Recording - October 2013 - 69

exact cutting point between them. So, when
you are having trouble hearing accurately
even at slow speeds, try listening in reverse.
Most importantly, close your eyes. Try
not to pay attention to the waveform on
the screen; listen to what is going by.
Looking at the waveform will mislead you
because it doesn’t exactly correlate with
what you’re hearing.
Some people like to use headphones for
editing rather than the studio monitors,
because it helps them concentrate. Some
people love using nearfields that exaggerate the midrange because it helps them
focus in on one part of the sound. I like the
Sony MDR-V6 headphone, which severely
exaggerates the upper midrange and treble
in a way that makes editing problems more
obvious. They can be unpleasant to listen to
all day, but you’re not in the editing suite for
pleasure, you’re there to get the job done.
Edit speech
The vast majority of audio editing
being done today is speech and dialogue
work, and getting practiced at editing
dialogue can be great training for learning how to edit music. Speech has
rhythm, tempo, and pacing, much like
music does, and one of the main jobs of
the editor is to maintain and to fix that
tempo and pacing, as well as correcting
fluffs and obvious errors.

OH BOY!

Just removing the occasional “um” sound
and cleaning up hesitations between words
can go a long way toward making speech
flow in a clean and natural way. Different
speakers are going to have different pacing, and they might alter their pacing
based on the material. To some extent, their
pacing is dependent on their need to stop
and take a breath.
Joe Tall (see the sidebar) talks about
speech having three major characteristics:
mood, pace, and tempo. The mood of the
speaker may vary a lot from one sentence
to the next, or even change within a sentence, and it is very easy to ruin that with
careless editing, by moving part of a sentence into one with a very different mood.
When we speak of pace and tempo,
we’re talking not only of the speed of talking but also the spacing between words
and breathing sounds and pauses, and all
the other things that make speech sound
natural. Before making a cut, imitate the
speaker’s tempo and say the sentence out
loud. If you can say it easily in the proper
rhythm, you can edit it the same way.
It is possible to do very precise editing of
speech, given uniform material. Years ago,
I worked at a radio station where one of the
editing staff would call up the White House
Press Office Actualities Hotline and record
off the phone the weekly short statements
from Mr. Reagan that his press office had

decided to release. These were almost
always recorded in the same room with the
same equipment and placement, so editing
them together was not difficult.
After nearly a year’s worth of actualities,
a colleague had assembled a ten-minute
speech in which the president admitted to
“sexual relations with dogs, pigs, cows, and
the entire Soviet Union.” I would give my
eyeteeth to know where this tape is today.
Blocks
“Block cutting” is the practice of chopping and re-arranging, either removing
or adding sentences one sentence at a
time. It seems like it would be the easiest
thing to do, but it’s essential to keep natural pacing.
We may start out with:
[sentence1] [breath1] [sentence2]
[breath2] [sentence3]
And edit it into:
[sentence1] [breath1] [sentence3]
and get a natural speech flow. But yet, the
following works out to be very unnatural:
[sentence1] [breath2] [sentence3]
Why? You’d think all breath sounds are the
same, but really that isn’t the case at all, and
the cadence of the breath is very much in time
with the sentence that preceded it. Because of
that, the breath in the second example will
probably not be at the same pace as sentence1, and becomes noticeable. In addition,
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Recording - October 2013

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