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Looper's Delight
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There's a good chance that was me. That's how I made my last 3 cds. When I first listen to a show recording, I listen to it in my audio editor. At this step, I listen to the entire show, and copy everything that sounds like a song into a new file. At this step, I'm not concerned with quality or whether it's a final edit. The file names include the date (yyyy-mm-dd), venue, a letter representing the order in the set and usually a short aesthetic description of the track. (For example "2009-8-11 Joes Bar A - Spongy Drone.wav") The next step is to listen to the tracks from several shows on shuffle play over the range of about 2 months. This gives me an idea of which tracks contain album-worthy music. I'll put those tracks in a sub-folder. With me, that will be about 1/3 as many tracks as I started with. For a typical Matt cd, that's about 20 tracks. I'll continue listening to the tracks in the subfolder. This is when I start trying to get a sense of what makes a good "starting cd" song, "middle cd" song, and "ending cd" song. At some point, I'll actually open up my CD editor tool. I use Sony CD Architect, which I really like. It works almost like multitracking software, except it allows you to determine exactly when CD track markers are. I start with the track I determined to be my "Starting Track". At that point, I know where I want the edit point to be for my "Starting Track". I'll listen to the end of the starting track, and play several of the other tracks afterwards, to try to get a good fit. The edit start points for my other tracks often depend on how they flow from the previous song. When working on the cd program, that's when I do the most critical listening of the tracks I like. Several "Good" tracks take too long to develop. I often wind up editing out large chunks out of the middle of tracks to take out the areas where I find myself waiting for the next thing to happen. Fortunately with looping music, that's fairly easy. If you place the two wave forms of the same track parallel to each other, you can often see the looping points. It's fairly easy to take out a few loop cycles, and crossfade between the wav files as your edit. My "Living Things" cd has several cases where 11 minute tracks were brought down to 6 minute tracks. Once I have a rough cut, I give a few copies of the draft to people I think both understand what I'm trying to do, and will be the most honest critics. I ask them to give it a close listen, and let me know of any parts where they find themselves: A) trying to ignore an element B) waiting for the next thing to happen C) unpleasantly distracted by something that happened. I then make the final draft based on their notes. So, some thoughts on the above: --If a track's start point is actually in the middle of a fairly long transition (from the performance recording), consider using a sudden start rather than a fade-in. Sometimes the "transition out" of the previous track will sound a little like a preamble or development, when you listen to the clip outside of its original performance context. --When it comes to editing, I'm not worried about hurting my own feelings. I'm pretty merciless. Don't use ANY tracks where you find yourself trying to tune out any elements. (Such as "This sounds great if you imagine that the rhythm isn't too loud".) If you can't fix it, don't put it on the cd. --I wind up not using lots of work I'm really proud of because I could not find a way to take out the elements I didn't like. --Sometimes perfectly good tracks don't make it to CD, simply because I couldn't find a good place for them to fit with the other tracks. (And in some cases because they didn't fit with the aesthetic theme of the cd.) --Sometimes I'll use a 30 to 60 second clip from the "reject bin" to serve as a transition between two tracks. (On my "SoftWetFish" cd, that track actually got radio airplay!) --Kevin, you mentioned that on some of your tracks you feel that the "rough" areas are necessary to explain the good bits. I'd suggest taking a clip where you cut out the rough areas, and listen to that clip by itself for a while. You might find it does ok on its own. That's one thing I learned from pop music. Most pop music doesn't spend too much time setting the stage - it just jumps right in. -- Matt Davignon mattdavignon@gmail.com www.ribosomemusic.com Rigs! www.youtube.com/user/ribosomematt Kevin Cheli-Colando <billowhead@gmail.com> went: > A few days back I think, someone mentioned that they play a ton and > then go back and sort out the good stuff from all the hours of sound > to make an album (or something to that effect). I was wondering how > they managed to do that (sorry, can't remember who said that or when > exactly). > > I've got hundreds of hours of looped recordings, some an hour or more > single take. And there are some truly amazing spots in there. And > there are some VERY rough spots as well, things that embarrass me me > when I say I'm a guitarist rough. But I find, I have a really hard > time excising the 'good' bits from the flow of things because the > rough spots seem somehow necessary to explain the good bits. Or > finding when exactly to come in to the good stuff.