PG Music Home Forums User-to-User Post your own Tips and Tricks here Fade in and out for spoken word

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I am producing some spoken-word CDs to go with a series of seminars. I need to start with music up, then fade the music for the narrator, then bring the music back up at the end.

I do this in Real Band. Any DAW would work.

I tried going to mixer view and fading the music down then up in real time. Then I tried the "Record Mixer Moves" function in RB. I have to use my mouse to do the fades. Both ways came out rougher than I would have liked.

Then I tried copying the music to two duplicate tracks. One instance is at full volume and the other 12 dB lower to serve as music-under while the narrator is talking.

On the full-volume track, I use "EDIT>EFFECTS>Gain change" to create the fade-out and fade-back-in on the full volume track. Erase the audio between fades. The lower-volume track is going the whole time. Paste in the narration on a separate track at about 00:09.

Came out very smooth. I get a nice degree of editability and do-over if I need it. The process is easily reproduced for the next project in the series.

Let me know if y'all decide to try this.

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Sounds good. If you use other DAW software, look up the term, "ducking" to see if it has a built-in function.

When I recorded voice-overs for commercials for a local radio station, they had this on automatically. Very cool.

For a year, I volunteered to help my wife's 'Community Bible Study' group edit down two full 1 hour talks to fit on a single 74 minute CD as two audio tracks. I made roughly 20 of these CDs for those folks and we had a CD duping machine to make the copies.

I used Tracktion for this and it's one area where it's editing feature simply runs circles around the method you describe. In Tracktion, each audio 'clip' has graphic fader handles on each end of the clip. Pregnant pauses, repeated statements, etc. can be quickly snipped out of the audio with the '/' button (looks like an old-school razor blade actually, for you old tape-experienced folks). Slighly overlapping clips automatically brings up a cross-fade dialog, etc. There's no menu picks, nothing - it's all graphically driven.

Ducking, or side-chain compression as it's also known, works well if you are o.k. with the pauses in between the spoken word. In my role, I was primarily a content editor - again, taking a good 15 - 20 minutes out of a 60 minute recording, bit by bit. I was given that authority and pretty soon if you have to do that a lot, you realize that doing this process where there might be 60+ edits in a single recording, you don't want to mess around with menus.

I also produced a series of pre-recorded 15 minute radio shows for a pastor in Flint, MI, where we had bumper music (mine!) on the front 30s and tail 30s end of the show. The pastor's brother Craig calls local HS sports on Flint radio and has that 'radio announcer voice': big, deep, smooth, etc.

I started down the road with trying to set up ducking for the bumper music, but since it was a fixed 15 minute time period every week - with Craig coming in to announce the show and send off the show at the end with the same track each week, there was no need to have the music in the middle 14 minutes of the show, nor duck the music with his vox. I used graphic fades on the bumper music and in the end, the pastor learned how to use Tracktion to record his 14 minutes in the middle each week in a template project.

The benefit of using graphic fading, as to destructive gain changes, is that you can always change it without losing quality of the audio. You CAN do this in PG products now - volume envelope editing. Destructive gain change is one way to do it, but file size is now cheap - keep the file the way that it is and just do graphic gain changes vs. permanent destructive gain changes.

Try it that way and see what you think. rharv can point you the way specifically. I don't have the latest version of PTPA to tell you the way this is done.

-Scott

Envelope control is in the Piano Roll window. Set the controller to 7 (Volume) and draw in the envelopes you want on the piano roll.

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A-Ha! THAT's what I was looking for! Thanks RHarv. This is entirely non-destructive, no?

http://www.wordjazz.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=9

My band played for backgrounds for Ken Nordine, back in the "beat" mid-fifties...
in Chi-Town, of course...

Once your hooked on Ken's talent...then perhaps you'll dig what he REALLY has to say...

Can you dig it??? Of course you can, and enjoy!!

Yep, non-destructive .. you are simply invoking a control change 7 to lower the volume in the software.
Not a single bit is harmed in this procedure.

>>>...Envelope control is in the Piano Roll window. Set the controller to 7 (Volume) and draw in the envelopes you want on the piano roll. ...>>

I have been playing with these parameters a lot, with great results. Thanks again!