How to "disable" comping take lanes?

[mgustavo]

Hi, I'm transcribing a song on Staff View but as I've been cutting it in sections, one part was divided on 2 take lanes. However I'm trying to export it to one single clip but one take lane always get excluded!
I found out that the project was on Comping mode, so one take lane will be saved and the other will be lost. I tried to change the recording mode but it didn't help on exporting the clip.

Is there a way to disable the comping take lane or maybe I'm missing something?
Thanks in advance! 

Edited May 26, 2023 by mgustavo

[Andres Medina]

I'm not really sure what are you not being able to do, but watch the videos anyway.

If you think of the comp lanes as minitracks contained in a master track, that can be deleted, reordered, etc, it should not be a problem to get what you want. Remember that you must be sure that you are really selecting the right lanes or portion of lanes with the selct tool. You can even add an empty lane and move the clips of other lanes there, to create a single lane, and then delete all others. It will become a "uncomped" track.

[John Vere]

For this very reason I have always used Overwrite mode. It is found in preferences but the quick way to get there is to RIGHT CLICK the RECORD button in the transport  module to open the preference dialogue.  It's one of those annoying default setting. Instant mess. I prefer to delete bad takes by recording over them. Why would I want to keep a bad take? 

Edited May 26, 2023 by John Vere

[Andres Medina]

Another way is to open the take lanes and lasso select both clips (or more if you need). After that you can also bounce to clip to render the two lanes into one single lane.

 

[mgustavo]

Hi, John Vere and Andres Medina! Thanks for the replies!
Actually I knew how to set recording modes and also how to export take lanes to a single clip (at least I did it a few times). But for some reason I'm not getting the expected result!

What I noticed is that best take lane will "survive" the clip rendering, but it seems I'm missing something.
* I was wondering if I could "uncomp" the comp'd take lane! ?

Fortunately the troubled section was a repeated section so it was discarted as I finished the score on Musescore. But I'd like to know how I got in this issue!
Thanks!
 

[John Vere]

I've been using Cakewalk for a long, long time.  I also managed to figure out punching in and  sound on sound in on Tape based machines... this take lanes has had me baffled since day one. I have tried it many times and ended up with a total mess. I read the manual, 

  I have figured out how to use just about everything in Cakewalk and how it works,,,, but not this. Is it just me and my linear thinking?   I find it much easier to simply record 2 or 3 different real actual tracks and use parts of those to compile a signal track if needed. Ultimately nothing ever goes south on me when I do that. 

Take lanes has a mind of it's own. Comping Mode results in a bunch of layers of garbage hiding beneath my actual finished tracks.

Sorry I just have never understood it's purpose. Unless you are a recording hoarder and just can't stand tossing out the garbage. 

 

If I screw up a take I re do it,, I totally don't want to keep screwed takes.  End of rant..  

[Andres Medina]

Yes, sometimes they behave in unexpected ways!

Anyway, I find them VERY useful for tracking, specially when recording talent (voices most of all), as I just arm the track and repeat over and over as many takes I want. I configure them to stack the last on top, so, in a way, the last take would be your "preferred take" in the overwriting mode. 

For me, the beauty of the take lanes is that I have additional takes in the background. Those have saved my day when I find out that my "preferred" take had a noise, or that a word was not clear enough. For tracking guitars, I often end up with two marked "preferred" lanes that I can copy to a different track to pan L/R.

I keep record of the pre-selected takes as I go: it saves a lot of time later, and I just delete later the unusable takes. So, I end up with may be 5 good takes for a single line.

I think the messy stuff is related to the use of the selecting tool. It can create a real mess. I found out that you can redo your selections from scratch by selecting the whole lane from start to the end. It clears all the messy clips.

Take lanes require a different workflow approach. Yours is very straightforward!

But I agree that when the lanes get messy, is a headache.

Edited May 27, 2023 by Andres Medina

[John Vere]

I have this one template I keep forgetting to fix that defaults to comping.  I’ll have recorded midi parts that I’m unaware of the underlying garbage until I go to copy paste and when I slip edit there they are revealed from the hiding place. 
 

Another thing can happen is Melodyne can get messed up. 
 

It’s easy to fix and I take it in stride as being my own fault. But I am contrary to many of Cakewalks defaults and I can sympathize with new users who some of these defaults can trip up.
To me Comping mode is an advanced feature and the default settings should be Overwrite just like any other Recording device or Wave editor or DAW.  
My all time favourite default is the Basic Workspace.  Why would you hide dozens of features by default?  
And then hide the toggle in a tiny box and name it obscurely. 
 

Apparently most people who have used Sonar/Cakewalk since the beginning of time are still unaware of what a Workspace is and actually does. 

I like Movie Makers approach. Big huge tab right in plain site says Expert mode. 

Edited May 27, 2023 by John Vere

[Andres Medina]

Right.

I only use take lanes for recording audio. Always stay in Overwrite mode, for the reasons you say, specially midi. Never used comping recording midi. It's messy.

[Byron Dickens]

2 hours ago, John Vere said:

To me Comping mode is an advanced feature and the default settings should be Overwrite just like any other Recording device or Wave editor or DAW.  

That sounds like a good feature request.

[Will.]

22 hours ago, mgustavo said:

Hi, I'm transcribing a song on Staff View but as I've been cutting it in sections, one part was divided on 2 take lanes. However I'm trying to export it to one single clip but one take lane always get excluded!
I found out that the project was on Comping mode, so one take lane will be saved and the other will be lost. I tried to change the recording mode but it didn't help on exporting the clip.

Is there a way to disable the comping take lane or maybe I'm missing something?
Thanks in advance! 

Bounce the clip. It should combine all lanes to one clip withing the track. 

[Will.]

Comping works just as expected - unless things have changed while ive been gone. I see we're on the same build still though. 

Comping works in conjunction with your loop points and I always use it with punch in and works great - well, the last time i still used it. Dont think it has changed. It overwrites the region you want to replace as it should. 

Edited May 27, 2023 by Will.

[msmcleod]

1 hour ago, Will. said:

Comping works just as expected - u less thi gs have changed while ive been gone. I see we're on the build still though. 

Comping works in conjunction with your loop points and. I always use it with punch in and works great - well, the last time i still used it. Dont think it has changed. It overwrites the region you want to replace as it should. 

Some changes were made a few releases back to extend the last take to the loop points/punch out points, to avoid splitting all of the lanes at the stop time.

IIRC it only does this if the loop went around more than once though, otherwise it'd extend just a single take which isn't what you'd expect.

[mgustavo]

17 hours ago, Andres Medina said:

I'm not really sure what are you not being able to do, but watch the videos anyway.

Thanks for the videos, those procedures resolved the problem!
I was trying to select take lanes when mouse pointer was on "select mode", but selecting them with pointer on "isolate clip" mode (for comping) will do the trick!

Thank you all for the replies! I agree take lanes and comping are a bit complex but when I have to record music I like to use comping mode.
Although I feel it would be better to practice enough and record good takes, I've been using it due it's easy workflow.

[Starship Krupa]

On 5/26/2023 at 12:25 PM, mgustavo said:

I'm transcribing a song on Staff View

Am I the only one who noticed that it looks like he's not working with audio, but with MIDI? Or do I have that wrong? They work differently in Cakewalk, in some important ways.

On 5/26/2023 at 1:29 PM, John Vere said:

Why would I want to keep a bad take?

It's just another signpost on the race to the bottom.

This "comping" thing came about because sometimes an entire take isn't considered "bad," maybe one clammed note or a flubbed lyric that may be "good" in a different take. So what the engineer does then is substitute the bad note or lyric with the same one sung correctly in the other take. You can do it with instruments as well. Seems icky, like taking the one rotten egg out of a carton and putting a fresh one in its place.

It's one of many talent substitutes that exist today. I'm sure that pros like you guys can nail complete takes in your sleep, but to be honest, for duffers like me (and Lindsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac on their Rumours album and Tom Scholz of Boston on their first LP), we need every crutch we can find.

I've even heard about finicky, indecisive so-called "talent" who record multiple takes and then can't decide which one sounds better and want to come back and decide the next day or, ugh, hear it "in context." If one of the takes doesn't stand out, they should just wipe them all and do it right!

Don't want to gross you out, but I've even heard of unscrupulous engineers letting their "singers" do stuff like recording a verse at a time, doing the chorus or bridge isolated from the rest, then stitching it all together, and even abominations like copying their favorite performance of the chorus and pasting it multiple times! These abominable practices supposedly originated back when people recorded to tape, and computer recording has just made it easier, to the point where they've made this stuff the "default."

You can't fight it any more than you can fight the software coming with a connection of pre-recorded musical "loops" that are intended to be strung together as "songs." I even heard of something the other day called "Band-in-a-Box," which sounds appropriate for something that sounds like it kills creativity. Band-in-a-Box-And-Lowered-Into-The-Earth is what it should be called!

[John Vere]

Don’t get me wrong I realize how important multiple takes are and how widely used they are by duffers as well as some of the very best players and singers.

I just think until a new user gets the hang of basic recording they should use overwrite mode as it definitely is  more straight forward to use.
I’m only assuming this because if comping mode is confusing to me it must be very confusing to a new user. 
They say there’s Linear and Abstract thinking. I must be Linear. 

And I realize how indecisive some creators can be too. I’m not. I write songs and in my head is a complete vision of the songs parts and how they will sound.  I sit down and keep playing the part until I learn it and then hit record.  
That’s just my old school, tape deck methodologies and that my music is very traditional. 
There’s a zillion other workflows one could use to create music.  And for some noodles and riffs are how they do it. And then some don’t have real creative skills so they use tools like Band in  Box . As long as we are staying out of trouble all is good. Music in any form it therapeutic.  

 

[Byron Dickens]

2 hours ago, John Vere said:

And then some don’t have real creative skills so they use tools like Band in  Box .

That's BS.

BIAB takes skill and creativity.  It doesn't do anything for you except realize what you wrote. It is really not much different than handing a bunch of session musicians a chart and saying "here, play this in such-and-such style."  You still have to write the song and the more you put into it the better results you get.

You should hear some of the stuff people have done with BIAB. Oh, wait... You probably have.

[John Vere]

I was only using it as an example of how we have AI type tools and software now that do the playing for you. Some people struggle with things like, coming up with a bass line, or a piano part. The AI to the rescue. I'm not saying its a bad thing at all. It's just yet another persons workflow. Not mine.

And yes I have listened to many a BIAB midi creation over the last 3 decades. A good chunk of the free midi downloads where created with it. This info is sometimes imbedded in the midi file itself. The dead giveaway is the drum fills that happen in the wrong place. 

I actually have an old version that was made for XP. For me it was the hard way to create midi because the parts it generated needed too much editing to start sounding like what I wanted. It seemed to work fine for things like 3 chord Hank Williams songs.  Of course I'm sure they have added a million styles since those days. It's good software and well done, but not a workflow that seems to work for me. 

Edited May 28, 2023 by John Vere

[Starship Krupa]

5 hours ago, John Vere said:

I just think until a new user gets the hang of basic recording they should use overwrite mode as it definitely is  more straight forward to use.
I’m only assuming this because if comping mode is confusing to me it must be very confusing to a new user.

I can tell you I struggled with figuring out the different modes, Comping, Overwrite, and Sound on Sound! I even asked for help with it on the old forum and still couldn't get a clear picture. I finally figured it out by doing some tests.

I can also say that what we call Comping mode is either the default or even the only mode in every DAW I've tried. It was the existence of Overwrite and Sound on Sound that threw me for a loop (no pun intended).

And I'm impressed by how songs come to you so fully-formed. I used to think that I was somehow inadequate or inauthentic because it doesn't work that way for me, I bat ideas around like a kitten with a ball of yarn until I get something that jells. Some of us are Albert Bierstadts, some of us are Jackson Pollocks, some of us are Andy Warhols.

Once I became more experienced, I realized how The Beatles wrote their songs in pieces. Paul would have been working on one part, John another, and they'd stick them together. "A Day In The Life" is one example. Paul's later "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" is another obvious and notable example. I count at least three independent song snippets in that one. I watched Get Back, the Beatles documentary, and they would sit around in the studio and noodle and stitch things together.

It's odd, because listening to their catalog, it sounds like they started out with more fully-formed ideas on the early records and then (d?)evolved into the piecemeal methodology. Maybe after they fried their brains on pot and acid!

Watched an interview with Brian Wilson, who said that he would have loved to have had Pro Tools back in the day so that he could have more easily pieced together songs like "Good Vibrations."

I've been taken aback when finding out how much of some of my favorite more recent songs turn out to have been stitched together from samples! A notable case is Daft Punk's "Digital Love." I thought it was inspired by all these older songs, turns out that the bulk of it was older songs (the badass fake synthesizer guitar solo was original, at least). Sometimes I'm reminded of John Godfrey Saxe's famous aphorism about sausages and the law: “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."

But the truth is, it doesn't "cease to inspire respect" in me, although it may change the flavor of the respect. I contend that if it sounds good and moves my heart (and/or booty), it is good.

[John Vere]

those  thousands of songs rolling around my brain that I think I perceive my own songs this way too. 

Edited May 29, 2023 by John Vere

[Michael Vogel]

There was a time we were limited by the length of tape available so judicious use of overdubs, mixing and remixing had to be applied. 
At some time before that a composer had to assemble an orchestra to realise their musical creation.

Today we can keep it all, every single note played in a recording session and put off decisions about what to keep or delete or record again.

Cakewalk is at its very core a non-destructive  DAW and new users would be better served learning to use that feature to the full than turn on overwrite mode and not take advantage of these exceptional features. It took a lot of coding chops to create such a rich depth of features.

People expect that sitting at the helm of a complex recording facility is child’s play where in fact it takes a lot of knowledge and skill to manipulate the knobs and buttons (virtual though they may be).

It takes experience and application to learn not only the software but the art of the mix engineer, producer, composer, orchestrator, musician just to mention a few of the hats people wear and then expect it should all be intuitive and come naturally.

As if.