 I'm working on this little groove here in Cakewalk by Bandlab and I'm primarily focused on this organ track which we can see at the top here. Let's just have a quick listen to this with the effects chain switched off so that we can hear what we're starting out with. Now let's switch on that effects chain so that we can hear what we're trying to achieve during this tutorial. Now I want to thank one of my viewers here Glenn Jones, he wrote to me the other day, he'd seen this technique demonstrated, it's called the Trans Gate Technique and he'd seen it demonstrated in this video here but it was being done in Ableton so he asked me how it could be done in Cakewalk by Bandlab. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you will. Normally we'd use a gate plugin to get rid of sort of unwanted background noise for example so there's kind of noise that you might get between phrases of a vocal but today we're going to be using it in a more creative way and we're going to be using it into conjunction with the sidechain features of Cakewalk by Bandlab. Now in the first half of this tutorial I'll show you the basic setups, you can get it going and then later on I'll show you some tweaks and variations that I found are quite fun with it as well. Now don't forget if you're going to be releasing any music do follow the link down below to sign up with DistroKid, the sponsor of this video. If you follow that link you'll get 7% off their already cheap price of $19.99. Let's dive in. So you want to start off with a kind of a long sustained sound. I happen to be using this B3 organ from Arturia but you could use any sustained sound, it could be a synth which has a nice big long pad for example or you could use a long vocal for example, a distorted guitar could work really well with some big sustained chords something like that. The main thing you want is that long sound you don't really, this is not going to work with you know already sort of staccato sounds or something like that. So I am starting off with this. So the next thing we're going to need is a trigger to open and close that gate which we're going to be applying to the organ in a moment. Now my preference here is to use a kick drum and I'm going to be using a virtual instrument. The reason for that is we can easily edit the midi of this kick drum later on if we want to kind of change the pattern that we're creating with it. So it's very very versatile if you do it this way. So I'm going to go over to my browser here in Cakewalk. I'm going to the plugin section, I'm going to make sure I switch to the instrument section here. I'm going to go and open my Cakewalk folder and I'm going to drag in the SI drum kit which we all have. Okay now I just need to insert it as a simple instrument. So I've just got this checkbox selected here and I'll click on okay. So this is the sound which we're going to be using on my piano keyboard here. We're just going to be using that to trigger the gate. So I'm just going to drag that up. So I've got it next to my organs because they're related to each other. I'm just going to arm it for recording and I'll go ahead. I think I'll just mute the drums and the bass actually. I'll go ahead and record this part. Now as you can hear there, I had some pretty kind of sloppy playing going on. That's why you'll almost definitely want to quantize this. So I'm just going to select that clip there. I'm going to press Q on the keyboard to bring up the quantize dialog box. One sixteenth is fine for the duration here and I'll click on okay. Let's just have a quick listen to hear what I've got. Okay that's awesome. I think I'll just go ahead and name this so I'm clear what it is. So let's call it Gate Trigger and I'm also just going to change its color to red actually I think. So it's very very obvious. You can do that in Cakewalk here. Just go to the left hand side of the track. Click on that bar there. I'm just going to click on other so I can select a nice strong red color there. Click on okay. That just makes it super obvious what this particular track is for. So now that we've got our trigger set up we just need to insert our gate plugin. Now I'm going to be using a gate plugin which we've all got because it comes for free with Cakewalk by BandLab and it's the Sonatas FX Gate. So I'm going to be inserting that in the organ. So I'll go up to my organ here and in the effects section I'll click on plus and I'll go to insert audio effects. Now you may find this plugin in a number of different places depending on how you've got your plugins organized here. I happened to have used it recently so I can see it at the top there it's called Sonatas Gate. So I'll click on that and we can see that that plugin appears there. Now the next thing we need to do is make sure that we route our trigger that kick drum sound to this plugin. That's why we had to insert it first okay but we won't be able to do it unless we insert this plugin first as we did. So I'm going to go to the trigger channel here yeah that's the kick drum and I'm going to go down to the output right at the bottom where it says master at the moment that's the default value okay I'll click on that and because we already inserted it we can see our Sonatas Gate there okay so that's what I'm going to select for the output. Now why did I use the output rather than use a send? Well I use the output because I don't want to hear this kick drum anymore so I can have it sound totally sent to the plugin without it going to the master output at all of cakewalk. Now later on I'm going to be showing you a variation with this where I actually do use the send so do stick around for that. So we've got the sound of the trigger going to the plugin let's have a listen and see what we've got so far okay we can no longer hear the trigger however it's not having any effect on the organ yet and that's because we haven't adjusted the threshold so we're going to do that with this control here I'm going to play it and gradually push this control up till we find a kind of a sweet spot where we can hear that gate going in and out with the timing we created. Now that is our basic setup which is pretty straightforward but in a moment we're going to be tweaking it and I'm also going to be showing you some variations but I think you'll agree so far it's pretty easy. Now talking about easy you should probably check out our sponsor DistroKid because releasing a song with them is super easy. 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 although this gate is basically working I think it needs a little bit of tweaking because it sounds a little bit sort of soft and loose. Have a listen. I'm just going to sort of sharpen it up a little bit by using the attack and release controls. Essentially I want the attack on the of the plugin to be as low as possible but you do get some sort of artifacts if you put it right down to zero. Have a listen. You hear that sort of slight clicking sound so I'll just nudge it a little bit above zero. Have a listen. Yeah I think that's about right there. The other thing I want to adjust is the release. It's a little bit too long at the moment so let's have a listen to that. Yeah I like that right there. So I thought it would be kind of fun to add some panning to this organ sound so it's kind of going from left to right. Now you could do this just by using the automation feature in Cakewalk just by automating the pan control but I thought it would be fun to kind of do it with a plugin so we've got a bit more flexibility. So I'm using a plugin called Pancake 2 from Cable Guys and it's an absolutely free plugin so you can use it as well. I'll put a link for it in the description down below. So I'll go up to my organ, go to plus, go to insert audio effects and I can see it here in my recently used Pancake 2. I'll click on that and you can see right out of the box there's some panning set up and it's just going from left to right here with this curve. Let's just have a quick listen to that. So it's quite a slow pan there so I'm just going to go over to this part here and adjust the timing so it's happening over two bars at the moment. I'll change that so it's happening over one bar and also sort of want something a bit sharper than this or this gradual curve here so I'm going to change it using this little icon here. It's going to change to a triangle shape there so click on that and that's going to be a little bit more aggressive. Let's have a listen. Now I thought it would be fun also to add in some filtering and again I am using a free plugin which I'll put a link for in the description down below. However I must admit I only just downloaded this plugin today so I can't give you any kind of tutorial on it. I don't know what most of the controls do but I'll do my best with it to show you how I got the result that I got. So I'm going to my organ again here going to effects, clicking on plus going to insert audio effects and I'm inserting this one TAL filter two or tau filter two okay. The first thing I did was go down to the bottom where it says pan I selected high pass 12 decibels okay and then I sort of drew in a sort of a rough curve you can just click here and add nodes like so. Let's have a listen to see what we've got so far. Okay so then I just changed the cut off a bit and then the depth yeah I just sort of made it like this yeah and then see what we've got now. It's roughly what I wanted and then I pushed up this reso control here let's push it all the way to the top. So yeah that's look I don't really know what I'm doing with this plugin but that's what I did to get the sound that I wanted. But the next thing I thought would be fun or nice would be to add in some reverb. Let's go up to that organ here click on plus go to insert audio effects. Now I'm going to be using the sonnitus reverb which we all get with cakewalk by BandLab. Let's insert that there and have a quick listen. Now I might just change the low cut here a little bit so I have a listen to this. Yeah I like that the reverb is a little bit more in the mids there. Okay so it's as simple as that you're just going to have to adjust that to taste. The important thing about the reverb in this case is you really want to make sure it's the last plugin in the sequence here because if we put it in as the first plugin for example I'll just move it up there then that gate is going to be gating the reverb out as well have a listen. It's sort of in there but it's being cut off so that's why I like to have it there as the last plugin. Now with the basic setup of this gate we initially set it up so that the trigger was routed via its output to the gate plugin and we did that so that we could no longer hear the trigger but it's possible that some of you may want to hear the original trigger as well so let me show you how to do that in the best way. So I'm going to change the output there yeah I'm just going to click on that back to master. Okay so at the moment we'll be hearing the the original trigger and it won't be triggering the gate let's have a listen. Okay so now we're going to do it as a send so again using that trigger channel we'll go to sends click on plus and we can see our sonatis gate there yeah we'll click on that so now it's going to be triggering that. Now I actually want to turn it down initially but if I turn it down it will no longer trigger it because less of the signal will be going through so I need to make sure I click on this button here it says post I'll click on that switch it off so this is now a pre-fader send so no matter what I do with the fader here the same signal is going to be sent through to that gate so let's turn the fade all the way down and have a listen. Okay so we've got our gate working again now let's just gradually push this fader up. We can hear that kick in there quite like that. Now that part where we sent the signal from the trigger through to the actual gate is a type of routing called side chaining. Side chaining is a big part of mixing producing music in Cakewalk by BandLab and hopefully you can see how it basically works already. One of the more common reasons we use side chaining is for compression and I made a video about how to do that in Cakewalk by BandLab right here.