Music Editing Tricks in Final Cut Pro | FCPX Tutorial

hey guys in this video i'm going to show you a bunch of different tricks i've learned over the years for editing music in final cut pro i'm not talking about how to edit footage to music or cutting to the beat i have another video on that but rather tricks that help me edit the actual music the audio files in my edits i'll be talking about creating cut down versions of your music track looping your music easily using eqs on your music to make your voice stand out as well as a bunch of other handy audio shortcuts that i use every day [Music] for the first music editing trick i'm going to give you a couple of tips on how i create a cut down of a track one reason you might want to create a cut down as opposed to just trimming the track shorter is because most music has dynamics there are build ups quiet parts parts that have more energy or more or less instrumentation so if you just trim the track shorter you'll only get a small piece of that song by creating a cut down you can keep those dynamics and make the music more interesting to listen to i've got this music track here which is about two minutes long and i want to create a 20 second cut down version of it but first let's have a listen to some of the different parts of the song i have the intro section at the beginning [Music] and then the song starts to build a little more over here and then there's a proper build up somewhere around here that goes into the high energy section of the song [Music] and lastly the song ends off really nicely over here so i'm going to grab this little section as well [Music] okay let's grab those four parts and put them together in a cut down i'm going to zoom in here to the beginning and let's cut the first bit which is this intro [Music] i can use my left and right arrow keys to go back and forward to find the exact point where i'd like to cut use the shortcut b and make a cut in the clip next i'll select these two clips and hit command g to create a group and the reason i do that is because when i cut the next section which is over here i'll make a cut there and i delete this middle section this snaps up back to the intro next i want to add a cross dissolve i'll just click on this cut here and hit command t to add the cross dissolve and i'm going to zoom in here quickly so you can see what's happening let me first play this little section back because let me actually just increase the size of this waveform so you can see a little better notice how these beats don't quite line up in this transition so when i play that back this is what that sounds like it doesn't quite line up and the volume dips which we'll deal with in a second but first i'll hit the shortcut t to activate my trim tool and with that selected i can drag the second clip until those beats line up so if i go to about there the beat lines up a lot better let me play that back [Music] so now we fix the timing but the volume still drops here slightly so what i'm going to do is select this transition set the ease amount to 100 and the spade in and fade out type i'm going to set to plus 3 dbs that will fix this dip in the volume that you hear here let me play that back i'll repeat those steps for the rest of the sections of the track and then let me show you how i'm going to end this cut down off and right about there is where i want the song to end so i'm going to trim that off the down arrow to go to the end of the track and let me find this beat on the end here [Music] that is the beat at the end i'll cut there head back to this cut using the up arrow and i'll delete this whole section in the middle let's play that back without a transition so you can hear what it's doing so it ends quite abruptly i'd like to put another transition in there so that the ending is a little smoother i'll copy this transition again using t i'll make sure that these line up and i'm going to select the middle of this transition you can see my trim tool automatically gets activated here and i'm just going to drag this a little bit before this cut and extend the duration so that the transition ends at the time that this beat at the end of the song comes in i'll play that back [Music] just like that we've created a nice cut down which is 24 seconds long we can actually trim some of this tail off at the end maybe add a little fade here and you've got a 21 second cut down of that two minute track let me play that entire cut down back so that you can hear all those edits we just made i'll slap some footage on top so that you're not just watching a blank screen and this is the final result [Music] next up i'll show you a quick and easy way to loop a music track start by finding the first beat of the track i actually like to loop tracks that have some sort of pre-roll into the first beat so if you look here here's the first beat and there's a little bit of a riser coming into that first beat let me play that back i'll zoom in here and i want to put a marker on this first beat i'll use my left and right arrow keys to find that beat and with the track selected i'll just hit m to create a marker i'll hit the down arrow to go to the end of the track and now i want to find the point at where that first beat needs to loop so i need to find the correct ending of this track [Music] right there on that beat should work i'll create another marker using the shortcut key m i'll zoom out here and now you can simply loop your track by holding down alt to create a copy of your music track and you sync up your markers i'll zoom in here and you can see those markers are perfectly synced and if i play that back this is what that sounds like [Music] i've mentioned a couple of shortcuts already but let's go over a few more that are really handy to know instead of adding volume keyframes to your music over here in the inspector you can do it directly in the timeline by using alt and clicking on the music track to create those keyframes if you want to bring the volume of the music down and then back up again you can use the range selector tool using the shortcut r to select a small range and you can just drag and drop the volume you'll see it creates four keyframes which you can then adjust if you've ever tried to increase the volume just a little bit and it just jumps too far you can use the shortcut command as you drag up and down to make minor adjustments let's say you want to repeat the sequence of keyframes later on in the track you can use r to select your range selected tool select that range and hit alt shift c to copy the keyframes and with the track selected you can use alt shift v to paste those keyframes anywhere in the track before we get into the last music editing trick all of the music used in this video is from artlist and this video is not sponsored by them but i've been using their music on my vlogs and tutorials and my client videos for the last few years and i'm honestly a huge fan there's a large library of cool music and they're always adding new music for you to choose from i'll leave a link in the description down below if you'd like to check that out and if you sign up using the link you'll get an extra two months for free in return i'll also get two months for free so everybody wins there are two music editing tricks using an eq that i often use in my edits the first one is to use an eq to let dialogue cut through the mix more clearly let's say you want to have music in the background while you speak but you don't want it to be too soft when you turn the volume up you can hardly hear the dialogue like in this example i'll head over to my effects panel to eq and i'll drop a channel eq on the music track and then i can go into the settings here and you'll want to drop around 500 to 1000 hertz somewhere around the 800 hertz mark is actually a good place to start and if you drop that down you make a gap for the dialogue to stick out because that's the frequency where most of your voice will sit i'll play that back as i pull it down so you can hear the difference it makes let's say you want to have music in the background while you speak but you don't want it to be too soft when you turn the volume up you can hardly hear the dialogue the second trick using an eq that i sometimes use is to pull the low frequencies and the high frequencies out there are a couple of uses for this it can be a nice way to transition from a clip with dialogue into a b-roll sequence let me show you that example first i have this section from the prague vlog where i'm speaking and then we go into this b-roll section over here let me just mute this and play the song back as it is so you can hear the before [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so let's undo that and now what i'm going to do is use the blade tool to make a cut when i transition from talking into the b-roll sequence then i'll add a cross dissolve there and on this clip i'm going to add a channel eq i'll just drag and drop that on there and if i go into the properties of that eq i can add a high pass filter and a low pass filter and it'll be quite an extreme one just to create that effect that we're looking for if i play that back this is what you get let me actually first drop the volume down a little bit and i'll pay that back what's really cool is if you go all the way to the top you get a great view of the old town square another way to use this effect is to make the music sound like it's underwater which you can use to enhance a shark where the camera goes underwater [Music] that's it for this video if you want to watch another tutorial about cutting footage to the beat of music then i'll leave a link to that in the description below don't forget to like the video real quick subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell and i'll catch you guys in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Brad and Donna

Views: 8,976

Keywords: Music editing, editing tricks, music editing tricks, music editing in fcpx, music editing fcpx, audio editing, audio editing fcpx, edit to music, edit music, edit music fcpx, music cutdown, loop music fcpx, how to edit audio in fcpx, how to edit music in fcpx, editing audio in fcpx, how to edit audio, how to edit music, cut to the beat, tutorial, fcpx tips, Final Cut Pro tips, tips, final cut pro tutorial, fcpx tutorial, Final Cut Pro, fcpx, how to, Brad and Donna

Id: GbbdhjMObzk

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021