Thanks AntManB! I had that ideal lurking in my mind I considered using audio clips but my mind had not gotten far enough into the idea to consider midi clips. I will try that for this song and see how it works out.
I would really never dream of writing lyrics in Cakewalk, I use Microsoft Word because the spellcheck just makes things easier. (and rhymer.com always got that open)
For me and my way of creating a song in a DAW is like flight in getting the song off the ground.
I write the lyrics and sometimes, not always, the chords. Sometimes the chords are straight forward and sometimes they are quite a bit more complex and convoluted.
Each song is very different but, I first find a basic drum track that fits the song style. Either a drum loop or these days more often, Addictive Drums 2.
I usually use a basic beat rather than the metronome because I figure I will need drums anyway and it sounds more realistic. Though sometimes I will leave the metronome on anyway while recording to tell where beat one is accentuated in each measure.
Then I try and play the song on my guitar and sing it into one audio track. I allow the vocals and guitar together in this track because it will only be a reference track and not be in the final song. Sometimes I will use two tracks but the guitar will still bleed into the vocal mic.
This is where I am usually looking over to a lyrics page in Word that I have resized both the cakewalk window and the Word window so they can fit side by side. Mind you, this takes my eyes off cakewalk for the most part. This is getting the song off the ground. Once I have the reference track recorded I can then begin nailing down the song structure. This is where markers come in. Recording this reference track saves me hours of work. Otherwise I would have to map out the song on paper and that really is very tedious.
This way my reference track is easily mapped out to cakewalk's predetermined tempo. I play an estimation of how long the instrumental sections will be but I can split my reference track and move the section later to add or subtract a measure or two.
As for the basic chord track I find a piano or guitar to be a good reference rather than a pad.
A piano has a nice attack where a pad is a bit to murky for some to sing along to.
This process is where the markers help to really map out the song and make it easy to add vocals and other instrument tracks along side the reference track. At that point with the markers the reference track can even be muted so as not to distract.
Not all songs I can do like this, sometimes I have to use a piano rather than an acoustic guitar or even a loop for my reference track and sometime I do not know at all how the vocal melody goes.
In this case I need to be able to sing several takes and experiment with the vocal melody and timing.
Once vocal comping is done then I can do my vocal markers. By this time my markers are usually chords.
Each song is different and the chords and lyric timing often evolve differently depending on the song difficulty and style.
Having two wheels under me (vocal markers and chord markers) help steady and balance the song till it can get off the ground.
Whether you think of it as getting off the ground or landing the song, the principle of needing two text lanes for chords and lyrics is still the same. Once these two text tracks have been fully satisfied then song can now be glued into place with other instrumentation and vocal tracks.
This probably belongs in a techniques thread but oh well it also cements my case for the need for easy to insert, on the fly, lyric and chord text events.
I try and get the song mapped out fully before adding too many instrument and melodyne tracks. Sliding whole sections of a song to insert a measure can be tricky after the fact but it can be done with a bit of wrangling and cakewalk's great editing tools.
(Psst, the smart tool would be great for adding and editing text tracks.)
:)