Best Practice for FadeOuts…
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With a song that tails off to nothing.. how is this best authored..?
Is it best to edit the audio and force a more abrupt ending …. ?
How you make the song end it’s 100% depending on the song, but look for Ollie’s tutorial on how normalize your audio and remove the fadeout, that is an essential starting point.
Ok, essentially this is extending the normal volume at the tail end of the track. I was really after some specific help on how to end a song with a prolonged fade. I can normalise the audio as Ollie’s instruction but that still leaves me with the problem of how to end it. He refers to drum samples and reverb… But I don’t know what either of these are and how best they could fit to a particular song choice.
In terms of the actual ending, I usually find a solid downbeat at some interval of 4 (assuming 4/4 time) to end on. So imagine the outro is about 10 measures long when it fades to nothing. Firstly, using the steps to more normalize the audio.
After that, like I said assuming 4/4 times, you want to count out groups of 4 from the outro area. In this case, you go 8 measures out (ie, 4 then 4) and mentally mark this as your end location. From there, I usually move my cursor to the next beat (so the first upbeat, usually a snare hit in a general rock beat). This should be where the audio cuts off. Remove everything from this point to the end. What you should be left with is a good downbeat and then the next upbeat. Apply a fade-out yourself from the downbeat to the end. This will make that last downbeat strong, and then it’ll fade out quickly over the course of the next beat.
I prefer this because just cutting straight out on a note sounds awkward. However, the longer the “new fade-out” is, the more problems you will having charting. You should technically chart everything heard, so if you extend the fade-out you may have to chart in it.
If you want to make your ending more professional, get sound clips of a bass drum and then both a hi-hat and a crash [likely several]. Right on the last note you intend to chart (that downbeat) splice in the the bass drum and then whatever hi/crash sounds best.This just gives the end a more precise and explosive “end”.
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