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Editing: Noise Gate

Noise gate versus editing now there are two main places that people put noise gates and that's before the guitar signal and after the guitar has been put through distortion so either on the d I a or on the distortion the worst place for in my opinion for a professional recording is to ever well one really you use a d I a lot or put it on the use a gate a lot or put it before the distortion because like I was saying before you got these little guys who are your attack see it's something there it's a very small but it's there and without it it just sounds like it's cutting in you can hear both sounds if you're if you pick up on that stuff so every time there's a break and there's a phrase a new a new guitar phrase you want to hear that picks out okay I'm just getting rid of some of the and it's just so I can you strip silence easier, which is built into pro tools it's like a noise gate but it edits instead for you, which I think is awesome save make sure you save all the time we'll turn ...

off alaska audio hopefully there are no errors we're committing the tracks right now so the tracks are rendering in place elastic audio or flex and logic will time stretch your audio in real time so now what I'm doing is I'm turning it off and it's rendering all the changes I made there we go and also uses cp uh a lot of cpu, so if you're on a laptop or something like that, you'll you want to turn it off if you can okay, so, uh under edit and pro tools it's strip silence and this is going to edit the guitars for you I'm just gonna do one track. I usually just try to do one track at a time because sometimes the guitars are off feet from each other and and I like that so I want to I want to keep it sounding little natural so these air some settings that anyone can use on strip silence actually just gonna focus on the first part. Ok? So see here the white box is uh to the to the right here is what's going to stay to the left? Is what's going to disappear? So I'm zooming in a lot and I see that some of the guitar is being cut off. Actually, so has this cool feature where you could expand the very beginning of it, so all these should be in in the box is there is another one see? Cool, cool okay and then the other thing is the end do we want that to sustain there's a little tail do we do we want a little bit not too much so that might be a good setting to have it all let's keep it on this strip it it's semi colon to go to the next track below and pro tools speaking which andrew uh corey brunner min in the chat room says he's dying watching you not use all those great mac pro tools shortcuts yeah I usually use usually have a numeric keypad over here on the right has a lot of the the short cuts in it and it usually on a pc so okay, cool. What does this sound like? Pretty cool. I want a dead stop there at the end so that that by hand just deleted that put a little faith. Okay here's the next section this part is kind of tricky for anything because we have so many quick stops and this I recorded the specifically because this is where I think most people ruined their guitar tracks because they cut out the silence between every single part in the wrong kind of a way. Now this varies part by part so let's see books then the end pad a little bit let's just see what this sounds like just like this because it's right here and it's quick ah okay it's not too bad, but um I actually need to hear it in headphones because there's there's a there's a good example of a moderate environment when it matters in this room it's kind of river be so a lot of these cuts sound ok to me, but they might be cutting off really abruptly and I can't even tell because of all the reverb in here, so this would be a good time t's headphones ah ea mai ah, I'm hearing something weird, you know, I was going crazy. It sounds like one of the guitars is a lot louder in the mix on one side than the other, but when I saw you it it doesn't happen does it make sense that make okay, but neither here nor there okay, a lot of these cuts actually sounded pretty good. We do something for you guys, though, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna edit this in a different kind of way. We're not gonna have any pad at the beginning or the end, so parts of the guitar aren't just going to cut off. This is how I hear a lot of people, any guitars so let's listen to these by themselves. So if you if you wanted to do super edited that's, how you do it would just chop it out a lot, I think that's very simple, very easy I don't enjoy the way it sounds, um, because if you've ever played a guitar you know that's not what it sounds like so that's just my thing so I like to keep I like tio let it breathe just a little bit see they get similar settings very so what are you looking for here is you scroll through the song um just making sure all the cuts are going the right spot right now I'm almost done here, okay? That's a tight as I I feel comfortable editing the guitar um let's uh now one other thing that's really easy to mess mess up is the fades on the beginning and end of all your little sections of the guitar so like whenever you have those quick chops, well, I'll just have to do it when you have those quick chops. Sometimes the end of the guitar really sounds like it's just cutting off unnaturally so it's nice to put a little fade on him and what's happening here is the beginning is staying there is actually no fade on the beginning of any of these they're just cutting in which I like because I think it sounds aggressive and then the ends are being faded off just so there's no weird pops or, uh, anything like that so those settings I know I did that quick er if you're in pro tools the the fade the fade in is not a fade basically so it's this weird right angle that's pointing to up and left um the link is none the out shape is just ah linear fade and then ah about thirty milliseconds it depends on the riffs and the edits but about thirty seven thirty milliseconds it is pretty cool we'll work so we've got those we've got those edited and the next thing I like to do after I listen to make sure like it ah cool I like it I show the band the band loves it so to keep everything neat I consolidated all the edits are gone if you if you're not very comfortable with that just just leave it until you've sat with it you listen to it a bunch of times maybe you can't make that choice right away um but I've gotten comfortable enough that I'm cool with doing that so now let's talk about so that was consolidation ok, I also like to if we do any puncheon's do after the edit so it's simple so if if we needed just punch in this this little guy after we edit everything and something is weird you just punch in this little thing and that's the only thing you have to deal with everything else is perfect and it's much less of a headache so quick question for you when you consolidate here is that still the dire does that include the amp soon that's still that's still the deal all it does is get rid of all the edits and makes it one five while two files here and this one too all right so we're done with strip silence are there any questions by the way? Absolutely ah question came up from snickers bar fifty who asked on the longest bracket of notes in the current part I noticed some static like high end fizz I notice is this a lot in my own tracks? Is this a tracking issue then they go on to say I think it wasn't bracket twenty eight you could really hear the fizz getting louder in the segment compared to the other brackets if this is a subtle tracking issue I'd be interested in what playing techniques can help control this issue um bracket twenty eight do they mean like seconds twenty seconds there's a twenty eight here we can ask snickers bar we'll see if that let's play that part I think I think I know what they're talking about it's like it is like they say no the bracket names had numbers before consolidating like brackets of audio six twenty seven twenty eight over here does it there's a twenty eight here eight is that what they mean? We can ask snickers bar if that's what you mean we don't have toe necessarily solve okay and maybe they misread the number as well but maybe just generally answer the question maybe not specifically well if they if they're talking about fei is like on a guitar tone that makes absolute sense I will take as an example this this section during that long sustain e I can hear a little bit of a fizz and it's stronger on one side than it is on the other and that's because I tracked this quickly if this was an actual ban we would go in and make sure that both of those jugs are very clean and identical so one of you have big long sustained things like that you want to make sure that there are no other strings ringing out that's a huge thing that causes like it sounds kind of like static and that could easily be what that is on dh there's also or maybe hand placement hand placement tone gain and all that stuff you know when you're doing long sustained notes like that you know sometimes you khun start to get that cycle hum in there too yes you know yes exactly there's ways around that but you know those little type problems can really mess up the whole absolute tone and everything it's really important right now this is just for demonstration so I didn't go into great detail to do this this is the stuff we were talking about in the previous segment yeah where you hear something like that you know it's a tracking issue can't fix that with the cue you know, if your hand was in the wrong place you get a spring or something like that yes really nothing you can do about that because that was weird but it's just gonna be really strange and not as good of a result but these are the things that while you're recording anything while you're tracking you have to keep all of this in mind all the time and be very picky like, for instance and just the fact that these stereo in a stereo field are out of balance like to me that would drive me crazy I would never let this fly on a final band's recording but I tracked it and I did it quickly so um so it's ok for now uh another thing really quick. I heard this whenever I was tracking this and I left it on purpose um that second hit is out of tune it goes sharp listen, I get that one goes sharp so you might not notice that when you're tracking and that's exactly what happened to me but I left it I could have easily fixed it but I left it so I could show you guys I will just make sure that I take one that is good no, now what I do like to do is avoid um and this might be overkill but I like to avoid having things like that pasted back to back because it's, easy to pick out that they're exactly the same. But maybe that's, just me being overly critical. Uh, I don't know.