Creating a custom music mix is not difficult. It takes time and practice to create perfect edits. Here are twelve steps to guide you to creating great music edits for your performances.
1. Buy the music. Don’t steal it from the file sharing world. Most of the songs cost less than a dollar.
2. Get good mixing software. I use Acoustica’s Mixcraft program. It does a great job on music editing.
3. Import your song(s) to your computer. Usually, that means “ripping” the song from your CD or putting it into a format that the mixing program can use. I recommend the MP3 format at a resolution of 256 kbps.
4. Determine the desired length of your finished work. That will determine how and where you make your edits.
5. Listen to the songs and identify the parts you would like to keep. For example, the intro, the first verse and the chorus, the bridge, the final chorus and the ending.
6. Identify areas that are not important or are redundant. Often the second and third verses are not essential to the nature of the song.
7. Determine if the speed and pitch of the song are good. If not, part of your editing will be changing them as you mix the new version.
8. Plan where you will make your edits to the song(s). Some programs allow you to place markers in the song and cut and separate parts of the songs to reassemble them.
9. Run the edits. This is the hard part. You’ll need to learn to line up beats when joining sections of a song and to reduce or fade overlapping sections to minimize transition effects. Good programs like Mixcraft also have special effects like reverb, chorus, and filters to modify the sound of the song.
10. Preview and modify the mix. Isolate the transition sections, zoom in on them, and play them again until you are satisfied with the result of the edit. Then go to the next.
11. Save your mix file. The mix is a recipe for modifying the original song and is given its own name. You can save multiple versions for different applications.
12. Mix the file into an MP3 file and transfer it to your player or burn it to a CD.
Many mixing programs, such as Acoustica’s Mixcraft, have a free trial period. Use this to learn about the product and learn how to run editions. Happy editing!
