How do you automate without CC changes? (NOOB ALERT!)

[Christopher Burke]

Dear Anyone.

OK, so I've had Cakewalk (a.k.a. Sonar as you know) for about 5 minutes and it's going to take a few ***** questions to get my head around it all, because it works utterly differently from my old VST.

My old one was pure notation, you chose one instrument per stave and put in all the notes with a mouse.  I loved it cos I'm disabled and can't play keyboards easily (co-ordination!) But my old one did everything with CC changes.  You chose the right CC number, put in what you wanted to happen at that point - volume change, velocity change, whatever - and that was it.  Thing IS - not all VSTs 'read' CC changes.  So I just stuck with those that did.  

Then I hit Cakewalk.  Where there's no nice little boxes (that I can find) to put CC changes in.  I keep reading articles that say 'automate reverb' or whatever but I flat am not seeing how to do this without my old familiar CC change numbers.  I've tried Googling 'automation' and it just says 'raising and lowering of levels in VSTs and plug-ins'.  I know this.  I'm just not seeing how to make Cakewalk do it! 

Hokay, so it's going to be something stoopid that's obvious to everyone else....!! I'm aware of this and happy to hear the sniggers as long as there's an answer in with them somewheres.....

Yours respectfully - there's going to be another couple of questions after this but one at a time! - 

Chris.

 

[Steve Harder]

I would suggest you go to Youtube and search for Creative Sauce.  Mike has a wide range of videos that will help get you up to speed on a number of concepts that will be new to you.

I'm on lunch break right now but I hope someone else will come along that can give you a specific answer to your questions about CCs.  But Creative Sauce will give you plenty to think about in the meantime.

There are lots of helpful folks here.  Welcome to the community.  It won't be long before you get a handle on the many different resources that are available to help you use Cakewalk.

[John Vere]

What you are  up against is your workflow was 20 years ago. Modern DAWS (  not called VST’s. A VST is a virtual instrument ).  Do all the fiddling around for you. Nobody really needs to use CC events any more unless your working with old school GM. All the parameters are  easily dialled in within each VST using their GUI interfaces And volume panning and effects all can be automated. 
But if your dead set on doing some things the slow and painful way you can enter data into the Event list. Just like in 1985 on my Atari ?

Edited January 28, 2021 by John Vere

[Larry Jones]

I'm having trouble picturing how you're working with CbB (Cakewalk by Bandlab). Are you drawing notes in the Piano Roll View (PRV)? If so you must have already inserted a virtual instrument or you would not be hearing your notes. And if you've got a virtual instrument loaded, the control pane to the left of the timeline is where automation happens (or in the console view, I guess). I'm not an expert, so I'll defer to others here, but there's an 1,800-page PDF manual you can download. Here's a section on MIDI automation. The full manual can be downloaded from a link at the top of this page: Reference Guide PDF. Best of luck!