Cakewalk as looper station

[Tobias Saaby Nielsen]

Hey everyone.

I'm fairly new to Cakewalk and recording in general, so I do not know if this is a possibility, but I want to use cakewalk as a live looper station. In Garageband they have the feature 'merge recordings' (I think its called), that kinda works like a loop station, but I wonder if Cakewalk has such feature.  I haven't really done any "research" or experimented an awful lot with cakewalk so maybe it's an obvious question. I have a looper station - the Looper RC - 300. But it seems to be much more smooth when using a DAW for looping.

Edited February 7, 2020 by Tobias Saaby Nielsen

[rsinger]

15 minutes ago, Tobias Saaby Nielsen said:

Hey everyone.

I'm fairly new to Cakewalk and recording in general, so I do not know if this is a possibility, but I want to use cakewalk as a live looper station. In Garageband they have the feature 'merge recordings' (I think its called), that kinda works like a loop station, but I wonder if Cakewalk has such feature.  I haven't really done any "research" or experimented an awful lot with cakewalk so maybe it's an obvious question. I have a looper station - the Looper RC - 300. But it seems to be much more smooth when using a DAW for looping.

CbB has matrix view which is non-linear. You can try that. I use Live for looping.

[David Baay]

Cakewalk is not the right tool for this. It can be done with MIDI-driven synths, but for audio, there is no recording configuration that will replay previous takes while loop-recording without restarting the transport.

As an experiment, I found I could pull it off using a delay FX with a very long delay based on the tempo and number of bars in the loop, but it's awkward to set up, and you can't arbitrarily define the length of the loop while performing; you have to set it in advance, and play to a click.

Better to use a DAW that's optimized for this kind of thing like Abelton Live as rsinger suggested... or a hardware looper.

Edited February 7, 2020 by David Baay

[tecknot]

10 hours ago, rsinger said:

CbB has matrix view which is non-linear. You can try that. I use Live for looping.

Yeah, Tobias, try the Matrix View as rsinger suggested.  You can set it to playback each clip at different time intervals or immediately.  Sounds like it would do what you're looking for.

Kind regards,

tecknot