Track Lanes and Mixer Basics in BandLab

BandLab is an online digital audio workstation (DAW) that lets you record, edit, and mix music from your browser. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the basics of the user interface, focusing on track lanes and essential mixer controls like solo, mute, volume, and pan.

Track Lanes

Each sound in your project is placed in a track lane. These lanes represent individual instruments and musical layers of your arrangement or composition.

Each track lane includes a track header with controls to manipulate the recordings on the track lane.

Track lanes are often simply called Tracks.

Timeline

The ruler above the top track is a timeline, divided into bars and (divisions of) beats. You can show a division in Minutes and seconds by right-clicking your mouse while hovering over the timeline.

Track Header Controls

You can control each track individually using the controls on the track header.

Solo and Mute

These buttons help you control which tracks are audible during playback:

• Mute (M): Silences a specific track without deleting it.
• Solo (S): Mutes all other tracks so you can focus on one.

Volume Faders

Each track has a volume slider to adjust how loud it sounds in the mix. Use this to balance your overall sound.

Tip: Start with the most important track (e.g., vocals) and adjust others around it for a clean mix.

Pan Controls

The pan knob places a track’s sound in the stereo field:

• Left: Sound moves to the left speaker/ear.
• Right: Sound moves to the right speaker/ear.
• Centre (default): Equal in both ears/speakers.

Track Types

BandLab offers different track types.

These track types can be categorized into Audio tracks (Voice/Audio, Guitar, Bass) and MIDI tracks (Virtual instruments, Drum Machine, Sampler).

Adding Tracks

• To add a track, click “+ Add Track” and choose Audio, Instrument, or Drums.
• Each track appears in the timeline, where you can create arrange, trim, or loop your recordings. The recordings will then be displayed as regions.

Region Types

The music blocks on a track are called regions. You can create regions by dropping clips, samples, and other files (audio, MIDI, video) on a track or by recording in a track.

BandLab offers three region types: Audio Regions for Voice/Audio, Guitar, and Bass tracks, MIDI regions for Virtual instrument and Sampler tracks, and Drum Machine regions for Drum Machine tracks.

Next

Now that you know how to use track lanes and mixer basics in BandLab, start building your production by adding samples and loops to your arrangement.