Using Cakewalk in a live situation

[Nick Burgess]

Hi,

I have Cakewalk set-up a certain way when putting together songs in the software......reverb, eq etc.

I want to know if there is a way that I can transfer these settings to a live situation, in other words me singing to a crowd.

If possible what is the best way to do it? I have been using Cakewalk for only a short time so any help would be appreciated.

 

I will be using an i3 laptop

Edited November 28, 2022 by Nick Burgess

[57Gregy]

Welcome to the forum.
I would use a Track Template with the desired effects. Or a Project Template.

[Lord Tim]

Unless you're planning to play parts of the project live (eg: you have a MIDI keyboard playing VSTi synths, or you're running a guitar through an amp sim, etc.) then save yourself the headache and mix your backing tracks down to MP3 or WAV rather than playing it live in a DAW. With an i3, you don't have a lot of headroom for things to screw up, so a simple glitch might be enough to pause the audio engine and ruin your show.

Now, this isn't to say Cakewalk can't be used as a live performance tool - it can and is being used for that by lots of people - but if you don't need the bells and whistles of a full DAW, I'd really recommend erring on the safe side and going as simple as possible.

[Steev]

13 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

Unless you're planning to play parts of the project live (eg: you have a MIDI keyboard playing VSTi synths, or you're running a guitar through an amp sim, etc.) then save yourself the headache and mix your backing tracks down to MP3 or WAV rather than playing it live in a DAW. With an i3, you don't have a lot of headroom for things to screw up, so a simple glitch might be enough to pause the audio engine and ruin your show.

Now, this isn't to say Cakewalk can't be used as a live performance tool - it can and is being used for that by lots of people - but if you don't need the bells and whistles of a full DAW, I'd really recommend erring on the safe side and going as simple as possible.

I have used Cakewalk to run and play MIDI DX instruments that rely on DAW for a host on a laptop successfully, but just as instruments, and definitely not recording them into multi-track projects without running into latency problems. Same goes for amp model plugins like Waves GTR, Amplitube. As cool as they are for recording in your living room bedroom, unless if you have a really REALLY GOOD sound system and well-placed monitors, they flat out SUCK in a live venue. You lose control of symbiotic nature between pickups and speaker cabinets to take advantage of controlling the beautiful harmonics of feedback, and or removing it,  and any preset time-based FX like reverb, delay, chorus, flanger, so on and etc. that sounds great dialed in at home in a small room with soft surfaces, has VERY unusual, unexpected results in a large room made mostly out of hard surfaces in venues that all have their own natural reverb, delay, and flanging going on that need to be adjusted and compensated for, and ther are NO TWO the same. Hard enough to do quickly with real knobs and foot pedal boards on a real modeling amp such as Line 6 Spider, or Peavy Vipyr, etc. IMPOSSIBLE to do quickly enough on a mouse.

Always remember "Murphie's Law" when jamming live shows. ANYTHING that can go wrong will. And just because you can Cakewalk by Bandlab on a laptop doesn't mean you should. You would be surprised how many people resent that. Especially when your reputation as an up-and-coming live performer is at stake, there's not much wiggle room for screwing up, and screwing up typically ends up with being stuck into a constant loop of little to no money gigs, never playing that venue again even for free, and or even the humbling screams of "YOU SUCK" at best, having to be dodging flying projectiles from angry drunks such as anything from snack food, half eaten Whopper burgers, to beer bottles at worse. 😆 When you're jamming live on stage there are no do overs. It's one thing screwing up during a lead solo, if you are fast enough and proficient enough reacting on yer feet you can turn mistakes into new inspiring riffs without derailing the groove. But one of the worse things is when the grooves stops dead on the dancefloor, and saying Opps, sorry, lets rewind and try that again doesn't cut it.  Especially when computers are involved in playing/mixing real instruments live performances with MIDI instruments.

 but very minimally for sneaking it in for a song or 2 and never more than in one set for such things as adding a track or 2 of audio with no more than 16 previously recorded audio/MIDI backing tracks all "FROZEN" to ensure all Audio plugins and ProChannel are offline and MIDI tracks are bounced down to audio and softsynths are offline to free up memory and CPU loads on an HP Intel i5 Windows Pro "Optimized" for high performance,  with CbB configured for CPU "Load Balancing"  16 gigs of RAM installed and my trusty little rock-solid IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo USB interface with external power supply running IK's ASIO drivers, NOT with USB power or with Windows 10 WDDM drivers with the laptop's internal sound card  and it runs smooth, stable and decently at low latency, on "ASIO" DRIVERS,  but not for long on battery, so  definitely, absolutely DO NOT TRY TO RUN YOUR LAPTOP ON BATTERY POWER and expect it to run smoothly if at all without your audio engine stopping mid tune, or for more than 20-30 minutes and shutting down!🚫

But I have used Cakewalk on a laptop for live solo shows for jamming, I've even used Bandlab running off my iPhone. Why? Because there was good strong Internet service and because it was fun just because I could, and that blew everybody's mind including my own. 🤯😆 But I wouldn't rely on that either much less running Cakewalk than a laptop. Not that they are bad, it's just even the most powerful laptop you could buy only has a fraction of the power of a comparable full-size desktop, tower, or rackmount case computer in my experience in the 30+ years I been using Cakewalk, Pro Tools (Mac) and various other DAWs, blah, blah, blah.  Although is looks surprisingly similar, but not exactly the same as it's scaled back and down, CbB is a WHOLE COMPLETELY AND RADICALLY DIFFERENT DAW running on my Intel i5 laptop OK as long as I don't overdo it than it is running on my full tower AMD 8370 8 core workstation where it seemingly has unlimited extra power.

And strangely enough as far as laptops are concerned, I've had MUCH better reliable performance out of i5's then i7's simply because they retain stable clock speeds because they run cooler. And the hotter the laptop gets the slower it gets due to thermal throttling. Laptops break easily too, and even the best have abysmal cooling problems when pushed hard. But run an i7 in a full tower with proper cooling mounted on high-performance motherboard is the stuff dreams are made of and I'm saying that as a diehard AMD evangelist.

  Dollar for dollar price per performance AMD has always blown Intel away, but that gap is closing, and both are so powerful it's really humanly impossible to tell or even care.

Also don't even try optimizing for "Gaming", I have NEVER seen that work out well.  DAW's aren't games, you may be prioritizing performance your graphics processing but reducing the power you need getting to the DAW where it's needed most.

Keep in mind the i5 is a 4 core CPU, and an i3 is dual core CPU and one of those cores is used for graphics the other used for Windows, CbB, and whatever else may be running in the background that you're not aware of,  and I have no idea if Windows can even be optimized for high performance with an i3 which of course isn't a high-performance CPU. And you don't have an option for Load Balancing, so I couldn't say how many tracks you could safely run with an i3? CbB is an excellent well matured DAW, and it scales back better than any other DAW I've ever seen to run efficiently on even modest computers nicely as it does scale UP to powerhouse workstations with the least amount of problems of any other DAW I've ever used.

And all that being said, to close this rant..... I would strongly advise NOT using or relying on a laptop for live jam venues to run DAW's like Cakewalk by Bandlab. If you really want to be a road warrior and use computers successfully, do up a powerful rack mountable "workstation grade" computer with multi 100mm fans, at least an 8 core CPU, 32 gigs of RAM mounted in a 19" rack case that could take a right proper beating and banging that'll handle Cakewalk's synth rack and dozens of audio FX without breaking a sweat, and anything else you throw at it with power to spare and a multi-channel audio/MIDI interface with plenty of I/O to spare.

And the biggest problems to figure out with all that is.... Do ya have the money too spare for a computer MUCH more powerful and durable and as a result will easily outlast 3 laptops but cost much less?

 It's always a good thing to have more then you need, and never a good thing to not have enough.

 

[Nick Burgess]

To explain a little better...........the only thing I will be using Cakewalk for is my vocals. The backing track will be played via a separate laptop, running through it's own channel on the mixer.

All I need is it to work with my vocals

[Lord Tim]

It can be done, but you definitely have to make sure you have a decent quality audio interface with rock solid ASIO drivers (especially if you're running this on an i3) because if you're planning to run live reverbs and that kind of thing in real-time with very low latency delay, any weak part of the chain can make this fall over.

What audio interface are you using?

Edited January 17, 2023 by Lord Tim

[Xoo]

And if it's just for vocals, why not get a dedicated vocal processor (eg. Digitech used to do one called Vocalist)?