in this cakewalk tutorial I'm looking at creating beats and loops with the Cakewalk step sequencer I'm Zane welcome to Simple Green Tech where I do weekly audio tech tips tutorials and reviews to help you conquer the tech and unleash your creativity now let's jump into Cakewalk now what I recommend getting is a sampler plugin for this you could use the drumkit plugin that's included but it's a little limiting to the sounds that you can create but a sampler or drum plugin that will allow you to load drum sounds that you have or sliced up loops that you have so for this I'm going to use Sitala as it's a free VST plug-in and it's very easy to use I've linked to it in the description just in case you want to grab it for yourself now I'll also link to my video showing you how to add plugins to cakewalk just in case you need that so now let's go over here we're going to click on instruments and then I'm just going to type in sitala and then click and drag it over into this area here and you might have something pop up with a couple of options the default options should be fine just click OK now if you want to see the instrument you just click this little icon here and it brings up the sitala instrument so sitala comes with an 808 kit and that's what I'm going to use for this but of course you can drag and drop your own samples onto each of these pads and create your own kits within this and now that we have our sampler ready we just want to right-click in this area here go to view and click on step sequencer and by default the step sequencer loads 12 rows so if you need more you can click this plus sign here and you can see it's added another row and you can drag these around however you like and one of the things I recommend doing right off the bat is increasing it from four beats to eight and you can even go to sixteen beats if you want or however many you want but I recommend doing at least eight that way can have some variety in the loops or beats that you create you can see down here that's our bass drum and that's our snare and then of course we have all our other drums and cymbals in here and if you need to change these up just click here and you can go down or up however you need to now I'm just going to draw in a quick drum beat and to do that you just click to add whatever drum you want and if you want to remove a note you would just right click on it and that removes it alright let's listen to how this sounds alright so that's the very basics of the step sequencer now if we want to adjust the velocity say we want to adjust the velocity of our snare hits we would just click on this triangle here and then let's scroll down and you can see velocity set here and you can just click wherever you want on this line and you can see it adjusts the velocity and this can be a great way to give a more human feel so that not all of your notes are played the same now say you wanted to quickly add in some notes let's say I wanted to add in hi-hat hits every second note so I want to click here and then right click and now go down to fill every and I'm gonna go to fill every two notes and this can save you a bit of time if you know you're going to have notes every second beat every fourth B it's something like that and of course you can always take out notes that you don't want in later now what if you want to use the sequencer for something other than drums and you want the note to last longer than one little beat what you can do is you would just put in however many beats you want the length of the note to be and then you hold down control on your computer keyboard click and drag right across and now this is one note so if you had like a bassline here it would hold that note for that long and of course you can add more in and if you want to remove some of this you would just hold down ctrl and right click and now if we go up here and we go to view piano roll you'll also see your notes in the piano roll so you can make edits in there if you want to but the step sequencer is really nice and easy for creating beats and loops in now if you want to check out 19 free drum plugins click up here or click down here to see what YouTube thinks you should watch next if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more videos from me thank you so much for watching for simple green tech I'm Zane keep creating and we'll talk soon