Guitar Editing Help!

[bouka01]

I'm in the middle of recording a metal band and we are using a pretty heavy guitar tone. All rhythm is recorded but i'm having trouble with it after editing it.

I have had to cut alot of guitar to make the stops sharper (e.g. breakdowns) with heavy muting and stops. But when I cut the fronts and tails off the audio, cubase plays it back with a sort of soft popping sound everytime each audio clips begins and ends. Its never just the clean audio thats supposed to be there. Any idea what i'm doing wrong? I cant seem to figure out how to make this go away. I'm hoping its just my computer/monitors/headphones and when the final product is mastered it wont have this annoying sound.

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks

 

[legionserial]

If you add a very short fade to the beginning and the end of the audio events, it should help get rid of the pop.

 

[Wireneck]

Has the guitar been quantized to make sure it is dead on with the bass drum or click? The popping is happening more than likely because you are gating the audio where the guitar might have played earlier than your point of reference you are using to cut. What you end up with is the audio starting right in the middle of a transient and it causes the pops and glitches you are hearing. Small fade ins and fade outs will definitely help. Honestly though, most guys in those breakdown genres are just taking one or two good chugs and building the entire breakdown from cutting and pasting. Another trick I have seen put to semi good use is using a gate sidechained off the bass drum to duck the guitars. Though your mileage may vary.

 

[bouka01]

thanks guys! i will definitely give those a shot. i never thought about lining up the audio with the grid, but that might do the trick. it was really confusing me as some of them dont make this sound... whereas others do. if worse comes to worse i will do the copy and paste trick and try and only use the good ones. i'm pretty sure i tried the fade in/out trick to no avail before.

this popping sound also seems to occur sometimes when i cut two guitar audio events together. right at the join, when solo'd you can always hear this pop

might just be a cubase thing.

 

[TelePaul]

thanks guys! i will definitely give those a shot. i never thought about lining up the audio with the grid, but that might do the trick. it was really confusing me as some of them dont make this sound... whereas others do. if worse comes to worse i will do the copy and paste trick and try and only use the good ones. i'm pretty sure i tried the fade in/out trick to no avail before.

this popping sound also seems to occur sometimes when i cut two guitar audio events together. right at the join, when solo'd you can always hear this pop

might just be a cubase thing.

A couple of things:

It sounds like you're just describing the difficulty associated with getting a clean break in your audio. Audio is actually quite hard to edit, it's not like midi, it's difficult to chop it up into manageable portions without judicious fading and eye-balling each track. If you think about it, a guitar note doesn't surge from nowhere - there's the sound of your room, the noise floor from your amp, 60 cycle hum if you're using a single coil...whereas a Cubase track with no audio files loaded is entirely silent, so there'll obviously be a slight discrepancy preceeding the attack of a note. But if you can only hear it when a track is solo'd, use a cross-fade and move on.

Furthermore, if you can hear it in the mix, you'll hear it -possibly in even more detail - in the master. Mastering wont magically get rid of it.

 

[ggunn]

thanks guys! i will definitely give those a shot. i never thought about lining up the audio with the grid, but that might do the trick. it was really confusing me as some of them dont make this sound... whereas others do. if worse comes to worse i will do the copy and paste trick and try and only use the good ones. i'm pretty sure i tried the fade in/out trick to no avail before.

this popping sound also seems to occur sometimes when i cut two guitar audio events together. right at the join, when solo'd you can always hear this pop

might just be a cubase thing.

In addition to what the other guys have told you, zoom way in on your edit points and make sure you are making your edits at zero crossing points in the waveform. Short fades is one way to fix this. Play around with tiny crossfades, too, where you join tracks.

The reason you are hearing the edits sometimes and sometimes not is the luck of the draw; the farther off zero the waveform happens to be when you make your cut the louder the click will be.

It's not a Cubase thing, per se. You'll see this type of thing in any digital editing program, although some will have a setting where you can tell it move your edit to the closest zero crossing point automatically. I use ProTools, and one thing it has is a pencil tool you can use when you are zoomed way in to bridge across those clicks when you can't get rid of them any other way. I'd be surprised if Cubase doesn't have a similar tool.

 

[bouka01]

Thanks for all the help. I haven't found an equivalent to the pencil tool but i'm sure Cubase probably has it. Time to consult the manual I think.

I was able to fix the problem by applying tiny fades and the beginnings and ends of the audio events that were making this noise. The songs are sounding great now. I found it hard to listen to the tracks because of this glitch but now that its fixed its all sounding so great. Thanks for all your input!