Second in Command
Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Doug Eisengrein
AFTER A DAW, A DEDICATED AUDIO-EDITING PROGRAM RANKS HIGHEST ON THE LIST OF NECESSARY SOFTWARE FOR THE COMPUTER-BASED MUSIC STUDIO. THESE FIVE MOST NEEDED TIPS, PERFORMED IN BIAS PEAK PRO 6, CHART THE COURSE FOR A SUCCESSFUL PROJECT
BIAS Peak Pro 6
Dedicated audio-editing software often gets overlooked as a high-end tool for postproduction professionals. However, the following common scenarios in which an audio editor can save the day affect musicians in bands, bedroom producers, DJs and mixers of all skill levels. We explore five individual scenarios using the new BIAS Peak 6 Pro ($599 or $129 for Peak LE 6; www.bias-inc.com) as the editor du jour. Note that while Peak is a powerful and popular editor, many dedicated audio editors share the same or at least similar tools as those demonstrated here.
First, a note about audio editing: I recently helped a client choose his gear and set up a home studio. His main DAW is Apple Logic 8 Pro, and the “knowledgeable” salesperson that sold it told him, “Nowadays, Logic can handle all the audio editing you will need.” I'm a Logic 8 user myself, and it is an amazing DAW; I've used Logic since version 3. But it does in fact lack deep audio-editing tools, and the same can be said of most of the full-featured, commercial big-gun DAWs. I firmly believe that, in addition to a main DAW, every serious studio should have a dedicated audio editor such as BIAS Peak, Sony Sound Forge, Adobe Audition or the like. Most DAWs include standard-fare audio-editing tools, yet few offer the broader range of features — or the level of fine detail — that dedicated editors do. With that said, let's turn to scenario one.
IS THIS NORMAL?
Let's say you and/or your band travels a lot for gigs. You don't own your own recording studio, or you simply choose to record in different studios around the country (or world, if you're really ambitious and lucky) to experience different studio vibes, meet different producers or work with new musicians. After a tour, you end up with a great album's worth of material, but each track is at a slightly different volume. They've been recorded at different studios, by different audio engineers and through different equipment. As you listen to them, you constantly adjust the volume on your car stereo, iPod or other monitors at the beginning of each track because some tracks were recorded or sound louder than others.
Yes, a proper mastering job will take care of that, but what if you're not yet ready for that final stage? While auditioning your masterpiece, if some songs sound punchier than others (which is nearly inevitable), they will consciously or subconsciously draw you in more, even if they aren't the best songs. You could geek out and go song by song, watching the level meters and making mathematical volume boosts or cuts, or you could use a function that is made for this exact scenario: normalize. Many DAWs include such a function, and any audio editor worth its salt will have one.
Normalization is somewhat like compression in that it uses a “threshold” of sorts, but normalization doesn't affect an audio file's dynamics. What it does do is raise the overall level of an audio file to a maximum, stopping short of clipping. The “threshold” (though normalize functions don't usually refer to it as such) is typically the audio file's current point of maximum gain. Normalization will quickly analyze an audio file, find the current max level point, and increase the gain of the entire file in relation to that point with as much headroom as is available. Some normalize commands allow you to manually adjust the amount of normalization as a percentage (zero to 100), in decibels or as in the case of Peak 6, either one (see Fig. 1). Assuming that the different engineers of your tracks know what they are doing in terms of dynamic range and gain structure, by normalizing all of your tracks with the same (or very similar) settings, you should have a decent pre-master to audition from and pass out as promo — one that sounds fairly consistent in volume from track to track. However, you should as a precaution save all of your pre-normalized tracks as separate files. Those are the ones you may want to turn in to the mastering engineer to give him or her the most headroom with which to work.
Peak Pro 6 also offers RMS normalization, which raises the overall level based on the average peaks, resulting in a more consistent level throughout the track. If you're really prolific and have a lot of material that needs normalizing, you may want to automate the process, which brings us to scenario two.
A WHOLE BUNCH
Imagine a friend just gave you a disc chock-full of killer, gritty-sounding samples, but they hail from an old hardware sampler such as the E-mu SP-1200, so the samples are in that machine's notorious resolution of 12-bit/22 kHz. Those won't jive with your DAW at your standard session sampling rate. The good news is that you don't have to open each file individually and convert them if your audio editor includes a batch processor.
With batch processing, you select specific settings for your output files, such as creating WAV, AIFF, MP4, etc., at specified bit-depths and sampling-rates, adding suffixes to the names to denote the new versions from the originals (see Fig. 2). With better editors such as Peak, you can even apply plug-ins such as compressors to the resulting files.
Depending on the software, you'll likely have the option of creating new copies or overwriting the original files (I don't recommend overwriting). In a few seconds or minutes, you can translate that entire unusable SP-1200 library into the latest building blocks for your new productions. And here's a production tip for you budding hip-hop producers: If you're looking to capture that old-school, gritty, late-'80s-to-'90s sound in the vein of Public Enemy, Pete Rock and Tribe, take your modern, pristine samples and downgrade them to 8- or 12-bit with a low sampling rate and then batch-process them back up to your everyday working settings. This simple trick, used by none other than Pete Rock himself, might get you a whole lot closer.
STOP THE POP
You're a DJ with a killer collection of vinyl classics that you can't live without. But you're finished with breaking your back carting crates of records from gig to gig. Your problem stems from recording vinyl to digital and all the pops and crackles that go with it. Every time you play an oldie back-to-back with a newer, purely digital track, the pops, well…pop out in the mix. They don't sound so great over a 20,000W system.
If you've got a dedicated audio editor, most likely there is a good — if not excellent — click or pop filter in there. Just like most tasks in your editor, you can select either a particular section to apply the filter to a single pop or run the entire file through the filter to remove all of the problematic “dirt.” The even nicer thing is that you may be able to apply the pop filter from within the batch processor, thus cleaning up entire swaths of your cherished digitized vinyl. Some pop filters definitely do a better job than others, and some have more controls than others. You just have to experiment with yours to find the right balance of click-removal versus unnecessary overall quality degradation. Thus, unless you have a whole mess of files to process or a particular track is really scratchy, I recommend applying pop filters to isolated areas to preserve the overall fidelity of the rest of the track. Peak Pro 6 also includes the noise-removal app SoundSoap LE.
BRING ON THE MICROSCOPE
You've got a final mix that sounds great, but just one or two tiny yet pesky pops remain, and no matter how hard you try with your DAW to remove them, you can still hear some artifacts.
You may have done as directed above and applied a pop filter to a specific pop. In some cases, either the filter will not fully work or you've simply decided to select the pop and delete it entirely, figuring the segment is too small to be noticed. Regardless, it's fairly common for you still to hear a small click, light thud or some other noticeable artifact. In such a situation, some detailed microsurgery is in order.
First, zoom all the way in on the waveform, or if that is too close, back out just a notch at a time until you see the entire pop onscreen, while still being able to see the individual curves in the waveform. Next, find the nearest zero-point to the left of the pop and drag your selection cursor to the nearest right zero-point directly after the pop. (A zero-point is where the wave crosses the center bar; at that exact point there is silence.) Delete that selection. Now, locate where those two zero-points meet, and once again select the area just to the left so that it extends over one or two wave cycles. Apply a standard fade-in on that selection. Then do the opposite to the area just to the right of the zero-point; using the same guidelines, perform a fade-out. The idea here is that you want the tiniest fade-out and fade-in to live back-to-back in order to erase any pops or artifacts, but it should be so small as to be inaudible during track playback (see Fig. 3). For this operation to be successful, you may need to undo your fades a few times and re-select the areas and repeat to get it just right. Each time, however, you will sharpen your skills for the next time.
VANISHING ACT
If you're like me, you like to use the stereo field to separate elements in space and give your songs some animation. Have you ever had such a mix sound great in your studio, only to have some of the panned elements practically vanish when played on other systems? Some mixers and audio interfaces have a built-in mono switch. If yours doesn't, then make it a habit to convert a copy of the final mix to mono and listen to it carefully before sending it off to a label, mastering house or demo pressing.
In Peak 6, this command sits in the DSP menu (see Fig. 4). (Note that there is a Mono to Stereo command, as well.) Examining your tracks in mono is a good way to ensure that even the most minor left- or right-panned elements actually still show up in the mix the way you want them to. Likewise, it is a sure way to tell whether a major element that lives in the center, such as a vocal track, is too soft or too loud in the mix.
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