Master Class: Cakewalk Beatscape

Feb 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Brian Smithers

FIND THE GROOVE WITH SONAR 8'S NEW BEAT-CREATION PLUG-IN

Beatscape is a new plug-in included with Cakewalk Sonar 8 Producer Edition that offers a friendly and appealing interface for manipulating loops and other samples. You simply map samples to its 16 onscreen pads and trigger them with MIDI notes; Beatscape takes care of tempo matching the beats. We'll dig deep into this plug-in's bag of tricks to help you wield its power most effectively.

Get Current, Stay Current

First, download and install the Beatscape 1.0.1 update from cakewalk.com. The free download offers more than the expected first-generation bug fixes; most significantly, it allows you to assign each Beatscape pad to one of 17 stereo (or 34 mono) outputs. Although each pad has its own set of up to three insert effects, the ability to return each pad into Sonar on its own track for separate processing is enormous.

Each Beatscape output appears as an available input to an audio track (see Fig. 1). Whether you create and assign these audio tracks yourself or have Sonar do that for you from the Synth Rack dialog box (check All Synth Audio Outputs: mono or All… stereo) depends on how many independent outputs you expect to need. Automatically creating 34 mono audio tracks is probably overkill for any application, but autocreating outputs automatically assigns each pad to a different output.

To assign pad outputs manually, click in the Output field within the Pad Settings pane as shown in Fig. 1. As with most Beatscape properties, left-clicking increases the value and right-clicking decreases it. (As of this writing, the output numbers assigned in Beatscape are offset from the Beatscape outputs listed as track inputs by one. For example, a pad assigned to output 4 will return to a track on output 5. Cake-walk is aware of this discrepancy and promises a fix in the next update.)

Obviously, having your pads on separate outputs allows you to EQ, pan, and process them independently. Go beyond the obvious and run one or more of them through an amp simulator, such as Guitar Rig 3 LE, which is now included with Sonar 8 Producer Edition. A classic drum-machine technique is to run a loop through the audio input of a Minimoog. My favorite soft synths for this treatment include Arturia's Minimoog V and Software Technology's VAZ2010. Alternatively, you could assign the pad's output as the modulation input of a vocoder plug-in such as Native Instruments Vokator.

Got Mono?

Having too many stereo sources results in what mix engineers call “big mono,” meaning that panning options are somewhat reduced. Because Sonar's stereo tracks feature balance controls instead of true stereo panning, this is especially dangerous, as hard panning effectively mutes the opposing channel. The simple solution is to set the track's channel interleave button to mono, which causes Sonar to sum the left and right channels. If you have loops that don't react well to being summed, you may want to re-create them as mono loops. Mono loops will also react better to step editing of pan within Beatscape, in which case the track interleave must be stereo.

In general, I keep keyboard and guitar loops in stereo and use mono for drum and percussion parts. I especially want any parts from which I will end up playing individual notes to be mono.

Playing the Field

Beatscape pads can be triggered in a variety of ways by combining the plug-in's four different pad modes, which control a sample's sustain and loop characteristics, and four different sync modes, which control its alignment with the timeline. For a classic subtractive loop-and-mute technique, set all pads to Auto Loop and Measure, then assign buttons on a MIDI controller to each pad's Mute button. Start all pads at once and then selectively mute and unmute pads to build or deconstruct the loop. This is often preferable to triggering pads because you can play the mutes rhythmically and get tight musical response.

With some careful planning, playing Beat-scape can feel very much like playing an instrument. For occasional 1-hit sounds, such as a cymbal crash, put the pad on Auto Play so it won't retrigger accidentally. Be sure the sample is trimmed properly, though, as you'll have to wait for it to finish playing before you can retrigger it. Put one copy of a hi-hat loop on Manual Play and Immediate Sync so you can trigger it on offbeats and change up its length. Right-click on the pad to copy and paste the hi-hat to another pad set to Auto Loop and Measure (or Beat) for set-and-forget playback. Little things like this help you get more out of your samples.

Beatscape maps every slice of a pad's audio to MIDI notes on the corresponding channel (see Fig. 2). Although this allows you to dissect a loop and create new patterns from its individual hits, it complicates mixing and matching hits from different loops. To get around this, create a Sonar drum map that maps incoming MIDI notes to the specific notes and channels needed to trigger the components of any Beatscape pad. Note that if you inserted Beatscape on a simple instrument track, you would need to create a separate MIDI track to control the drum map. The MIDI output port of an instrument track is assumed to be the track's soft synth and cannot be reassigned.

Remember that Sonar's step sequencer is designed to work with drum maps, so as soon as you've mapped some Beatscape hits, you can play them with the step sequencer. Beatscape thus becomes a simple sampler for the step sequencer.