Audio and music editing,  enhancement and restoration
 
Unless you’re making silent movies, every video is 50% picture and 50% audio, with both equally important. With a background of 25 years as a studio and live engineer, I place great store in ensuring that the audio for every project is as good as it can be.   
 
I can provide all forms of audio enhancement, from editing through to restoration, using the latest software and audio sweetening tools.
Used for audio and music editing in days past

The Splicing Kit

When I started working as a sound engineer, editing was almost an art, and a splicing kit (left) was always part of an engineer’s toolkit. To identify where you wanted to edit the tape, you would rock the tape back and forth over the tape heads while listening to the track. When you found where you wanted to cut, you would mark the spot with a chinograph pencil.

 

Splicing tape together was  generally done at an angle to give the best result, a sort of mechanical fade in and out. The two pieces of tape were then joined by a piece of sticky plastic tape.

The Wem Copicat Tape Echo

Before digital audio effects and plugins, we used whatever was available to add colour to our audio.  

 

One of the earliest effect units I owned was the Wem Copicat (right). This used a loop of tape, one recording head, an erase head, and three playback heads to give different types of echo. It also had two inputs with separate gain controls. This meant that bands, like the early Beatles, sometimes used them as basic mixing desks to set the volume on two microphones at once.
An early effect unit and mixer

Audio Editing

One of the things that separates professional from amateur shows is the use of well-edited music tracks. It’s something we often come across – music ending abruptly – which I find deeply unpleasant.
 
This clip is an example of well-edited audio, where the songs flow into each other with no glitching, and the ending is clean and appropriate.

Audio enhancement and restoration

Before I begin editing the video on a live performance, I spend anything up to two days enhancing the audio. This involves going through the dialogue line by line and working to make sure that the overall balance between dialogue and music is perfectly balanced.
 
If the audio on your video project is letting you down, contact us for help. It’s surprising how much we can enhance bad audio and maybe save your production. 
A mixing desk and computer audio station

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