The Ease Of Editing or Producing Audio Graphically

We have always been producing audio with our eyes and ears. But precisely editing a piece of sound like we are editing a photo on Photoshop?

Since I mixed-down my very first radio production in 2003, I have always been using Cool Edit Pro, which is now Adobe Audition. When they say that Audition was actually designed for radio, I definitely agree. But when they say, it’s designed for amateurs … I definitely agree that it’s both for newbies and pros.

And I can tell you why. Audition hosts a lot of presets that makes the life of any voice guy or radio producer easier. Well, there might be some drawbacks in being so overly dependent on presets, one of that is sounding almost like everyone else. But the good thing is, you can always tweak the default settings and create an original set of processing, especially for voice overs.

One of the many advancements of Audition is the spectral display. It lets you view your waveform in a sort of “thermo-graphical” approach, kind of like the technology that scans images of life in complete darkness using heat source.

The spectral displays let you see which frequency in your voice track is louder than the other. The brighter orange part are the amplified frequencies while the purple-ish to dark hues are either lesser in volume or dead silent.

There are three types of spectral displays: frequency, pan, and phase. I am particularly interested with the first. It’s pretty helpful when you are cleaning a track. Let’s you “see” and not just hear, what is pure noise and take it out accurately, without compromising those important and relevant frequencies.

The spectral frequency display also helps me process my voice tracks more precisely, since you can target specifically which frequency range to add effects on.

If you have not explored producing “graphically”, try switching the waveform view to the special display. After getting the hang of it, my voice tracks have become cleaner and production has become more enjoyable.