Once an audio recording is taken, it would, in most cases need to be cleaned up. This process normally is carried out to remove excess and unwanted sound parts, such as a sharp intake of breath, or an annoying dog barking in the background. Due to the fact that your audio recording is digital, there exist a variety of ways that it can be cleaned up and made into something that sounds professional and, more importantly like that, exactly the way you want it to sound.

Techniques of Editing

While there are more advanced techniques for editing audio recordings, such as mastering that is performed on recorded songs before release, other editing techniques are much more commonplace. With the rise of open source, there are even a lot of very good, and free, pieces of software that can easily help you edit any audio clip in a number of ways, making it easy for first timers.

Some of the most basic techniques of editing involve the four basic tools of cut, copy, paste and delete. Through these four tools, many possibilities arise, such as deleting portions of unwanted sound by selecting it during playback and simply erasing it from your recording. Also, with cut, copy, and paste, duplicates of a certain part of the audio clip can be made, or even moved, from one place to another.

For example, say you had a recording of a speech that had a dog bark in the background near the start, and also a line that you messed up. Firstly, you could delete the dog bark entirely, and then you could cut out the line you messed up, and paste in a newly recorded correct version of the line.

Apart from that, other basic techniques of editing involve the addition of certain effects into the audio clip. Most common among these are fade-in’s or fade-out’s. Essentially these involve raising the volume smoothly up, or down, respectively, over the course of a predetermined portion of the audio clip.

Additionally, it is possible for you to alter various aspects of the recording. Two such of these aspects are the pitch, and the tempo. Normally, altering tempo to make it faster automatically results in a much higher pitched ’chimpunk-sounding’ recording, and likewise, making the tempo slower automatically decreases the pitch. However, with most editing software of today, you can easily perform any changes while retaining the pitch.

Most software available today can allow even beginners to suitably edit audio recordings to a satisfactory level. Of course, it takes true experts to completely ‘master’ the audio track of a song, and that would take more advanced features than most of the common software has to offer. Still, for the casual user it is more than enough, and an hour or so of experimenting with the features on offer, as well as the techniques above, could easily help produce professional sounding audio clips that are crisp, clear, and most importantly do not have annoying background sound such as dogs barking.