How long will it take me to learn it.

[rezino]

If I'm a newbie.How long will it take me to learn it.Please tell me about your experience

[Byron Dickens]

The rest of your life.

[RobertWS]

25 minutes ago, bdickens said:

The rest of your life.

...plus ten years.

[Justin Broad]

4 hours ago, bdickens said:

The rest of your life.

But you will have fun along the way!

[Lord Tim]

^^ agree with this stuff - I'm still learning (and big props to the community here for the free education I'm getting!), but if you mean "how long until I'm able to do anything useful on it" then like all pro software there's a learning curve, and some stuff will click with you better than others.

Start here with these excellent video tutorials, this should get you up and running really fast:

 

[Will.]

Forever and ever-ever and ever-ever. 

[John Vere]

Yes its a two part question. 
1. How long does it take to learn enough about Cakewalk to record and produce a project?  
Answer-  If you try and figure it out on your own - forever.  If you take the time to watch the tutorials and study the documentation then possibly a few day of spare time. 
 

2. How long does it take to completely understand Cakewalk? Once again the process will be sped up 10 fold by watching tutorials and reading the documentation. 
 

It’s odd how many choose to just jump in with out taking advantage of the free training. I’ll include myself in that camp so I speak from experience.

I’ve been using it since 2002. I think 4 years went by and I couldn’t get it to work so I continued to use my Atari. 

I joined the forum and started to slowly figure a few things out. First step was learning you needed an Audio Interface.

Slowly I learned how to get the basic stuff working and Understanding about 20% of the features.My workflow sucked.
12 years later my workflow still sucked. I self explored the program and picked up tidbits from the forum.This  in retrospect was the most painfully slow way to get there.

18 year goes by and I only understood 50%  of Cakewalk. Even so, I had over 300 completed projects that were more than satisfactory. 

The quantum leap was just a few years ago. 

It started with a need to teach 3 musician friends of mine how to use Cakewalk so they could work at their house instead of coming to the studio. 
I started looking for videos but a lot seemed really outdated or they had to much self promotion and wasted time babbling.  The topics were scattered and hard to find the simple basic stuff. 

So I thought I’d make my own. At first I just demonstrated using my 60% knowledge but then decided I could do better.
So topic by topic I tried to research the details and slowly managing to create the series. They are far from perfect because 1 month after I make one, I find another detail or a better way to do something. I’m still only at 80%. 

Edited April 28, 2022 by John Vere

[InstrEd]

I started with Cakewalk Pro Audio something or other way back in the day. Point is I still feel like a newbie at times.  Learning the basics isn't that hard if you take it slowly. Learning all the in's and outs of this monster of a DAW or any of the big DAWs is actually mind blowing IMHO.  What we can do in a DAW is amazing compared to the old days.  So take it slow and if a few months time I bet you will have the basics down

[rfssongs]

I've been using for 30 years ... Great program ...Still learning new things.

[JoeGBradford]

As well as John's videos linked to in his post I can highly recommend Mike at Creative Sauce who has done a whole series on starting out with Cakewalk as well as many other tutorials using the DAW. His approach is clear and friendly and I still refer back to his videos to remind myself how to do stuff. This series is three years old now and there are some new features that aren't covered but it should still be a good starting point to give you a basic idea.

As others have said it would probably take a lifetime to learn and use everything but you can get good results quite quickly

Good luck!
 

 

[57Gregy]

If all you want to do is record audio and MIDI, your songs, then not too long. I was doing that within a few hours of installing Music Creator 2003.
After buying a better audio interface, they even started to sound good.
If you want to produce lavish, orchestral movie soundtracks and world-class symphonies, or Dark Side of the Moon-like rock and synth music, a little longer. ?
What is your goal? What kind of music?

[AndyB01]

33 minutes ago, JoeGBradford said:

As well as John's videos linked to in his post I can highly recommend Mike at Creative Sauce who has done a whole series on starting out with Cakewalk as well as many other tutorials using the DAW. His approach is clear and friendly and I still refer back to his videos to remind myself how to do stuff. 

 

+1 to this suggestion - Mike's videos are really good.

Enjoy the ride!

[Roger_L]

I agree with the recommendations to watch some tutorial videos on YouTube.

Although it is free, Cakewalk is fully featured DAW, which I believe was originally designed around the concept of a mixing desk. It has many good features, but can look daunting to the beginner.

[Starship Krupa]

On 4/27/2022 at 8:35 PM, rezino said:

If I'm a newbie. How long will it take me to learn it.

As others have said, it depends on what you want to make with the program. In my experience, it has a fairly short learning curve for the basic tasks of recording audio and MIDI.

How long it will take any given person depends on more things, such as prior familiarity with DAW software in general. I had been doing songs using Mixcraft for years, and the workflow in that program is close enough to Cakewalk's that I jumped right in.

As others have said, Cakewalk has 34 years of development behind it, so to master every feature in depth will take years, if one could ever even do it. But that's not how DAW's are, the initial way you learn is to decide what task you want to do and then figure out how to do them. After that, poking around different menus and Views to see what they do, asking questions on the forum or Facebook group or Reddit, watching tutorials on YouTube, reading the Reference Guide.