Making Loops in Cakewalk Music Creator

Making Loops in Cakewalk Music Creator

The loop making page in the lessons area of the cakewalk site has some good information, but also has some confusion along with it, as it mentions some features are for Sonar. I spend three years using AcidPro software and became fairly adept at making loops with that program. Acid has some very advanced loop making tools that make it the king of loops. Having said that loops can be made fairly well in MC as well, it is a decent workable tool, the one feature it lacks is the render looped region only feature that Acid has, to take the fight out of the process. But Cakewalk is a great all around program bringing both midi and audio together in a very powerful package, and for most of us here a cost effective one at that, it is good to explore the full capabilities of the program, so I put together a simple process to make loops.

As was mentioned in a previous post, loop making helps us where we want to add an instrument we might not be as adept at so that we can have a good outcome, you want to make a song with three chord in it C, D and G, and for instance maybe you play the guitar a bit, but every time you try to play a song and record a whole track of backing acoustic guitar chords you make a mistake somewhere in the track and have to start over, well looping can solve that problem, he is how:

First plug in the guitar or mike it then get ready to play, then open an audio track and arm it. Let’s begin with a “C” chord, Strum a few measures of the chord till you feel that it sounds like you want, now hit record, and strum the “C” chord for about six measures, then hit stop.

Now look at the wave file in the audio track it stretches for six measures, but you only want two measures of the “C” , so listen to the whole track and it sounds pretty good, but the middle two measures are the best sounding, no mistakes.

Take your cursor to the middle of the wave file, and left click, and the whole wave file will turn dark, then slide the cursor to the ruler bar above the track and right click in the gray area of the ruler bar, and a box will appear, find “set loop points”, two yellow arrows will appear above the ruler bar and at each end of the wave file.

Slide those loop points until they are at the beginning and the end of the area that you want to keep as a loop, then hit play the looped area will play over and over, you can fine tune this loop by sliding the loop points until the loop plays perfectly as if you were strumming the guitar on the same chord over and over seamlessly, now that loop area is a perfect loop. (Note that the loop point will only slide to the snap points of the grid, most likely the beginning of each measure, that may be right, but it also may not be a perfect loop, if so then you will need to undo the snap to grid feature, at the bottom of the track view window there is an icon next to the plus (+) and minus (-) icons that looks like a box with a four smaller boxes in it, unclick that and the loop point arrows will slide anywhere you want them too, unaffected by the snap to grid feature.)

Once you have the loop playing flawlessly, then slide the cursor to the ruler bar again and right click, then click on “select looped region”, the area between the loop points will turn dark, now in that area, right click, and choose split, a box will appear, in the box it will have a smaller box that asks for the time to split at, insert the ruler position of the beginning of the looped region, (this will be displayed in the boxes above called “loop from and loop thru” these boxes are on the tool bar between “loop on/off” and “set to loop selection”. If these are not visible on the tool bar then you need to add them from the View/toolbars) and click okay, then repeat for the end of the looped area.

You will see that the area that is looped will split off from the proceeding and following areas of the wave file, now click on and delete the extra areas outside the looped area, now only the wave file in the looped area will remain, the process in not done, to lock in these properties, right click in the middle of the looped area and click Groove-Clip Looping, this will turn the wave file into a groove clip with the tempo and key signature embedded, and make sure that the part you deleted is gone from the file. Now this can be exported to a folder for safe keeping.

Now repeat this process with the “G” chord and the “D” chord and save them now you can import these clips as loops in an audio track and used to build a song add the chords as needed, to make the song structure. This process can be used with drums, bass piano anything to make a complete song.