Final Project
For my final project I chose to create four songs that contain a variety of different editing tricks and methods I have learned over the semester. The goal of the album was to start off with the most simple edits and slowly build up by re-using those editing styles and adding new styles to the next song.
The End by Blue October was the first song I chose to edit for the project as it was the song that contained the least amount of editing and was a nice introduction point to build upon. For this song I simply made some minor changes to the bass levels and treble as well, as well as tried to clean up some of the background static. The main edit of this song and the main thing I tried to include in the song was the three gunshot sounds that occur in the song to try and add to the story that was being told.
Creeping In My Soul by Cryoshell was the next song I edited for the project. In this song I attempted to edit this song by simply using the song itself and no outside sound files. The first thing I did to this song was to increase the speed by about twenty two or twenty three percent. Then to counteract the pitch change I dropped the pitch by about twenty percent. Once I had a working base track I then cloned the track and removed the vocal track from the clone. From there I had a mostly music only track that I used to edit the volumes of the piano portion and the bass/treble volumes. Finally I went back and tried to remove some of the excess static and normalize the volume levels.
Tanz Mit Mir by Faun was the third track I chose to use for the project. Tanz Mit Mir was a good song that built into the final song from an editing standpoint and it allowed me to fit all four elements into a 10 minute segment. The first thing I did to this song was the same as the previous track where I increased the speed and decreased the pitch to normalize the sound, then I cloned the track and created a track that had the vocals removed. Once I had the second track I began to really edit the sound levels and using a normalizer and noise remove I was able to take specific instruments, namely snare drum, tambourine, and what I think is bongos, and make those background instruments able to be easily heard throughout the song.
We Are Murderers by Xandria is the final song for this project. For this song I went ahead and started by creating a music only clone track that I could use to edit the volume levels of a few portions in the song. These edits were mostly evening out sound levels and removing drops in the song. Once I had a working base where the original track was normalized, and bass/treble boosted, I then began to add in the additional effects. The first thing I added was a ticking clock around the one minute marker that led into two bell strikes. I added these two elements because the song talks about how we as a species are killing both the planet and ourselves, so I wanted to add the sounds in to be like a doomsday clock ticking. I then added the bell chimes in again later on in the song but I did not add the clock ticks back in because I noticed my brain was actually subconsciously already putting them in for me because of the initial point in the song. So I left it that way because I thought it was interesting to see and wanted to display that instead.
