skip to Main Content

Music Editing for Film – Avid Composer Quick Tip

You’re editing some music for film, but when you play it back it sounds a bit boring, as if it’s lacking in variety. You might not have time to change the music, so how can you enhance the beats you’re already working with? This quick tip will show you how you can add variety to your cue.

In this example, we have some repeated beats that we are working with, and we’re going to look at adding a little bit of variety to them by using audio filters and pit shifts to change their character.

In Avid Media Composer, an editor plays back some music that is repetitive
We’ve repeated the beats in this example to make it even more boring

This will give it a little bit of a different feel and break up some of the monotony of them. Listen to what the music sounds like at the moment, before we make any changes:

 

Let’s make it a little less boring.

What we can do is use some audio filters. Let’s take this middle chunk, with two beats that are repeated, and pitch shift them up. We’ll go up a few semitones here in Avid – your software is going to have different tools to be able to modify the audio, so just use whatever type of pitch shift tools are available to you.

In Avid Media Composer, an editor pitch shifts some music
Select the clip, And find the pitch shift tool. Increase by 2 semitones

This is a very simple way to add a bit of variety to your beats, just pitch something a little bit up, or a little bit down. I pitch shifted the middle two beats up, so let’s try  pitch shifting the next two beats down. I’ve also added a dissolve, and fixed a pop as well. Have a listen to what that sounds like now:

 

So now we have our beats repeated quite a few times and it doesn’t sound monotonous. We’ve got quite a bit of variety and we’ve been able to fill a longer, larger amount of space using the same queue by almost recomposing the music.

Wrap Up

This is a short extract from one of our training courses. If you’re interested in the full course, or editing training on other subjects, head over to our Free Training page to get started with some sample lessons on any topic that you like, from general creative editing, to working with music, cutting action scenes, trailers, promos, and a bunch more.

Leave Your Thoughts & Comments Below:
Back To Top