Editing out a verse

[cephus]

Or solo or whatever.

Say I have a song that's too long and I'd like to make a jingle-length demo of it. I want to keep the intro and the ending, but I can whack a verse to get it shorter. Does anyone have any tips for cleanly editing out a chunk of time from the middle.

I know in wave view, you can highlight a section by sweeping with the mouse and cutting it out. But that may take a bunch of attempts to get it right.

Any tips would be appreciated.

 

[lpdeluxe]

The key to a good edit is finding a beginning and ending point. You want these points to have two attributes: they should come where there's a nice loud transient to hide your edit, and they should be made at zero crossing points to avoid clicks. It's not something where you can just casually highlight an area, cut it out, and smush the stub ends together. It takes a bit of meticulousness. You must also be careful to preserve the tempo of the song: don't whack off a piece in between beats!

I added a vocal chorus after an instrumental solo in a song in Multitrack View: it involved carefully marking each point in each track, (probably about 9 right then, since we overdubbed some more tracks later) and pasting in a chorus copied from later in the song from each track in Edit View. It took about a day to get it right, but I would defy anyone without prior knowledge to identify what I did or where I did it.

Although doing this kind of editing in Multitrack View takes longer, the results are much superior to just whacking out a piece of a song already mixed down to stereo.

BTW, this is where the elapsed time bar below the tracks is very handy: you can get your edits exact to the thousandth of a second.

 

[cephus]

There is a point where there is a guitar riff before the verse that would let it happen naturally. I was kind of thinking the best thing would be to make a copy of the end of the track (the edit part) and put that on say, track 2. Then it would be easier to move it to the right position and fade out track one at the edit point.

I just was wondering if there was something akin to smacking the space bar in rhythm where I want the cut and CEP making a flag at the right spot for me. Then I could paste in the end part at the flag.

I guess it is a trila dn error thing, though.

Thanks, LP.