- Hello. I am Mike Russell
from musicradiocreative.com. In this video, I wanted to
show you some Adobe Audition simple multi-track audio editing tips. (energetic upbeat music) Okay. Let's get stuck in. When we're editing away, whether it be audio
production or a podcast, we really want to work
quickly in the multi-track. And that's what I'm about to show you. Audio production tutorials
are weekly on my channel. I'd love it if you would like this video. Also remember to subscribe, so you never miss a video. And to make sure you get a ping every time I do release a video, hit the bell as well. Right, here we are inside a multi-track
session already loaded up. That's the multi-track selection here, not the waveform. I've created this multi-track
session to work in. And actually I've got
some audio from a podcast. I've got three different tracks recorded on a zoom recorder, and I'm gonna drag them in. Now notice default behavior here is to drag them all onto one track. I do not want that. I want them on three separate tracks. So the first little
multi-track editing tip is to hold down the Alt or Option key, if you're a Mac user. And it will put them on
three separate tracks. And again, letting go puts
it back to the same track. And this behavior is always asked for the first time you drag
multiple clips into multi-track. So you can actually say, well, every time I drag clips in, I want them to go into separate tracks, or every time I drag clips in, I want them to go on the same track. So let's hold down Alter option and make sure that happens. There you go. They're all on different tracks. Now, there are different reasons why you might want them
on different tracks. For instance, if you're an audio producer, and you want lots of sound
effects on the same track, definitely select always bring
them into the same track. But if you're a podcast editor, and you're working with
multiple different recordings that you need to mix together, definitely select put
them on different tracks. That's the first step. Secondly, we want to get
rid of any unwanted tracks. So if I right-click here, and I go to the Track menu, you can see there is
actually Delete Empty Tracks, or you just hit Shift
and E on your keyboard. And then you've got a much
cleaner multi-track to work with. Next thing, I want to expand out these tracks so I can see them better. If you hit Control or
Command and Backslash, boom, you get a bird's eye view there. It looks absolutely marvelous. And you've got no dead space
down here at the bottom. So really easy to work with. Okay. Let's move on and do some
more stuff in the multi-track. Next thing I might do is rename the tracks by clicking on them, and say Guest 1, Guest 2, and Guest 3. Okay. Some quick shortcuts for working
quickly in the multi-track, if you ever need to isolate something or make some cuts in the multi-track. Now notice I'm using my
scroll wheel to zoom in on the time bar here. Okay. This is where I am using
the scroll wheel on my mouse up on the time bar to zoom in and out. And you can also zoom in and out here by selecting the individual
tracks like that, to get it to the right size. But remember, if you really mess up, just take Control or Command on a Mac, Backslash, and you're
back to a default view. So I'm just gonna zoom in here and say, I really wanted to isolate out this chunk of audio here. I can do that really quickly by hitting Control or Command + K. It makes a cut there, and Control + Command + K, like that. And there we go. We've got a nicely trimmed piece of audio that I can move around. Notice also, when I'm moving this audio left and right, when I'm overlapping it
with another piece of audio, you're getting these yellow lines. These are cross-fades. So what it's doing is it's fading out the
initial piece of audio, and fading in to your new piece of audio. This is particularly handy, if you make some edits and you want those edits to sound smooth, a cross-fade can really help. I'm just gonna undo all of that now by hitting Control or Command and Z or Z. If you prefer, you've the
other side of the pond. Another thing I'm gonna
show you in multi-track that's really, really cool is called ripple delete. And if you're a podcast editor, you're definitely going
to thank me for this. So all these tracks are in sync. They're all separate
speakers on separate tracks, but sometimes we want to cut
out from multiple tracks. So this little tut here,
that's going on here. So I wanna get rid of all of that silence and keep things nice and flowing. Now usually, I'd select that little piece, hit Delete. Oh, it's only deleted one bit. Okay, well, no worries. I can just select all the
tracks and hit Delete. But now I have to like
grab all these tracks and budge them up. (chuckles) So it's just not ideal, is it? So ripple delete is your best friend. All you have to do is select
in one portion of track, the amount of silence you want to delete, then you right-click, you
look for Ripple Delete. You'll only have to do this once, because then you can learn the shortcut. Time Selection in All Tracks is what we're going for. Control + Shift and Backspace. On a Mac that would be Command + Shift and Backspace or Delete, and then you'd delete it all. So I'm gonna use the shortcut now. Control + Shift and Backspace on my PC. Boom. There you go. Deleted the silence and
budged everything up. Control or Command + Backslash. And we're back to a bird's eye view. And I think in just a few minutes, you've learned quite a
lot about the multi-track. Some great shortcuts and processes you can use in your
everyday audio editing. One more bonus tip, by the way, if you get to the end
of recording like this, and you zoom right in and you notice there's a long tail of silence, you can actually go ahead and drag that in by just hovering over the end, getting this red icon and trimming. And if you wanna do it to all the tracks, you can also do that by selecting everything. And look at that. We can just bring all
the tracks in like that. So really handy. Multi-track is the best. If you're still editing in waveform, what are you doing? Move over to multi-track, and let me know your aha moments, and questions about multi-track in the comments down below. (energetic upbeat music) ♪ Musicradiocreative.com ♪
