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Filed under: Audio •

Mangling Music Masterfully

If you are fortunate enough to have music custom-composed for all of your visual work, this article is not for you. However, if you are regularly handed music you have to make work underneath your visuals, and that music is not exactly the length you need, read on. We’ll discuss how to find the best places to slice it, whether you are trying to reduce its length or need to repeat a section to make it longer. We’ll then show how to cover your edit points and introduce variations. This will help you create your own custom version of the track, better suited to your needs. Click here to download source and project files you can use to follow along.

Slave to the Rhythm

Most music has a central timing pulse known as its tempo or rhythm. The elementary division of this pulse is called a beat. When you’re dancing, or just tapping your fingers or toes along to a piece of music, you’re usually following these beats. Music is then structured around simple phrases of these beats, known as bars or measures. A large amount of music has four beats in a measure, although there are exceptions - for example, a waltz has three beats to a measure. The first beat in each measure - the one that you instinctively want to tap loudest on, and which often marks the beginning of a repeat of a rhythmic pattern - is referred to as the downbeat.

A basic approach to editing music is spotting the downbeats and marking them as potential edit points. Listen to the music and practice tapping along until you are confident you have a feel for its pulse. Counting out loud - ONE two three four - often helps reinforce this, including identifying the downbeats. Then place markers on these downbeats in your editing or compositing software. Most software has a special key, such as an asterisk or the letter M, which allows you to do this in real time while previewing the music track.

Chances are you will place these markers slightly late, for reasons ranging from your reaction time to delays in the software recognizing your taps to even the time it takes for sound to travel from the speakers to your ears. Zoom in on the audio waveform, and slide these markers in time to align with the nearest spike in the waveform display, which indicates where a drum hit or note landed.

Elementary music editing consists of removing or repeating a number of whole measures in the music to achieve the desired final length. However, working this way can be akin to editing dialog by cutting out phrases or sentences without listening to how the entire paragraph flows: The result can sound disjointed. It’s better to edit both dialog and music around entire thoughts, so it will sound more fluid and natural.

Musical Language

Music rarely carries on in a continuous, featureless groove. There are places where the musical key - its foundation note or pitch - changes. Also, there are places where individual instruments join in or leave, such as guitar solos or a sung verse or chorus. On a wider level, it is often possible to identify whole sections, such as an intro, middle, and end. A surprising amount of stock music has a clear A/B/A structure, where the intro and end have one energy level (such as brisk and upbeat) while the middle has a different level (such as quiet and thoughtful).

Go back and play your music track again, this time listening for sections such as when the key changes, a crash cymbal marks a particular downbeat, or the energy level suddenly rises or drops. Mark just these section breaks, adding short descriptions to your markers such as “S1” for section 1 or “quiet” for when the energy drops.

A good way to spot music is to identify changes in the music itself, and to make your edits around entire sections. These sections will start on downbeats; there just won’t be as many to keep track of.

If you want a music track to practice with, we’ve included in the download mentioned in the intro a track called Brutal Drums from the VideoHelper stock music library which you might have heard under some CNN promos back in late 2001 (when this article was originally written). As it so happens, the slamming drum hits that punctuate this piece don’t neatly count out “one two three four” - making it hard for a non-musician to tap along with. However, it’s very easy to spot the dramatic section changes in the track overall. (The online files contain After Effects and Final Cut Pro projects with spotted versions of this track.)

Now when it comes time to slice pieces out or repeat them to change the duration of the soundtrack, try to find entire sections or groups of sections that match the change in duration you’re looking for. If you can edit in terms of entire sections, your splices have a much better chance of sounding natural and not drawing attention to themselves.

If working in entire sections gets you close but not quite there, then you may have to resort to cutting or repeating a measure or two. Try making these additional edits closer to the ends of sections than their beginnings; you don’t want to cut out the bits that clued you into a section change in the first place. If you need to lose only a small amount of time, you can try fading the ending out faster. (Tips for extending a piece are discussed later.)

sidebar: Sound Library Sources

In addition to the VideoHelper Noise Generator library mentioned, there are numerous stock sound CDs and web sites where you can purchase sound effects, ambiences and musical drones. For a great selection of CD libraries, try a search at Sound Ideas - we use the Sound Ideas and BBC libraries they offer. To purchase and download individual sounds, check out SoundDogs or the Sound Effects Library. We’re also thrilled that Smartsound’s Sonicfire Pro also now so tightly integrates sounds effects with its soundtrack creation tools.

next page: where to place edits, and how to crossfade them

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