Any tips/tutorials for using Audacity?

[Sergeant_Skyrim]

Sub bass is mono. Its fine like that and will mix into both channels. I do not remove basslines to place my own. I generate a tone and mix it with the non hpf'd song, like in "Ain't No Sunshine" or "Get That Dough" - Gucci

Is there something bad about completely removing basslines and replacing with your own? What would the advantage of mixing both basslines together be?

[Sergeant_Skyrim]

Also, if I have a song where the vocals are extremely quiet, would there be anything wrong with just amplifying the track that I used the HPF on? Like I'm talking about I can just barely hear the vocals when the bass hits, and even when the bass isn't there it's quiet

[Decaf]

^truth

a few more things to improve the experience

- find the speaker icon next to the green bar meter, hit the down arrow and select preferences. change to 100 for a more accurate reading (i use the when adding sine waves before mix and render to see if it will clip)

- if you notice when you slow a song you lengthen the notes, this in turn can make red lines (show clipping option) show up from dc offset. Think of it like a mountain peak that has been flattened just enough to sit on. you didn't increase the amplitude of the wave... you lengthened the duration the note was held as near 0db. so if you slow a song and see it turn red from it, go to amplify and find out how much you need to quiet it to stay within the data range. now slow the song and if there are, lets say, 10 red lines or less you can go to each and lower the amplitude. try -.8db, once all red is gone, highlight the whole song and go to amplify and you should incrementally be able to raise the amplitude to get it just a little louder.

- if you simply click on the gray area below the L-----R slider it will highlight the entire song

- start at 30% slowed and listen, then undo the slow until it sounds the way you want, every song deserves its own slowed % because you will find you like a certain BeatsPerMinute whether you intentionally do it or not. don't think you can just go and hit 20% on every song and it will sound good.

- when you are attempting to add sine waves and you cannot locate the exact position of the beginning of the wave, use beat finder and most of the time it will put a little dash exactly where the sine wave should start (doesn't work all the time, you have to mess with threshold to get it perfect with each song)

-even if you finished perfecting your song with NO RED, when you export it chances are there will be some red once re uploaded. I'm not 100% positive why this happens, you can alleviate it by lowering the amplitude -.1/.2dB before exporting. sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesnt, regardless the amount of "clipping" that happens from the export is nothing worth fixing. its in the thousandths of a second of dc offset and your amp won't even know it occured because the duration is so short.

more as I think of it

same happened to me, all i did was highlight by bass track and reduce the amplidute a bit. You can see it turn red on the little thing in the top middle of audacity when playing through it before exporting, even when both tracks are peaking at -3db.

after you've exported it, import it and go to amplify and it will tell you how much you need to lower to be at 0dB, if its less than 1.0db and its mids/highs its not going to matter. You do not want to be sending bass lines into clipping because the power involved is dramatically higher with subs

Sub bass is mono. Its fine like that and will mix into both channels. I do not remove basslines to place my own. I generate a tone and mix it with the non hpf'd song, like in "Ain't No Sunshine" or "Get That Dough" - Gucci

Is there something bad about completely removing basslines and replacing with your own? What would the advantage of mixing both basslines together be?

Not necessarily, I don't really mess with new basslines in audacity because its something done easier in FruityLoops.

When I've added sine waves using audacity its on top of the song... just in places where there was no bass originally. I do not HPF before I added sine waves. You are trying to do something different than what I do.

Also, if I have a song where the vocals are extremely quiet, would there be anything wrong with just amplifying the track that I used the HPF on? Like I'm talking about I can just barely hear the vocals when the bass hits, and even when the bass isn't there it's quiet

EQ is your friend, It will do whatever you want. But yes, you can do that.

[Sergeant_Skyrim]

EQ is your friend, It will do whatever you want. But yes, you can do that.

Noob question, but what exactly is EQ and how does it work? I know it means equalization, and I have the rough idea that it somehow evens things out so that it'll sound better, but that's about it

[nickfs442]

Been editing songs for a while. This took things to a whole nother level.. Decaf thanks for letting me know finally how you "amplified" the bass in the intro of the song like Money Man, Ready for Whatever, etc and then at a certain moment in the song the bass comes alive. Always wanted to know how to do that! Now I know how to with the HPF. I'm glad you are letting everyone know how to do it by themselves, All of you guys are awesome

[Geardropper]

still im not 100percent but im geting there now i have 3 different sets of boosted music that have been created by different methods the first lot tho was just a bunch of clipped garbage.

2nd i found out what clipping was and started messing round with the eq speed bass boost amplify etc which sounded really good

3rd im trying what u all told me here.sound amazing but is still no decaf or big pimpin yet but its a fn good try:) thanks guys u r my idols

[Ecco]

Been editing songs for a while. This took things to a whole nother level.. Decaf thanks for letting me know finally how you "amplified" the bass in the intro of the song like Money Man, Ready for Whatever, etc and then at a certain moment in the song the bass comes alive. Always wanted to know how to do that! Now I know how to with the HPF. I'm glad you are letting everyone know how to do it by themselves, All of you guys are awesome

What I do is just have the original file, and cut everything but the intro (brfore the bass area) so it stays normal, and you boost the rest.

[KMS]

Okay Kiddies, sit down , grab a drink, get out your pens and notepads for a BigPimpin' Tutorial. (Or CTRL-C + CTRL-V will work just fine.)

To Slow things down in Audacity is rather easy.

Load up your track by opening Audacity and dragging the music file from it's destination folder to the work area in Audacity.

For those that do not know, if you click and hold a file and slide down to your Taskbar over the program you want to open it in and you hover there for a moment, Windows will automatically open up that programs tab. (This only works on Windows, obviously, and if that program is already running.)

Once that is done, hit CTRL-A to highlight the whole track.

From there we go to Effect-->Change Speed.

Choose any number on the negative side.

Anything more than 30% gets a bit drastic so shoot between 10-20 depending on how low you want to go with it.

If you need pictures to explain, let me know.

Now, for the BigPimpin' Trade Secret on Chopping a song in Audacity.

*NOTE*

This method is VERY time consuming. You MUST be able to keep time with music so a musical background helps. Band, Choir, ETC.

Be prepared to set aside about an hour to Chop a song depending on how much chopping you want and how well you want it to flow together.

I DO NOT use this method anymore as I found out the real way to C&S is to use turntables.*

*Pro-Tips*

I like to listen to the song a few times to get a feel for how the beat goes and I like to Chop the song live by vocalizing how it would sound chopped.

To properly chop, you must have the part you want to chop play BEFORE it is supposed to happen in the original track.

EX.

Good

Wax on Wax off like Karate Kid Eight's-Eight's on the Chevy You know what it is

Bad

Wax on Wax off like Karate Kid Twenty Eight's-Eight's on the Chevy You know what it is

In order to attain good chops, you must do it on beats 1 or beat 3 where the Artist is beginning a word not ending it. Chopping the latter half of a word sounds "off" and isn't good for your audience.

Now to the Nitty-Gritty.

Following steps above have your track loaded up and slowed to whatever pitch you want it.

Begin by finding a Kick Drum or a snare as these are on "time" and are easy to measure from.

From there you are going to measure to the next "peak" by aligining your box up to an identifiable point on the kick and dragging the box over to the next one to see how much time is between beats.

Here's a close-up of the time display.

Okay, our time is .75210.

This is actually incorrect. It turns out the time we need is 0.5123 but I did all the screen shots with the wrong time but the theory still applies. (A LOT of C&S in Audacity is guesswork. Not all songs work out because the BPM is too high or too low. Hence why I can't C&S all songs that I would like to.)

We then measure this from our point where we took our measurement.

We then drag the LEFT side of the box over to the right passed the right hand portion of the box and up to the 0.37605.

Then we CTRL-C that portion.

Then we slide the right side of the box BACK over to the left of the box creating the box we had before.

Then we CTRL-V that portion onto there and VOILA your chop is done.

Now, depending on where you chose to chop and what you we're chopping, it may or may not sound good.

If not just CTRL-Z the shit out of it until it's back to original.

Here's the bad chop I did for the tutorial versus what I should have done. (Super Tired Tutorials suck.)

If anyone needs some more clarifying please post here and I'll fix it tomorrow.

I wouldn't mind replacing the original post with any info that Pimpin/Decaf/SPLWGN/anybody else provides to be honest. I think that this could be a great Q&A sort of thread though concerning purely Audacity.

Another question I had though was when you add the Low and High Pass Filters there's a rolloff and there's a filter quality. When implementing either filter, is there anything wrong with doing 48dB per octave at the preset .7071 filter quality? Or should you change any numbers or use a different dB per octave rolloff? I know that it says:

the higher the db slope the sooner it gets rid of whatever you are filtering, I would use 24db or higher when attempting to add a bass line ontop of a song that already has bass. I've always left it at .7

"If using a rolloff of 12 dB, a [q] value greater than default 0.7 increases resonance ['ringing'] of the cutoff frequency and could result in clipping."

see above

So if I'm for instance taking a track and placing it there twice, and giving one track a HPF and the other a LPF after I've already slowed both down by the same speed and having both cutoff frequencies at 80Hz, then would a 48dB per octave rolloff with a q of 0.7071 hurt anything? You say to slap on a bunch of filters to get rid of the portion you don't want, but it seems to either amplify or increase the clipping whenever I play it back (Original track never hit red on the L/R up top but after throwing on a filter or two it did).

lower the amplitude by -2 or -3 before you do any HPF/LPF. after you have you might need to find whats clipping or at max and lower that

What I was trying to do was take Dirty Diana and split it into two portions - one less than 80Hz and one greater than 80Hz after they both had already been slowed by 16%. Then I was going to try changing the pitch of the greater than 80Hz to see if I could get his original voice back while keeping the slowed version with less than 80Hz at the new slowed peaks basically. So to summarize myself, keep the new lower tuning on the bass side while trying to restore the voice back to the same original pitch.

not gonna happen. you will notice the vocals will be warbly and off sounding when trying to change pitch on one and not the other. i have always used change speed and that is all, never tempo nor pitch

If you can decipher any of what I'm trying to say then I'd love a response telling me what I'm doing right/wrong, I really hope I'm starting to catch onto this! (Thanks again for all the help so far)

you want to choose a value higher than 80hz usually, even with a 48db slope you will still get some information between 65hz-80hz. trying using 100hz or a bit higher. this starts to become an issue if you are eliminating midbass that you want to keep, so not all songs can be messed with successfully.

decafe please do a huge right up on how you do your magic please

The easiest way for me to explain it is that you CANNOT modify every song, know that from the beginning.

I download songs and the first thing I do is run it through windows media player oscope so see if its even worth the time in audacity. Its hard to explain what exactly I look for, because I use my ears just as much as my eyes.

If there is excessive highs/mids that you can quiet it will allow you room to add bass via bass boost. so you need to use a combination of amplify, EQ, bass boost, declipper, limiter, normalizer.... whatever it takes to make room for bass, and plenty of times there isnt a feasible way without lowering something in the song too much.

I would not suggest doing this without decent headphones otherwise you can't even hear what you are doing to the bass below 80hz.

I only use change speed.

About 90% of the effects (after you download the plugins) are not used by me.

In the past i've used whawha to make the track move from left to right.

When the bass is quiet at the start i use a HPF@90hz, db level depends if i wanted to hear a little bass or 0 bass.

I slow between 6-30%.

Unfortunately I started saved the early zips at 192kbps but now I use extreme preset/320kbps. the reason is that when you use a lower quality it will cut off/clip small parts of the song to fit, which look red when you reimport the song after exporting it.

To add bass lines when there isnt any in the song to begin with you simply highlight the exact start and end of the note in the song, go to add new audio track(not stereo), generate sine wave, you will almost never be able to use an amplitude higher than .6. because you highlighted the exact place of the note you want it will be generated as the same duration. fadein/fadeout the first and last wavelength to eliminate the DC jump from note to note (sounds like popping or a click)

now play the track and watch the green stereo bar, if it turns red you need to lower the amplitude. keep doing this til it rarely turns read and can make it through the song with let says, 10 red spots or less. listen to it over and over again and mess with the amplitude of the sine wave until it sounds correct then hit mix and render. keep show clipping on because once mix and render is done you will have both waveforms combined. its a simple addition, you can go from 0-30 in loudeness and the mids/highs are 15, you can only add 15 in bass, if that makes sense. if you find that you cannot fit a loud enough sine wave you might have to quiet the mids/highs, but you should be doing this to the notes that are peaking, not an overall amplify.

The EQ on audacity its basically only limited by your screen size, you can easily get 30 bands out of it so its as verstile or more than the best eqs you can buy. I use EQ a LOT, sometimes with success and other times its just ok.

To finish you need to go back to the start. import the original and modified song into windows media player and watch them both on the oscope. pay attention to bass lines that look like a slide not a sine wave, triangular basslines the come to a sharp point, not smooth. Watch out for flat horizontal sections. Make sure the green line is actually centered and not lower or higher than normal.

The most powerful tool we have is our ears, so learning what distortion/clipping sounds like can really help, so i suggest to purposely ruin songs and ONLY play them on your headphone so you train your ear what you don't want to hear.

Am I leaving things out, yes... but between autr/spl/pimpn/me the average user has almost all the info you need in this thread already.

Remember I made all those tracks for me to listen to as a hobby originally and then I decided to share, I'm not perfect and it took YEARS to figure everything out. I've migrated away from audacity lately and I've been using FL, attempting to make songs from scratch the way we all want... so keep an eye out in the future

^truth

a few more things to improve the experience

- find the speaker icon next to the green bar meter, hit the down arrow and select preferences. change to 100 for a more accurate reading (i use the when adding sine waves before mix and render to see if it will clip)

- if you notice when you slow a song you lengthen the notes, this in turn can make red lines (show clipping option) show up from dc offset. Think of it like a mountain peak that has been flattened just enough to sit on. you didn't increase the amplitude of the wave... you lengthened the duration the note was held as near 0db. so if you slow a song and see it turn red from it, go to amplify and find out how much you need to quiet it to stay within the data range. now slow the song and if there are, lets say, 10 red lines or less you can go to each and lower the amplitude. try -.8db, once all red is gone, highlight the whole song and go to amplify and you should incrementally be able to raise the amplitude to get it just a little louder.

- if you simply click on the gray area below the L-----R slider it will highlight the entire song

- start at 30% slowed and listen, then undo the slow until it sounds the way you want, every song deserves its own slowed % because you will find you like a certain BeatsPerMinute whether you intentionally do it or not. don't think you can just go and hit 20% on every song and it will sound good.

- when you are attempting to add sine waves and you cannot locate the exact position of the beginning of the wave, use beat finder and most of the time it will put a little dash exactly where the sine wave should start (doesn't work all the time, you have to mess with threshold to get it perfect with each song)

-even if you finished perfecting your song with NO RED, when you export it chances are there will be some red once re uploaded. I'm not 100% positive why this happens, you can alleviate it by lowering the amplitude -.1/.2dB before exporting. sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesnt, regardless the amount of "clipping" that happens from the export is nothing worth fixing. its in the thousandths of a second of dc offset and your amp won't even know it occured because the duration is so short.

more as I think of it

Thanks, just quoting to put it closer to each other while I read through. Can't wait to edit.

Ok I read some posts but it seems that the talk is more about slowing, rebassing songs. I just want to boost songs for now. I have tried this guys way but it isn't decaf or big pimpin loud. Hmmmmmmmmmm

I love learning so if anyone can please help I'd appreciate it. Maybe I missed it in this thread.

When setting bass boost, what frequency should I use and what db? I think the db would be the highest as it can go without clipping correct?

[nickfs442]

Decaf - How do you fade the speed change of a song. Say I want the intro normal and slow it faded(ly) into the bassline. or into the "slowed" part of the bassline that im slowing in that song.

[Chris Bozman]

https://soundcloud.com/thebossman419/thrift-shop-remix my first attempt. check it out. Im pretty sure there is zero clipping. If any of you pros wanna look at it and tell me im on the right path lol. Thanks for all the tips!