My Voice Editing Tricks – Andre’s Production Diary Part 32

Hey guys, it’s Andre.

It’s now my 32nd week here at the Benztown studios in Stuttgart. I’m learning from the Benztown Crew everything about radio imaging.

One of the basic and most important audio editing techniques is voice editing. The goal of good voice editing is to remove all the annoying ambient noises like needless breathing and spitting noises. The result of good voice editing sound for the listener like you didn’t edit anything. There are a lot of tricks and techniques for the right voice editing. Today, I’m gonna show you some of my techniques for voice editing. This might be a bit basic, but it’s perfect for everyone starting in audio and voice editing.

Fades are a great technique to mellow hard letters like ‘P’ or ‘K’. Just fade in a bit at the start of the letter and hear the result.

The cursor in the picture above shows the start of the letter ‘B’. As you can see, there’s a waveform before the ‘B’ starts. This sounds like a ‘M’ and is not needed at all, so you can cut it.

The picture above shows a ‘S’ to the left and the following letter to the right. The marked area the end of the ‘S’ often contains spitting noises. You can cut the whole area and it won’t affect the flow of your audio.

The screenshot shows a typical noise in your audio, shown as crack in the waveform. Sometimes, it’s not possible to cut away that crack without affecting your audio negatively. There’s a simple technique to remove that crack, so anybody won’t hear it.

As you can see, the marked area looks similar to the area with the crack next to it. Just copy that area. Make sure your marked area crosses the zero point. Then paste your copied area over the area with the crack.

Don’t worry, if it doesn’t fit perfectly. Switch to the shuffle mode, so you can make it fit with the cutter. Make sure, the waveform is going smooth without any breaks and cracks. In my case the final result looks like this.

This are just a few techniques, I use quite often. There’s no default way you can use in every situation. Just listen closely and try different techniques. It’s all about the result you hear, not how you achieved it.

Cheers