Music
Editing Software and the Hidden Editor in You
Can
you find the hidden music editor within yourself? Look deep…
deep… DEEP! Nothing there? Well then, you need to discover
the wonderful world of sound editing.
Effective
music sound editing is highly dependant on how well your ears have
been trained musically. This is particularly true when editing mistakes
that have been made by instrumentalists.
Let’s
create a hypothetical situation. You are a recording engineer and
you have just recorded a classical pianist playing an entire movement
(large completer section) of a Brahms Piano Sonata. Throughout the
performance the pianist played flawlessly except for four particular
places.
There are two
clear-cut choices:
•
The performer can re-record the entire movement again.
•
You can ask the performer to play a portion of the music around
the areas where the errors took place.
If
you are dealing with a professional, they may very well want to
have another try (or two) at playing through the entire movement.
However, a note-perfect performance of a difficult piece is challenging
even for a professional. As for a semi-professional, they are most
likely going to produce mistakes in the performance of a long and
difficult work. The more times they try for the perfect play-through,
the more apt they are to make mistakes due to mental and physical
fatigue.
This
brings us to the second option. Most recording software allows you
to highlight and delete unwanted errors. Then, with a simple copy
and paste process, you can bring newer, polished playing into the
same track as a replacement for what you just deleted. The trick
is to find a place before and after the mistake area where some
silence takes place, so that you don’t hear the edit.
If
you cannot find a silent area shortly before and shortly after the
mistake, then you have to insert the new and improved sound clip
in an inconspicuous place, making sure to attempt a close match
in terms of sound levels, etc… This is a tricky endeavour,
but like any skill, it gets better with practice.
Of
course, if the performer performs the Sonata on a midi rather than
an acoustic instrument, editing becomes a breeze. Midi “mistakes”
are easy to fix. Midi notes usually appear as horizontal bars in
editing browsers. You can actually add extra notes or delete unwanted
notes with drawing and erasing tools respectively.
|