I wanted to take some time to talk about a piece of work that I did as part of my Audio Production course. One of the first tasks to complete was a radio edit for a country rock track. Even though it's a genre I'm familiar with, Pro Tools is something that I was definitely not familiar with before starting the course. Getting used to the functionality and learning all of the keybinds took a long time for me. The tasks for the edit were to fix any sound issues (micro edit) and then cut the song down to between 3 and 3.5 minutes (macro edit). The macro edits were definitely the easiest for me because my prior knowledge of the genre allowed me to maintain the flow of the song and keep all the sections that I knew to be integral to the genre such as the guitar solo or the breakdown chorus at the end.
The main challenge for me came with the micro edits. The more basic ones such as fixing the organ part were fairly simple. This was because of how little content the organ track had. There was lots of space between the parts so cutting and moving sections around was very easy. The vocal track was pretty simple as well. The trick I found was to keep a chunk of silence on the clipboard to paste in over the breath noises and bleed and then use appropriate fades to help the vocal sound more crisp. The hardest part was fixing the drums. Every now and again, one of the sound issues was fairly easy to copy and paste over and fix but a lot of them were very hard to get a clean transition on the fade. This was especially abundant in the "Effects" track which had everything playing in it at once. In addition, every edit of the drums would move them partially out of time if you weren't careful or if you made the same mistake that I did; not using groups. I only found out after submitting that a drum group would help keep drums in time when editing. Mind you, I still got a good grade on my submission but there were some very important lessons to learn going into my next piece of work - a creative mix on a jazz piece.
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