creating a unique edit of a song such as GV at home

[donald]

This may be better on the general music thread but my goal is to edit Good Vibrations (for personal use of course).

I would like to use the original single or an alternate release version of the of the original song as a basic track and "splice" in pieces from the GV outakes released ove r the years to create my own extended suite version of GV..  Got the idea today listening to the GV 40th anniv CD release with the 6 tracks.   

What program or device could I use to do this.  I am a total novice with this sort of thing on digital.  I used to do it with tapes using a tape counter very carefully to establishj smooth changes and edits.  My goal would be to have a seemless edit, controlling other factors such as volume and equalization if possible.

Surely some of you have done this yourselves.  Any suggestion on where to begin, how much software would cost, and how time consuming it would be?  Can I use some feature on media player or itunes to do this?

Eagerly awaiting you advice

[AndrewHickey]

For someone who is just wanting to do stuff like that, the easiest program to use would be audacity, which can be downloaded for free from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ . It lets you do pretty much anything you'd want to do with audio, including all the things you're talking about, as well as stuff like pitch-shifting to get two tracks in different keys to match up, and I find it very easy to use.

[donald]

Free and Easy!   Now that's what I'm talking about!   

Thanks!  Can't wait to try it!

[bonnevillemariner]

Although I agree that you can do most- if not everything- you mention in Audacity, I find that application clunky and unnecessarily user unfriendly.  I might use it to mix and match Smile/GV type modular tracks where there are distinct breaks between sections, but if you want to do any halfway serious mixing, I'd recommend Sony Sound Forge, which costs about $50.  Much simpler overall, cleaner interface, MUCH less confusing for beginners.   

[hypehat]

Yeah, but £50 to try your hand at mixing on a whim is ridiculous. Audacity is fathomable, and if you're anything like me arcane bits of knowledge about, for instance, how to get a useable sound out of Gverb will bubble up in the cortex for years to come.


I realise this may not read as an endorsement, per se. But if you're just chopping out and slotting bits together, it won't take long at all. As for ptchshifting, have patience. If you're attempting some vocal extraction type sh*t or using one channel of x on y, ye gods. Have a plan, I guess - my mixes are incoherent at best.

[AndrewHickey]

Yeah, but £50 to try your hand at mixing on a whim is ridiculous. Audacity is fathomable, and if you're anything like me arcane bits of knowledge about, for instance, how to get a useable sound out of Gverb will bubble up in the cortex for years to come.

Exactly -- for the kind of thing the OP is talking about, where it's pasting together a few sections, a bit of crossfading and *possibly* some tempo shifts, Audacity is easy enough to use -- Tracks->Add new, Edit->Copy, Edit->Paste, Effect->Fade In, Effect->Fade Out and Effect->Change Tempo are all the commands you need to know.

Audacity is also a much, much faster-running piece of software than any other audio software I've used, so if you're running it on a home machine that hasn't been especially built for audio work it'll be much more responsive than other software.