 So here I am in Cakewalk, I'm selecting this female vocal and I want a sudden volume change in this vocal just for these three phrases here. Now like me you probably already know that you can go down to the channel in the console view, click on the W button to right enable this for automation, then you could play the track, adjust the fader and it will record those moves. Let's do that now. And you can see that's recorded the change here and if we played it back it would follow those changes but it's gradual, it's not sudden like I wanted it to be. So let's undo all of that, turn off the right enabling and look at another method that you probably already know about. Let's go up to the track up here, go to this drop down menu here, select automation, go over to volume here and then we can see this line has appeared and when we hover over it this pencil appears and we can start to draw in nodes for automation. Okay so we could draw in something like this, do a sudden change, yeah we'll do it at the end here, we've got our sudden change like so. Now you may have already known about that one but what about this third method that I'm going to tell you, let's undo all of that again, yeah change this back to its regular clips value here, this time I'm going to set my playhead to some point just before the change here, yeah and I'm going to go down to the fader, I'm going to right click and then I'm going to go down to automation snapshot. You can see that it's added in a node for automation here, let's now move the playhead to the point where we want it to suddenly change, yeah we'll adjust the fader now, we'll just push it up like so, we'll right click on it and then we'll click on automation snapshot again and you can see that there's been a sudden change of volume here, okay it's not gradual anymore, we could repeat that process for the end of those three phrases there. Let me know in the comments down below if you knew already about automation snapshot or if it's something which is completely new to you, it's not one of the main secrets I'm going to tell you about in today's video so think of it just as a bonus secret. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Automation is absolutely essential for a great mix, if you don't know anything about it at all then I recommend you follow my guide just up here but if you've already been using automation in Cakewalk I bet there's a few secrets that you don't know about starting off with this one here. I'm working on my female vocals again but this time I want to start off by automating some muting actually we just want to mute out this phrase here so what I'm going to do is go down to the channel in the console for the female vocals I'm going to right click on the mute button here then go down to the bottom and click on this switch to automated mute so I click on that now the mute is sort of ready to be automated so I'm going to do some automation while playing so I'm going to click on the w button to write enable automation for this track then I'm going to play it and adjust my muting let's do that now and you can see it's muted out that phrase there and you can see it's written the automation there okay that's fine let's just turn that off I want to do some other automation on the volume and the panning but this time I just want to draw it in rather than record my movements so what I'm going to do is go to the track up here like we did before click on this drop down I'm going to go down to automation and go down to volume okay and I'm just going to draw in some automation for my volume here just on the vocals just here okay we don't need to listen to it you can see what's happening there with the change of automation now I want to adjust the panning so I'm going to go up to this drop down menu again or over to this drop down menu click on it go to automation then go down to pan and I'll draw in some panning automation okay so I've got lots of automation happening on this track now what if I want to go back and adjust the volume automation again I'll just go back up to the drop down go to automation click on volume make my adjustments because I want it to go down this time instead of going up fine I've made my adjustments now I want to go back to do the panning same again you can see the problem here gets a little bit cumbersome to be flicking between these different types of automation by using this drop down menu and if that's what you've been doing up until now that means you've probably missed one little button here on the track and it's this one this one which is going to reveal the automation lanes let's just do click on that now to reveal automation lanes now there's only one lane there at the moment and that's for the mute that we did originally we can see that just over here let's just add some more so that we can see our other automation I want you to go to that mute automation lane just click on that plus button there yeah and that then automatically has revealed the panning automation we can see it there and we can see that pan is selected there what about the volume let's click on the plus in the panning automation lane this time just click on it now and it's revealed an automation lane but not the volume one that I was wanting but that's easily remedied I can go to the drop down for this automation lane just click on that and select a volume now I have all of the automation that I'm working on for this track available in one place without having to flick between menus I can get rid of this just by clicking on this icon again when I'm not using it then when I quickly want to do some automation just click on that and I can easily access all of the automation lanes that I've been working on well by the way you can download the project which I'm using in today's video for free by following the link in the description down below I actually produced it during the course of making my course the absolute beginners guide to cakewalk and if you haven't recorded your first song in cakewalk yet this is an invaluable guide for you to achieve that goal I get straight to the point and teach you just what you need to know to record your first piece of music to find out more about that go to www.cakewalk101.com or follow the link in the description down below you probably noticed earlier that when I created my volume automation I created a few nodes and then I just dragged them around to make it kind of a natural looking curve but if you want a really free flowing automation what you can do is hold down the alt key on the keyboard and then simply draw in your automation changes with your mouse like so for a really free flowing kind of natural curve there that's a really quick secret to tell you about let me know in the comments down below if you didn't know about that sometimes you want to move our nodes with some accuracy for example I'm going to move this node here but before I do I'm going to hold down shift on my keyboard and then when I start dragging it I'm either going to go up or down once I do that it's locked so it can only be moved in an upward or a downward direction okay likewise when I select it if I hold shift and start off by moving it in either direction to the side it will be locked to a left or right movement we can't now move it up and down okay so that's a nice way of maintaining some accuracy another thing we can do is turn on snap if we turn on snap then it will obey our snap rules as they're set at the moment so if I move this around it's snapping as you can see to different positions in time if I hold down control key and then move it up or down it'll actually snap to the previous node there so that's really handy if you want to match the value of the previous node we can actually move all of these nodes for this clip in unison by moving up to the top of the automation area here until our cursor changes to this horizontal eye beam then when I start to drag it selects all of the nodes and I can move them up or down in unison like so another way that we can actually change the value of multiple nodes at once is by moving off to the side here until we get this this vertical eye beam then I'm just going to drag out this gray box here until I've got a few of these nodes selected and then I can move them around like I normally would and just as before if I hold down the shift key move them up and down they'll only move in that direction and if I hold down the shift key move them left or right then they'll only move in that direction sometimes we want to copy automation from one place in our track to another or indeed we may want to copy it to other tracks or to different parameters let's do all of that now I'm going to start off by going off to the right hand side of my nodes here until I see that vertical eye beam then I'm just going to drag out this gray box to make my selection I'm going to press ctrl c on my keyboard to copy that and then I'm going to move to a different position in my track and I'm going to make sure I move my play head to where I want that automation to be and then click ctrl v on my keyboard and you can see that that has been pasted in there at a different position let's undo that and this time we're going to paste it to a different track I'm going to make that selection again like so yeah I'm just going to take note of where that selection starts okay and I'm going to move my play now position by clicking up here to the beginning of that selection it's handy if you have snap on for this okay again I'm going to press ctrl c to copy that automation data now I'm going to go down to this other female vocal track which I've got here and I'm just going to open up that all the automation lanes there yeah by clicking on that icon I've done that and I'm also going to make sure that I've got that track selected by clicking on its number like so again I'm making sure that play head is at the beginning of that selection and then I'm going to press ctrl v and you can see that it's now pasted that volume automation into the other track now of course the automation values before and after that happened were different on this track okay so you may need to do some adjustments to make it blend in okay but that's the essence of how you do it okay so that's automatically copied the volume across but what if I want this to be applied to a different parameter okay let's right click on this automation here and I'm going to go down to assign envelope and let's assign this to let's say this compressor which I've got on the track here I'm going to assign it to the output volume of that compressor click on there now you don't see any much of a change visually here you can see the same automation but if we look over on the left hand side and we look at what's being automated here we can see it's now the compressor's output which has been automated but what if I wanted to retain it on the volume because if I go up to the volume if I change this to the volume here and take a look at it we can see that it actually moved it from the volume to the compressor let's undo what we did with the compressor there okay I'm going to go in open up automation here you can see it's applied to the volume here but this time when I right click I'm going to go down to copy and assign envelope okay I'm going to go across again to the compressor and go to its output and we can see here that it's here on the volume we can see volume is selected here but now if we go and we select the compressor and its output we can see that same automation is applied to that as well this time I'm going to be working with electric guitar which is in my project and I specifically want to hand draw in some automation for some values in a plugin which is applied to it so it has this th3 plugin applied which is the free amp sim which comes with cakewalks I'll just click on that you can see it's a fairly simple setup in here I have this amp in there I have a cabinet with a microphone applied and I also have this spring reverb and this is where I want to change some parameters as I say by hand so I've got this mixed control here and that's what I want to change so I'll close the plugin and I'll start the process of adjusting this by drawing in some values so I'll go up to the drop down menu here I'll go to automation and I'll go down to th3 which is the plugin and you can see I've got this choose parameter selection here I'll click on that and it opens up this selection here you can see there's already loads of parameters for me to change with this plugin and I don't know which one to choose I'll cancel that and I'll show you how I can quickly find out which parameter it is so again I'll open up the plugin here I've already I'm already in the section I want and it's this mixed control that I want to find out about so I'm just going to right enable this for automation click on the w up there and I'll just play the track momentarily and just do a small adjustment to this control and I'll stop that there turn off the right automation and close the plugin and you can actually see there already that this automation has been added so now if I go to open up my automation lanes there is an automation lane for this already I'll just expand it and I can now go ahead and adjust that by hand as I wish without having to figure out which of the many parameters available is the one I should choose from this drop down menu so I've got a guitar clip here with some volume automation applied let's just open up its automation lanes here and we can see that envelope there for that automation now as it turns out I actually want to move this clip to a slightly different position so I'm just going to grab it here and drag the clip over to the side but as you can see there the automation moved with it and that's because they're sort of connected they're associated with each other now that may be fine but also maybe something that you don't want so let's just press ctrl z to undo that now in order to separate these two from each other you need a specific module showing in cakewalk so I'm going to go up to my top bar here I'm going to right click go to modules I'm just going to make sure that the select module is showing so we'll click on that and now we can see the select module here now there's four icons they're all switched on here and I'm interested in the first one let's switch that off now when I actually move my clip from side to side the automation for that track stays in the same position another time when automation becomes really useful is during the mastering process I've already made a video about how to master in cakewalk by bandlab it's on the other side of this logo and I highly recommend you go ahead and watch that right now thank you