this for parallel compression. Now with parallel compression, you can press things really, really hard. If you heard this bus by itself when I do this, it wouldn't sound that good. But if you blend it in with the original source, then you can really, it can really help with things like vocals to keep that on top of the mix all the time. So that's what I'm going to do with it. Now I am going to get the attack down really, really low, really quick attack. Put the release up pretty high there. So the compressor is staying on. I'm going to push up my input here and I am going to make sure I've got it on nuke, okay, for some extreme compression. Let's see how I go. So that can really help as I say to keep something like a lead vocal on top of the mix. People use this on drums as well all the time just to keep them kind of slamming. So a very, very useful compressor, the 1176 has loads and loads of different uses for it. And that is my first pick. This is the Lexicon 480L. Well, the remote control for it at least. It's one of the most famous hardware reverb units of all time. And I'm going to show you how you can make use of its sound for free using one of the modules in the pro channel in Cakewalk by BandLab. Now the module I'm talking about is this one here. It's the Rematrix solo module. Now this is a convolution reverb. What is that? Well, convolution reverbs use special files called impulse response files, which are there to replicate the sound of actual environments to model actual environments, particular types of ruins, holes, particular studios, whatever you want. You could make your own impulse responses for a particular room in your house if you wish, but they can also be used to model the sound of hardware units. And that's where we're leading to with this. First of all, let's just have a quick look at the controls though on this module in the pro channel. We have some timing controls here. So we have the actual time, which is just changing the kind of length of the reverb there. We have a pre delay so that can create a little bit of space after the main signal before the reverb kicks in that's handy for keeping things present even when you're using reverb. And then we have a stereo spread control here as well. Then we have an EQ control. This is useful for boosting particular or particular frequency range within the sound of your reverb. So if you just want to say boost the highs, you would pop up to a high frequency here, adjust the gain to make it louder or quieter, and then you can adjust the queues. So the range of frequencies that you're actually affecting, you can use the queue to affect that. Then we have this dry and wet mix here, and we can bypass momentarily using this switch here. Now here's where it gets interesting. There's a whole bunch of presets that you can use here. Yeah, you can see I'm flicking through them like so. Now they're all using different impulse responses. You can make your own by choosing an impulse response from here. Yeah, you see this down arrow here. When you go there, that reveals to you all of the impulse response files available to you by default with this plugin. There's some whole ones there. There's some room ones. There's some plates, early special, whatever they are, I'm not sure. Now if you go down to here where it says user, you can see there's an import feature here. So if you can create or get hold of some impulse response files, you can import them here and use them. Okay, I'm going to choose this one, guitar plate. This was from or created using a Lexicon 480L. Okay, let's have a listen to it. It's going to make it completely wet. That's the sound we're getting. And I'd be pretty happy with that right away. That's my second pick. One thing I like about the Pro Channel modules is how easy they are to use. A bit like the sponsors of this video. By using DistroKid, you get to release your music directly to some of the best platforms on the planet. We're talking Spotify, iTunes, TikTok, Amazon, you know, all of the household names. And you don't need to open any accounts there because DistroKid does all of that for you. Now once you've created your master and your album artwork, it's as easy as filling in a friendly form, uploading them and DistroKid takes care of the rest. All for one flat annual fee and DistroKid takes none of your royalties. Sign up with my VIP link in the description and you'll get an extra 7% off. Now if convolution reverbs are not doing it for you, then I would also suggest that you make use of Breverb too. You can see it inserted into my guitar track here. And this has actually got a lot more options than meet the eye. In fact, those of you who watch this channel regularly will know that whenever I recommend something, I do like to go through and give you a mini tutorial of all of the controls, but I'm afraid I'm not going to do that for this one. The reason for that is is when you use Breverb, you can see that it's by default loaded up with a whole reverb here. Okay. And if you click on the drop down here, you can see there's actually four different types of reverb to choose from. And the reason I'm not going through all the controls is because as you select each of these, the actual controls change below according to that type of reverb. Okay. So probably not enough time here for me to go through all of them, but just understand that part about it. It does mean that you've got a lot of really appropriate types of control over each type of reverb. And you can really craft this to sound as you want it to. By using the PCA to a level, and we get access to one of the most common types and one of the most useful types of compressor in music production. This is of course based upon the LA2A compressor limiter. And it's so simple to use, but so very useful. But people do get confused about the controls of the emulations of an LA2A or indeed an LA2A itself. I'm going to focus on the main controls here for a moment, the gain and peak reduction. It is confusing because the gain is on the left hand side. Many people think this is input gain. It isn't. It's output gain. So it's just how loud the output is coming from the module itself. It doesn't actually increase or decrease the compression. For that, you need to use this one control, peak reduction. Okay. Now there is no attack control. There is no release control on these types of compressors. It's fixed. And it's fixed in a way that it often produces really natural sounding compression. And I think that's why it's very useful. This is not the kind of compressor that you're really going to end up hearing. Okay. In fact, that's kind of one of the things that makes it a little bit difficult when you're first starting out. You're thinking, is this doing anything? It is doing something, but it is subtle. It's used very commonly on vocals, very commonly also on bass guitar. And I like to use it on acoustic guitar as well. Now, if we switch over to the limiter mode, it just basically uses a much higher ratio than the compression mode. Apart from that, we do have a dial here, which is for the VU meter that we can see here. The standard position we have it in here says GR. That is showing gain reduction. So I've got to apply to this vocal. And as I play it, you'll see the needle moving downwards indicating how many decibels of gain reduction we're getting with this compressor. And as I say, if I want to adjust that, then I'll use this peak reduction knob here. Now the other positions for this VU meter display are really about showing output levels. And they're just calibrated to different levels, okay? So that's all that is for there. And finally, we have this control here. I think it's called the R37 control. Now this adjusts how much compression is happening in the higher frequencies over 1K or so, okay? And when it's in the completely flat position, which is at the moment, then it's just doing compression across the board. And as we move it downwards towards this HF indicator at the bottom, then it's implying more compression on those higher frequencies, okay? So that's just the way that that is working there. All in all, this isn't the number two spot because it's just very, very useful. My number one pick is very unique for a pro channel module. And it's been on the screen the whole time. I am of course talking about the EQ module. I know it's not the most exciting perhaps, but it is just so useful. There's some things that you may not know about it in actual fact. First of all, it's unique because it can't actually be removed at all. If you just right click on the top, you can't actually remove it. If you don't want to use it, then you can switch it off with the power button that we get on all of our modules. Another reason why it's unique is because when we collapse the pro channel, we still have access to some of the EQ functions in this tiny little display here, okay? So that can be useful. When we do expand the pro channel and we see it here, of course we can change values here, but we can also double click on it to open up this really, really big view of it. And I'll focus on this because this is much easier for us to see. So one of the first things I want to point out is that we have four main frequency ranges that we can affect or frequency bands. And we can see them in different colors here, red, yellow, green and blue. Of course, we can adjust them up here in this graphic display. We can grab one of them and drag it around. And if we right click and drag it around, then we can adjust the cue. That's kind of the area of influence for a frequency band on an EQ. And we can obviously increase or decrease at that frequency point. We can control all of that down here with these main knobs as well. So whichever way you prefer. Now our final EQ sort of line is indicated with this white line. So this because obviously EQ bands kind of intersect with each other and influence each other. So we get a final EQ curve represented with this white line. Now this is interesting because you'll see that there are four different EQ types here. Look at this equalizer section here. We've got hybrid, pure, E type and G type. Now as I go through each of them, look at how that white line changes. So we're on hybrid. This is pure. This is E type, E type and this is G type. And that's because with each of these different types of equalizer here, it's changing the way the cue is behaving at different levels and whether it's increasing or decreasing frequencies. Okay. So that's why you get a different result with each of these. Okay. So that's different types of EQ in there. That's quite useful and you may get results you prefer with any one of those. Now as well as those four main bands, we also have a high pass and a low pass filter. So if we adjust that, you can see that changing there for the high pass. And if I adjust it, you can see it for the low pass as well. So that's always very handy. I'm always making use of high pass filters and we can adjust its frequency there as well as its slope of course is what I was adjusting there. We can also switch that off and on. Now for the two, for the lower and the higher bands, the one in red here and the one in blue here, we can also change the type of slope we're getting. So they start off with our regular kind of bell curve type. You can see the red one in that bell curve shape there, but we can switch it over to a shelf if we wish. Okay. So that changes again, the area of influence which we set with the cue like so. Okay. So all in all, the reason why I've picked this as my number one module for the pro channel is because I use it in almost every single project in Katewalk and it's pretty sophisticated EQ in actual fact. So that's why it gets the number one spot. I'd love to know about your top five pro channel modules. Let me know in the comments down below. Now, did you know that you can actually do side chain compression by using a pro channel module? Check out this video right here where I walk you through it.