Cakewalk Guitar Studio

In addition to the usual piano‑roll and event editors, Guitar Studio has the ability to display and edit MIDI notes using a virtual guitar fretboard.

Paul White braves the slings and arrows of his outrageous PC in the good cause of testing a MIDI + Audio sequencer designed with the guitarist in mind.

There's no arguing with the fact that MIDI and the music keyboard are a match made in techno heaven, but there are still far more guitarists out there than there are keyboard players, and many are being forced to tackle the keyboard just so they can use a MIDI sequencer. It's true that MIDI guitars have been around for almost as long as MIDI itself, but they're pretty imperfect devices at the best of times. However, I've often felt that if a sequencer package could be designed to meet the MIDI guitar halfway, it might be a whole different story. After all, many of the problems experienced by MIDI guitar users could be lessened by means of pretty basic algorithms designed to remove spurious low‑velocity short notes, something MIDI guitars seem to rejoice in generating, and perhaps a switchable option to disallow hammer‑offs to open strings, which would get rid of that annoying retriggering that so often occurs when changing chords. There's also a lot that can be done to fine‑tune the way the sequencer presents information to the guitar player: for example, it would be useful to have a dedicated MIDI guitar‑sequencer track that can be selected and recorded as a single track, but actually contains six sub‑tracks for the 'one MIDI channel per string' mode in which MIDI guitars work best.

To date, the perfect MIDI guitarist's sequencer doesn't exist, but Cakewalk have taken several steps in the right direction with their new Guitar Studio package for the PC. Guitar Studio is based on Cakewalk's more conventional MIDI + Audio sequencer but is designed specifically to appeal to guitar players. For example, notes may be viewed on a guitar fretboard as an alternative to the more conventional piano‑roll editor (which is also included), and there's even an accompaniment 'Wizard' that automatically generates backing tracks in a choice of styles, requiring only that you enter the chords. Those of you who are familiar with Band In A Box will know the routine, though I think it's fair to say that Band In A Box is rather more sophisticated. Guitar Studio can also help you prepare pretty professional‑looking song sheets, and for live performance you can program it to play a number of songs in a specified order, using its Jukebox facility.

Layout

Guitar Studio incorporates both MIDI and Audio mixers into a single Mixer panel, allowing you to carry out most mixing operations within the same window.

As with most modern sequencers, Cakewalk provides a number of different windows, allowing audio and MIDI data to be presented and edited in various ways. The most important of these windows may be accessed directly via icons on the main screen, though to get to the event list or piano‑roll editors you have to go via the More sub‑menu under the Views menu. The main arrangement page provides the familiar track overview of the recording, where newly recorded parts appear as coloured blocks within the track area. Both audio and MIDI can be recorded and viewed via this page. Other than the arrange page, the main edit views are the guitar fretboard editor, the piano roll and the edit list, though there's also a page for lyrics and an automated mixing console.

Using Guitar Studio

The first step to creating a new song is to start a new Project, where you set up the tempo, metronome and key signature for the song, the audio sampling rate and so on. A number of session templates are included for certain types of composition, though the cursor always alights on the 'Normal' clean slate option, which leaves you to assign such patches as you feel fit to the various tracks. Never having used Cakewalk before, I found the system of opening a Track Properties window and then filling in what seemed like a small tax return a rather clunky way of choosing sounds, but I know a lot of people swear by Cakewalk so it's probably down to what you're used to. The same window selects the MIDI recording source, which may be Omni or on a specified channel, as well as selecting between audio and MIDI tracks.

As Cakewalk has been reviewed in SOS relatively recently (version 7.0 was reviewed in September 1998), I'll try to concentrate on the more guitar‑specific areas of the program. For example, there's an onboard guitar tuner, complete with analogue‑style moving‑coil meter, as well as a couple of MIDI guitar templates based on the Roland GR01 and GR30, which use the factory presets for these instruments as patch names rather than the usual GM set. The MIDI guitar templates allow the guitar to be used in Mono mode, where each string sends its data on a separate, consecutive MIDI channel (generally 11 to 16). Opening the template for the GR30 sets track 1 for Mono mode, track 2 for Poly mode and tracks 11 to 16 to Mono mode for use with the GR30. A number of templates for other popular instruments are supplied on the program CD‑ROM.

The Fretboard view of note data works very well in conjunction with MIDI guitars, as the software knows which string a note was played on — it doesn't need to make an informed guess, as it would if the data were input in Poly mode. However, the notes are only visible on the Fingerboard for as long as the MIDI note lasts, so, unlike the piano‑roll view, you can't view notes that have finished playing or are about to play.

Many of the facilities you need to use on a regular basis are still more than a single mouse‑click away, and Cakewalk forces you to fill in a questionnaire before even allowing you to drag a piece of audio or MIDI data to a new location.

A glitch filter is available for removing spurious short notes. This works by setting a note length, in milliseconds, below which notes will be regarded as errors and deleted, and seems to be the only real MIDI processing feature designed to help overcome the problems and limitations of MIDI guitars. Most other sequencers already have a way of doing this, albeit less accessibly in some cases.

Guitarists can also enter notes directly into the program using the Fretboard view — a drawing tool is used to place notes directly onto the fretboard so that chords or melodies can easily be entered in non‑real‑time. There's also a traditional step‑time mode where you first set the note length of each step, then play in the notes one at a time as quickly or as slowly as you like. Patterns can be created that automatically skip over the note positions where rests should be; alternatively, you could play, say, a bottom E wherever you want a space, then select and erase all the bottom Es after recording.

The Song Wizard

Select the Song Wizard and you're greeted by the Wizard's staff (subtle musical pun). Chords may be entered upon this blank staff above any of the four displayed positions in each bar (assuming your song is set up with a 4/4 time signature) where the chord name is in upper case and a lower‑case 'b' is used to signify flats. The manual shows how to enter major, minor, augmented, diminished, demented (just kidding!), seventh and minor seventh chords, but when you actually come to do business with the Wizard, no matter what style you pick, only straightforward majors and minors are on offer. This is odd when you consider that the cursor is actually a C7 chord symbol in this mode, but try sticking a 7 on the end and you get a message back saying "Variation or chord not found". Perhaps this will be sorted out in a future upgrade?

This limitation aside, the Wizard makes a fair job of coming up with a complete backing, which it obligingly pastes into your sequence as separate MIDI tracks so that you can edit them further. Style changes can be inserted within a song and you can also add lyrics to produce your own song sheets. If the style doesn't work out, you can regenerate the song in a different style, but if you do, any edits you've made to the first version will be lost — unless you deliberately remove the relevant track or tracks from the Wizard's grasp, by deleting the prefix portion of the track name.

Audio

The audio side of the program is pretty much what you'd expect from a well‑specified modern sequencer. It's similar to what you'd find in the regular version of Cakewalk, complete with waveform views, crossfading and numerous processing functions, including parametric and graphic EQ. These latter processes can be auditioned prior to doing a destructive edit. All the usual copy, cut, divide and paste edit moves can be made to recorded data, and WAV files may be imported directly into the program; on top of this, there's a virtual mixer that incorporates both audio and MIDI tracks to provide automated mixing capability. The audio channels can be used in conjunction with DirectX real‑time effects plug‑ins: these show up in a window near the top of the channel strip if used in insert mode, or in the aux return windows if patched to work with the channel aux send knobs. There are two aux send level‑control knobs per channel, with on/off buttons, pan and a volume fader. The same effects may also be used during destructive off‑line edits: just bounce the effected track to a new file on disk. This is a handy feature when your computer's CPU is loaded up to the limit and you need more effects.

Faders, knobs and buttons may be grouped to work together, producing subgroups of several channels, or to mute and unmute several tracks simultaneously. Remote control is also possible via MIDI, and when MIDI control is applied to a grouped control, the whole group moves together. All knob and fader movements can be recorded within Guitar Studio to provide both snapshot and real‑time dynamic mix automation, though on my (admittedly marginal) PC there was a space of at least three seconds between me moving a fader and the effect being audible. This delay will also be affected by the size of record buffer chosen. Snapshots may be arranged to change at a particular Now time (Cakewalk's terminology for the current cursor position), and when the final mix is ready to run, the resulting audio tracks may be mixed to a single stereo sound file.

On the subject of synchronisation, in master mode Guitar Studio can either run from its internal clock or from the clock on an audio card, while external sync is possible via MIDI. Audio playback in slave mode is possible with MTC/SMPTE, using either Trigger and Freewheel or full Chase Lock modes. In the former case, audio is triggered at the correct time but then carries on playing under the control of the soundcard's audio clock, so if the master device isn't running at a stable speed, some drift is likely. In Full Chase mode, the audio is constantly adjusted in speed so as to stay locked to the external clock. Guitar Studio also implements MMC so that external tape machines or other MMC compatible devices can be stopped and started remotely.

I have to applaud the company's initiative in trying to produce something that makes the guitar player's life easier.

Look And Feel

I found several aspects of the user interface irritating, not least the apparent surfeit of dialogue boxes and the odd response of the numeric windows. When you want to change something such as the song tempo, instead of just highlighting a digit, then changing it, or dragging the mouse to update the value, you first have to click on the window to activate it. At this point all the digits within the window move slightly to the left, so your cursor is no longer above the digit you want to change. There's no option to increase or decrease values by dragging the mouse — something most of the programs I'm used to happily allow. Many of the facilities you need to use on a regular basis are more than a single mouse‑click away, and Cakewalk forces you to fill in a questionnaire before even allowing you to drag a piece of audio or MIDI data to a new location. Similarly, the scissors tool works in a very convoluted way compared to Logic or Cubase. The manual, at least, is generally well written and easy to follow.

Some of these criticisms are no doubt down to personal preference, and I certainly have no complaints about the program's stability. Even using my antique PC and a humble AWE64 card, I was able to record both audio and MIDI quite satisfactorily, though the digital mixer responded too slowly for comfort and there wasn't enough horsepower to make more than a token stab at using the real‑time effects.

Piece Of Cake?

As a newcomer to Cakewalk, I find some aspects of the program rather archaic, but I have to applaud the company's initiative in trying to produce something that makes the guitar player's life easier. The Fingerboard view makes an interesting alternative to the piano‑roll page and is perfectly viable for inputting notes, though it is of limited use for editing recorded MIDI data because of the way in which notes are removed from the display as soon as a note‑off is received. I find the piano‑roll pretty good for editing anyway, though a guitar mode designed to show multiple MIDI channels with notes from each string (MIDI channel) showing up in a different colour might be useful.

The de‑glitching option for automatically removing notes below a certain length threshold when you're inputting data from a MIDI guitar works well enough, but I felt a lot more thought could have been given to creating algorithms that would detect and correct other common MIDI guitar problems.

Cakewalk have tried to cram a lot into this program, from the accompaniment Wizard to the song Jukebox feature, and because they are the first company to make a serious attempt to woo the guitarist, I guess they've decided to put in as much as possible to see what catches on. My own view is that the program is still much too complicated for guitarists who haven't worked with sequencers before, yet doesn't really offer enough guitar‑friendly features to persuade the guitarist who already uses a MIDI sequencer to change over to Guitar Studio. Still, this is a welcome a first step and hats off to Cakewalk for taking it.