Topic: Sound Studio Editing

[moonchilddave]

I do quite a bit of recording of folk music concerts (Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, etc), and I've gotten some really great shows.  However, I'm a newbie when it comes to anything other than track marking and normalization.  I notice 2 main problems with my shows... 1) clapping at end of songs is loud - although I've seen that the way to fix that would be to use "fade special" in Sound Studio (my app of choice on OS X).  The other problem is these folks are great storytellers - so I get very soft spoken word inbetween the songs.  What is the best way to bring up the level in these sections without it being too noticeable?

I'd also love to hear from any other "experts" in Sound Studio with any other tips for turning out a really nice sounding recording.  My usual process is simply do a normalize, and then mark tracks and save. 

Thanks!

[Will_S]

I do quite a bit of recording of folk music concerts (Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, etc), and I've gotten some really great shows.  However, I'm a newbie when it comes to anything other than track marking and normalization.  I notice 2 main problems with my shows... 1) clapping at end of songs is loud - although I've seen that the way to fix that would be to use "fade special" in Sound Studio (my app of choice on OS X). 

Actually, I think you should play around with the Dynamics Compressor filter as well - applying it only to sections that are loud applause.  Try setting the Threshold (peak) to something a bit louder than the loudest music, and Post Gain (Manual) to 0.0.

The other problem is these folks are great storytellers - so I get very soft spoken word inbetween the songs.  What is the best way to bring up the level in these sections without it being too noticeable?

This is where I really like the fade special command.  First, select the whole spoken word passage (and if possible, a bit of dead air to each side) and apply the Amplify/Volume Filter to the whole selection.  Try 6 dB to start, but you may want more or less.  Pay attention to the dB value and also the percent increase that this corresponds to.  Then, to the whole selection, apply the fade special command, with most of the graph set to 100% but fading the very start and ends to 50% (if you added 6 dB) or whatever will multipluy together with the amplification you applied to yield 100% in the end (eg 200% amplification - 50% on the ends of the fades, 300% amplification - 33%).