Digital Audio Editing

Whether you're comping a vocal track, restoring an old recording, working with dialogue or sound effects for film, or imposing your own vision with mash-ups or remixes, audio editing is a key skill to successful sound production. Digital Audio Editing gives you the techniques, from the simplest corrective editing like cutting, copying, and pasting to more complex creative editing, such as beat mapping and time-stretching. You'll be able to avoid unnatural-sounding pitch correction and understand the potential pitfalls you face when restoring classic tracks. Author Simon Langford invites you to see editing with his wide-angle view, putting this skill into a broad context that will inform your choices even as you more skillfully manipulate sound. Focusing on techniques applicable to any digital audio workstation, it includes break-outs giving specific keystrokes and instruction in Avid's Pro Tools, Apple's Logic Pro, Steinberg's Cubase, and PreSonus's Studio One. The companion websites includes tutorials in all four software packages to help you immediately apply the broad skills from the book.

Simon Langford is a professional music producer and remixer, with close to ten years of experience. He has worked on over 300 remixes, and has had tracks of his own in the UK National Top 20 Single Chart and the US Billboard Dance Chart. Simon is a regular contributor to Sound On Sound magazine and the author of The Remix Manual (Focal Press).

1. Audio Editing 101 2. The Different Aims of Audio Editing Section 1: Corrective Editing 3. Cutting, Copying, Pasting, and Moving 4. Fades and Crossfades 5. Level Control 6. Tonal Matching 7. Comping and Alternate Takes 8. Multi-track Comping 9. Transient Detection Section 2: Creative Editing 10. Beat-mapping and "Recycling" 11. Drum Replacement 12. Time-stretching 13. Elastic Audio (Time) 14. Pitch Shifting Section 3: Restorative Editing 15. Editing in the Third Dimension 16. Spectral Editing 17. Applications of Audio Restoration 18. Demixing 19. Thinking Outside the Box