Working With Music Editing Software

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.

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