Audio Editing in the Creative Process

When we as musicians think of editing, we immediately think of video editing and movies. Editing is an incredibly common thing in the life of a production. So much, that us engineers are extremely familiar with it. It’s our life - editing away every take to create the best performance possible. Listening to every nuance recorded to take out any noise or wrong played note. It’s also safe to say, it’s one of the most not thought of aspects in audio production. This is what makes your music stand out. This is what makes your music correct, in time, and will bring your music from good to great before even touching a single fader. As I like to put it, a well edited song will remove any of the eye squinting we get when we hear a mistake in our recorded music. Often times, musicians will say it can be fixed in the mix. This, is where you fix these problems.

WHAT IS AUDIO EDITING?

Audio editing is the process of manipulating sounds to edit, shorten, shift, and correct pieces of music or spoken audio to make it optimal for the audience to hear. With the process of recording mostly in the digital realm, we use our DAWs to help piece the music in a musical and pleasant way.

Normally, whoever is editing the audio will be given the files and import them in to the DAW of choice. For me, I personally like Pro Tools and Logic Pro. We have access to the takes and individual tracks of the song to create the final arrangement and ‘golden takes’.

Audio editing includes a wide variety of variables to take note to create something that is pleasant to the listeners. Some of these include:

• Removing breaths

• Cleaning up noise and imperfections

• Copy and paste parts to make the song more cohesive

• Stretch and shorten audio to adjust to the correct length of the section

• Adjust the timing of notes for more extreme circumstances

• Splice together multiple takes or parts

• Sync up elements so they all sound on time with the beat

• Loop, splice, and edit beats

WHAT DO I REQUIRE TO START WORKING ON YOUR SONG?

• Create files for all individual tracks in your project: This is sometimes referred to as ‘creating stems’. You should create these tracks to all have the same start time and ending. When importing these tracks into the DAW, they should all line up correctly so to not have to hunt down an arrangement.

• Render a rough mix: Level out the song to the best of your ability so I can have a rough idea of what the song is supposed to sound like. Attach this along with your tracks.

• Organize: Organize and name the tracks accordingly. Make sure you name the tracks correctly. I.E. ‘Kick In, Kick Out, Snare Top, Snare Bottom, Guitar Lead Left, Main Vocal, Backup Vocal Left, Effect Riser Mono’

• Project or Tracks: You can choose to send me the entire project or a folder with the tracks and takes you want edited. Be sure to take in consideration to send all aspects of the session (cache files, audio folders, settings, etc.).

• Tempo: Send over a tempo map, or a detailed description of any tempo changes and signatures.

• Compress or Zip: Zip the files for Windows, and compress the tracks for mac and place them in a folder with the name of the song and the name of your project.

• Notes: Please send any notes of ideas you’d like in the song. i.e. Do you want the song to start at 1:24 or do you want a quiet ending? Songs without notes will be edited as my ears hear it and any changes will count as a revision.

• When you’re ready to take your production to the next level, contact me here and let’s start working.