Recording - October 2013 - 71

If you need to use these tools to make your drum track work, you need a new
drummer, not an edit.
The difficulties with drum editing all center around the same issues I talked
about with dialogue editing: reverb tails and intonation. You can cut right on
the beat, you can cut right before the beat. Don’t cut after the beat and chop
off the reverb tail.
If you have recorded drums with spot mics and a lot of isolation, this gives
you a little more freedom to edit, and one of the nice things about the digital editing system is that you can cut and paste different takes together with
edits that are at different times on different tracks. This makes it a lot easier
to match everything up so there is no obvious reverb tail damage, but even
in the best of situations there will be leakage between channels. So if at all
possible, edit multiple tracks where the leakage occurs, a bar or so before
the actual error, in a place where the edit can be more easily concealed.
Remember, all of the drum tracks are associated with one another, they are
all one instrument, and there is extensive leakage between them. If you cut out
one beat and fix it on an individual track, you’re going to find that it’s still
screwed up in the leakage on the overhead. Will this be noticeable? Maybe
and maybe not. Sometimes being a little bit off the beat is greatly preferable to
an edit that can’t be made transparent. Nobody will ever see the beautiful-looking grid of beats you have on the screen, they will only hear the music. Make
the music sound good and stop worrying about what it looks like on the screen!
Yes, there are pop music styles that are based around automatic slicing
and quantizing of drum tracks, with everything lined up on a grid. Those
styles usually use electronic drums or heavy gating in order to get perfect isolation, and they aren’t going for a natural drum style. If you’re trying to get
that kind of sound—and it is legitimate for those genres!—you are probably
reading the wrong article.
The one big comment I can make about drum editing is that you should
make your edited track, take a weekend off, come back on Monday and listen to the original track and then the edited track, and only then decide if it
really is better or not. This may also give you a couple days in which to
decide to replace the drummer instead.

When the band tracks together
Maybe you have a classical piece that was recorded one bar at a time,
and all of those individual bars have to be put together. Maybe you have a
recording where the vocalist recorded with the band and you have to edit
the whole ensemble together in order to get a clean vocal take.

We’re used to being able to do really fancy edits with a DAW, but you might be surprised at what could
be done with just a razor blade, edit block, and leader tape (1). It was common to edit a single track out
of a multitrack tape (2), or even do a “window edit” to remove an unwanted sound (3).
The procedure is very much the same, whether you are recording two tracks
or one instrument per track. When there is an error, the band picks up a few
bars before the error so that they are up to speed and together by the time the
edit needs to be made. It’s the job of the conductor (or band leader, or rock
drummer) to make sure the tempi match in all of the various takes. This also gives
the editor a variety of places to actually make the cut, and it could be at a beat
or a pause, or any place that seems convenient. With a multitrack recording,
the cut can be made on different tracks at different times. Still, the process is very
much the same, because leakage connects all of the individual tracks together.
Sometimes a cut has to be made very abruptly, at a point where part of a
reverb tail has to be lost. When this happens, adding a little bit of artificial
reverb beginning directly after the cut can be a godsend for hiding the cut.
Spend some time comparing an end of another measure going into a quiet
part with the part that you cut, and play with the reverb parameters to try
and match them.
Conclusion
Editing can turn a good performance into a great performance, and sometimes it can make an awful performance into an acceptable one. Too many
people inadvertently use editing to turn a good performance into an irritating one, with jump cuts, damaged pacing, and chopped reverb tails.
A powerful tool can be used for good or evil, so try to be more like
Superman than Lex Luthor and wield the “razor blade” tool wisely. Know
when to edit, and when to stop.

Acknowledgments
Portions of this article were inspired by
Mortimer Goldberg’s article “The Art of Tape
Editing” from the December 1976 issue of db
Magazine (available online at www.american
radiohistory.com/db-Magazine-Guide.htm), as
well as Martin Dickstein’s follow-on letter to that
article in the February 1977 issue. Other parts of
it were adapted from Joe Tall’s “Tape Editing
Facts” booklet which used to come with Editall
splicing blocks. Joe Tall basically invented tape
editing and deserves an award for it.
Other large chunks of it were adapted from
advice given to me as an intern by a variety of
skilled editors, most notably someone I only knew
as “Don” but who introduced me to the concept of
using a typewriter eraser on audio tape to mute
noises without affecting pacing.
Oh, and many of our notions about pacing and
intonation come originally from Joshua Steele’s
“Prosodia Rationalis, or an Essay Towards
Establishing the Melody and Measure of
Speech”... from the year 1779.—SD
RECORDING October 2013

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