- Comping
- Stripping any "silence"
- Gaining up/down certain parts for "manual compression" (so to speak)
- Crossfades & tiny fades in/out (for the comping and stripping parts)
- Tuning (Melodyne)
- Nudging words/syllables into time
- Using vocalign to get the double-tracked vocals to match up in time
For comping, you're just taking all the different bits from multiple takes and putting them onto one track, copy and paste.
Stripping any silence - Just cut out any parts where there's no vocal/instrument being sung/played, just to be sure there's no unnecessary noise in the background of your mix.
Gaining up/down - That's dependant on your DAW. In Pro Tools, I just select the area I want to gain, then use the Audiosuite menu>gain plug in and it renders that part.
Tuning - Depends on the program you're using (Autotune/waves/melodyne), in which case, RTFM
Crossfades/fades in and out - Dependant on your DAW. When you're comping, and putting parts together, they won't always fit together. You could have ended one take while the waveform is sharply spiked upwards (telling your speaker to move out relatively), and then started the next take straight away with the waveform sharply spiked downwards (telling your speaker to move in relatively). Now, in a standard, straight forward signal, the waveform should be flowing between up & down (in and out)
continuously like so:
If it's not doing that, and looks more like this:
...you're going to get some nasty clicks and pops. The speaker's not moving naturally, and has to jump awkwardly between compression and rarefraction (in/out).
Jesus, I go off one tangents
So, yeah, crossfading (of just a few ms) provides a smoother transition between the two. Sometimes you'll have to adjust the boundaries and do different crossfades 'til it sounds natural, but they're awesome.
(The same rules apply for simple fade ins and fade outs of just a few milliseconds, when you have no audio before or after the take).
Nudging: Depends on your daw, but I'm sure you could probably just cut up the take into little parts and drag them to different places and manually make everything sit perfectly in time.
Vocalign does a similar thing, in that:
A) It does it semi-automatically, and...
B) You have to have a "master" vocal for all your double-tracks or whatever to line up with.
I haven't had much experience with other DAWs, and I've tried but they seemed like a pain in the ass, but Pro Tools is amazing for editing, and it's widely said that it's the best DAW when it comes to editing.
When it comes to everything else, I'm sure it's further down in the list
