All of what you are talking about doing can be done by selecting a section and processing only that.

I do suggest however that multiple takes, and saving them without processing and then making careful notes about what you did to each segment are a great help with your finished product.

Most of my experience in that type of project came with making training videos with DVD's where we would do questions and and later answers, narratives, and commentary. All of it had to sound seamless, although sometimes it took 8 or 10 takes to get the right answer from someone when a pro asking the question needed only one take.

As to volume levels and the final cut it was always cut and pasted into one track after processing, the whole thing was balanced using headphones, monitors, and finally a test cut on DVD on the actual tv set to ensure everything was right. Very specific notes, workflow, incrementally saved work, and careful attention to detail ensured the final product was spot on.

Others might want to extol the use of normalizing a track at the end. I now appreciate that process more than ever, now that most of my upper end hearing has vaporized. I listened to a CD the other day in my car and I couldn't hear the soft parts at all, but the loud parts were too loud. (I have to turn off the hearing aids in the car, it's cold here and the fan noise is in the frequency I need boosted and it's terribly loud, so I can't hear much with them turned on.)


You might want to try using Audacity and singing and playing multiple tracks into it. Then mess with fade in, fade out, and see how it works, then boost volumes, try compression, eq etc. If you make the thing fun and short it's a great learning tool. I don't see how it would hurt processing times, the only time a track is processed is if you highlight a section and apply an effect to it, or if you render the final result. Another thing you can try is to take your short row row row the boat, and copy it, past to another track and shift it just a bit thickening your voice. Panning left and right.

I think Mac has some stuff on a website he can point you to, the whole 'sound' engineering thing is sort of a very technical thing to some, to others a 'black art', and there are many opinions on how to do almost any part of the process. It's probably like learning Russian. It's easy to say basic stuff, buy you can't read Dostoevsky without years of learning!

John Conley
Musica est vita