step sequencer Step sequencer

[Keisari]

So i am trying to use step sequencer but its always greyed out. Couple of times I have been able to use it but it gives me this error and mutes the instrument. Fix?

[Starship Krupa]

You must select a MIDI or Instrument track before you may access the Step Sequencer.

This is the message you would get if you dragged an audio clip to a MIDI track.

[Keisari]

4 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

You must select a MIDI or Instrument track before you may access the Step Sequencer.

This is the message you would get if you dragged an audio clip to a MIDI track.

But can i get an audio clip into the step sequencer. Like a hihat (from the internet) to the step sequencer and if i can. How? Thanks

[scook]

There are a couple of ways to convert audio to MIDI

Dragging an audio clip into an instrument or MIDI track is the most direct. Click OK when the message on the left in the OP is displayed.

This will create a regular MIDI clip. To open a MIDI clip in the step sequencer use the Convert MIDI Clip(s) to Step Sequencer... function in the Track View Clips menu.

 

[Keisari]

Now  I can't hear the clip. I can access the audio clip in the step sequencer but can't hear it anymore.

[Kurre]

The most common way to use the midinotes from a stepsequenser with drumsounds is to use a vst sampler.

This is an easy to understand sampler and it's free: https://decomposer.de/sitala/

[scook]

The step sequencer in CbB is for sequencing MIDI data NOT audio.

As mentioned above playing MIDI requires a synth of some kind.

SI-Drums is bundled with CbB.

 

 

 

[Keisari]

7 minutes ago, scook said:

The step sequencer in CbB is for sequencing MIDI data NOT audio.

As mentioned above playing MIDI requires a synth of some kind.

SI-Drums is bundled with CbB.

 

 

 

So i can't use audio clips in step sequencer? Or am  I missing something?

[scook]

No, it is a MIDI step sequencer.

You can add audio clips to audio tracks

launch them from the Matrix View

or load them into a sampler.

 

[Starship Krupa]

@Keisari, I think I know what you're trying to do: you want to take a single audio sample, like a hi-hat or kick sample, and have it play when a MIDI note sounds.

As scook has said, the Matrix View is closer to what you're looking for, but at this time it's set up so that if you want to compose this way, the Cakewalk Track View and Matrix View are not integrated tightly enough that I would feel comfortable using both in a project. You can do a project in Matrix View using loops, clips, samples, and then get it over to the Track View, but for instance I don't think you can trigger Matrix cells from MIDI events in the Cakewalk Track View, if you have edited a clip using the Track View you must bounce it before importing it to the Matrix view, Matrix View cells don't have access to VST effects, etc. It's set up so that you can do a project/performance in Matrix View, then "capture" it to clips in the Track View. It's great for what it is, it's just not connected to the other areas of the program yet.

If you want to be more tightly integrated with the Track View workflow, use a software sampler such as T16Wx, which is freeware, a favorite of Cakewalkers and works great as a Cakewalk plug-in.

[Base 57]

2 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

I don't think you can trigger Matrix cells from MIDI events in the Cakewalk Track View

@Craig Anderton had a Friday tip on the old forum about how to do this using LoopBe. It works great.

[scook]

The aforementioned https://decomposer.de/sitala/ is a better fit for triggering drum samples. Especially for beginners. TX16Wx is overkill albeit probably the best free sampler available.

That said, working directly with loops in audio tracks is not that difficult.

 

[Starship Krupa]

Thanks, Steve, for the reminder about Sitala. It looks like a nice little one-shot player, and TX16Wx can certainly fall into the category of "way more sampler than I need for this." Not sure why I didn't delve deeper, maybe it was the developer referring to all of their releases as "beta." I mean, at some point, release one that you're confident enough in to call 1.0.

Opening the Ref Guide pages for Matrix View is frustrating because there's so much potential there. If it were better integrated with the other elements of Cakewalk. And not that better integrated, just basic stuff like being able to directly route MIDI inside the program, using FX in your cells, being able to drag and drop clips directly from Tracks without first rendering them, connecting the outputs of the MV to Console strips for processing, and recording from audio or MIDI devices into cells. Hooking up a few parts of the program to it, like you'd do with a ReWire object.

It feels as if it was a big planned feature, they got it working, yay, the stuff I listed was going to be implemented in the next release, then some catastrophe happened, maybe it lost its advocate in management or something.

[JoseC]

3 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Thanks, Steve, for the reminder about Sitala. It looks like a nice little one-shot player, and TX16Wx can certainly fall into the category of "way more sampler than I need for this." Not sure why I didn't delve deeper, maybe it was the developer referring to all of their releases as "beta." I mean, at some point, release one that you're confident enough in to call 1.0.

Opening the Ref Guide pages for Matrix View is frustrating because there's so much potential there. If it were better integrated with the other elements of Cakewalk. And not that better integrated, just basic stuff like being able to directly route MIDI inside the program, using FX in your cells, being able to drag and drop clips directly from Tracks without first rendering them, connecting the outputs of the MV to Console strips for processing, and recording from audio or MIDI devices into cells. Hooking up a few parts of the program to it, like you'd do with a ReWire object.

It feels as if it was a big planned feature, they got it working, yay, the stuff I listed was going to be implemented in the next release, then some catastrophe happened, maybe it lost its advocate in management or something.

I was hoping that this update was bringing some improvement for the Matrix, but the Arranger Track is a nice surprise instead. 

Anyway, you can do more than it seems with the Matrix. You can drag and drop clips from tracks. You do not need to render clips, you can drag directly Instrument Track midi clips to the Matrix and they are automatically routed to their Track. With audio clips you do need to set up the loop, same as in any other program, but you can drag single shots as they are. And you can route the Matrix rows to any Console track, and use the effects there. In Ableton Live is exactly the same, you add FX in the track, not in the Session View slot.  In fact, in Cakewalk you can even route several rows to the same track, something you can´t do in Live.

You can create a Step Sequencer clip from a cell, and edit from there, but for some reason you need to stop the Matrix to hear the changes. Very annoying, but if you link the Matrix transport to the main transport you can manage somehow. BTW, a nice feature with the Step Sequencer is that you can experiment with the Step probability and sequence length and record the Matrix output to a track. You can leave it rolling and record multiple variations. 

Recording audio and midi directly would be great, but in the meantime it would be nice if they  made possible to edit the Step sequencer without stopping.

 

Edited April 11, 2020 by JoseC

[Keisari]

On 1/18/2020 at 1:07 AM, Starship Krupa said:

Nice clean interface. I'll add it to the Favorite Freeware Instruments Thread.

I see that they are targeting it as a drum sampler, how does it perform as a general phrase sampler?

 

14 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Thanks, Steve, for the reminder about Sitala. It looks like a nice little one-shot player, and TX16Wx can certainly fall into the category of "way more sampler than I need for this." Not sure why I didn't delve deeper, maybe it was the developer referring to all of their releases as "beta." I mean, at some point, release one that you're confident enough in to call 1.0.

Opening the Ref Guide pages for Matrix View is frustrating because there's so much potential there. If it were better integrated with the other elements of Cakewalk. And not that better integrated, just basic stuff like being able to directly route MIDI inside the program, using FX in your cells, being able to drag and drop clips directly from Tracks without first rendering them, connecting the outputs of the MV to Console strips for processing, and recording from audio or MIDI devices into cells. Hooking up a few parts of the program to it, like you'd do with a ReWire object.

It feels as if it was a big planned feature, they got it working, yay, the stuff I listed was going to be implemented in the next release, then some catastrophe happened, maybe it lost its advocate in management or something.

 

16 hours ago, scook said:

The aforementioned https://decomposer.de/sitala/ is a better fit for triggering drum samples. Especially for beginners. TX16Wx is overkill albeit probably the best free sampler available.

That said, working directly with loops in audio tracks is not that difficult.

 

Yo guys got it to work like I wanted to. Thanks alot for the help!! Love the community. Keep it up!!

[Starship Krupa]

I'm going to drop in again on the Matrix, thanks to the encouragement from @JoseC. I had just kind of poked at it, and looked at the documentation, and left it.

[JoseC]

6 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I'm going to drop in again on the Matrix, thanks to the encouragement from @JoseC. I had just kind of poked at it, and looked at the documentation, and left it.

The main problem with the Matrix, IMO, is that most people expect it to be like  Ableton Live´s Session View, find out that it is not, and just never open it again, instead of trying to find out what it actually is, and what it can be used for, which is more than it seems. 

Just a warning: there is a bug in the Matrix where if you double click an audio clip in the Matrix, it opens the Loop Construction editor, but as soon as you do anything to it within the editor, bad things happen, like if  the Matrix cell did not recognize the clip anymore and it got lost in another dimension. You can double click a midi cell, though, and it will ask you if you want to create a Step Sequencer pattern. This works, though as I said above, you need to stop play if you want to hear changes.

 

 

[Starship Krupa]

Thanks for all the information. As I am wanting to explore more EDM production methods, I will be checking out the Matrix .

I'll search YouTube for tutorials and check out Craig Anderton's articles.

[Boogie]

On 4/13/2020 at 10:34 PM, JoseC said:

The main problem with the Matrix, IMO, is that most people expect it to be like  Ableton Live´s Session View, find out that it is not, and just never open it again, instead of trying to find out what it actually is, and what it can be used for, which is more than it seems. 

Just a warning: there is a bug in the Matrix where if you double click an audio clip in the Matrix, it opens the Loop Construction editor, but as soon as you do anything to it within the editor, bad things happen, like if  the Matrix cell did not recognize the clip anymore and it got lost in another dimension. You can double click a midi cell, though, and it will ask you if you want to create a Step Sequencer pattern. This works, though as I said above, you need to stop play if you want to hear changes.

 

 

I was experimenting with the Matrix view in Cakewalk and I noticed there is a glitch in the loop like a very short silence occurs when restarting the loop. Not sure if anybody else experienced this or if it is something to do with my system. What I did is basically I drag & dropped a few loops from bandlab assistant into matrix view and recorded it. I attached a clip to show how it sounds. This glitch does not seem to happen on the Bandlab's web based mix editor. I suspect this might be a bug, can anybody feedback to confirm if you experienced the same issue or not?

 

matrix_loop.mp3

[Mánibranðr Studios]

Just want to drop in to mention that Geist Lite is still free rn and can be used as a Drum Sampler.