Lesson Summary
Your music doesn’t always need to be the exact length of your meditation. This lesson shows how to shorten, repeat, and join sections of music or ambience so they fit your recording naturally, using simple crossfades to keep the joins smooth and unobtrusive.
Transcript
Welcome back to the second part of this editing module. We’ve arranged the vocal track the way we want it for the final production, so now we’re going to work on the musical portion.
The first track I want to edit is the soft electric piano. At around 30 to 35 seconds, a bass guitar enters. We want to remove that part and loop the earlier, beautiful two-chord piano riff instead.
Zoom in along the horizontal axis and turn Snap on so you can check the position. Solo the track to hear it in isolation, then turn Snap off for precise placement. Find the start of the waveform where the bass guitar enters, place the edit cursor just before it, and press S to split. The unwanted section is already selected, so delete it. What remains is the part we want to keep.
Play the retained section from the beginning. It is very pretty and lends itself well to meditation, but it stops abruptly at the end. Select the item and press Control-C to copy it. Place the cursor immediately to its right, right-click, and paste. We now have a duplicate of the original section.
To join these items, we’ll create a crossfade. Zoom in and look closely at the beginning and end of the waveforms. The duplicated section begins with a short natural fade before its first note, while the first item stops suddenly. Drag the second item left so it overlaps the end of the first. REAPER creates the crossfade automatically; the red lines show the fades, and you can adjust them in either direction.
Audition the result. The first attempt is already close, but the end of the first section fades a little unnaturally. Move its fade slightly to the right and listen again. The join now sounds natural.
Zoom out. The loop is now about one minute and 12 seconds long. Turn Solo off and listen to it with the vocal. Once the crossfade works in context, select both items by selecting one, holding Shift, and selecting the other. Press Control-C and paste copies to the right until the music spans the required length.
Go through the adjacent items and join each pair. For every join, zoom in, drag one item over the other, and listen carefully to the crossfade. If the end sounds unnatural, reposition the fade and audition it again. This is similar to the way DJs beat-match different tracks during a live performance: here, we’re aligning musical sections so each transition has a natural feel.
Continue along the timeline and repeat the process for the remaining sets. Once the editing is complete, the project contains approximately five minutes of music, ambient soundscapes, and the vocal part. We haven’t mixed anything yet; at this stage, we’ve created the layout of the track.
Save the project, and then move on to Module 7: Mixing and Mastering.