[Music]
hey how's it going I'm Ben Lindell and
today I'm going to be showing you how I
use the strip silence plugin in Protools
strip silence is basically a powerful
Noise Gate that allows you to separate
information inside the regions by how
loud or quiet it is I'm going to be
using it today to separate the musical
information that I want to keep from all
the noise and Ambience that's in between
and of course it's going to do this all
automatically so it's going to Sav me a
bunch of time so uh let's get
started so here's my session we're going
to be cleaning up today first things
first let me play you my tambourine
track now pay attention to in between
the tambourine hits all the noise the
jangling the ambience whatnot that's
going
on now depending on the genre of music I
may want to leave that dangling in
that's kind of could be the vibe of the
track but since this is like a pop hip
hop kind of track I really just need to
be as clean as possible so I'm going to
need to edit out all this extraneous
noise now I could do this by hand by
just clicking through and
deleting one by
one over and over again as you can see I
have about 50 more of these to do it's
not really a good use of my time so I
can use strip silence to actually do
this all automatically for me let me go
ahead and undo do
that I can go to the edit menu and
select strip
silence or I could use the keyboard
shortcut which on Mac is command U or on
PC it would be control
U so to use strip silence I'm first
going to select my region and there you
see a whole bunch of white boxes being
drawn around my regions now what's
inside the white boxes is the audio
that's going to be kept once I stripped
the silence so as you can see there's a
few areas here that aren't exactly what
I want to keep and there's some that are
too long in the front too big in the
back so we need to go through and adjust
the settings to get this so it's just
keeping the tambourine hits that I want
to hear the first parameter that we're
going to adjust is the strip threshold
now anything below this level is going
to be stripped away and anything above
it is going to be kept inside these
white boxes so as I'm going to adjust
this you're going to see the white boxes
focus in more on the tambourine hits
that I want to keep
there we go first I'm going to adjust
the region start pad just to make sure
I'm not cutting off any Beginnings to my
tambourine
hit now I'm going to adjust the region
end pad just to make sure I get all the
tail from each tambourine
hit there we go it looks pretty good so
now I have three options to finish this
off first is to extract now what this
will actually do is remove all the audio
inside the white boxes basically the
opposite of what I'm trying to do here
today second option is to separate and
what this is going to do is it's going
to create regions in and around the
white boxes so I can go through and
manually delete each region it's not
quite as automatic as I'd like it to be
now the third option is strip this is
the one I use all the time what this is
going to do is it's just going to keep
the audio inside the white boxes and
strip away everything
else so there we go now I have four
regions that I contain my four
tambourine hits I just need to add Fades
before and after each region to make
sure there's no clicks or pops and I'm
all good to go so the cool thing about
strip silence is now that I have my
settings dialed in for my tambourine
track I can just go onto other regions
and apply the same settings to get the
same
results except in this case because as
you can see we have one big white box
and the reason for this is because we
didn't adjust the minimum strip duration
right now it's set at 497 milliseconds
and what that's saying is that for
something to be stripped away it needs
to be at least 497 milliseconds away
from the other box
so what I'm going to do is just drag
that down and suddenly I have white
boxes around each one of my tambourine
hits just how I want it so I'm going to
press
strip so there we go now I have all the
silence stripped out of my tambourine
track but as I mentioned before you want
to create Fades before and after each
region to make sure there's no clicks or
pops so a quick way to do that is to
select all of your
regions and hit command F orrf on a PC
to bring up your fade window
and then I'm just going to set it for 10
milliseconds and what this is going to
do is it's going to put a fade in and a
fade out on each region automatically
for me so there we go now let's listen
to my track and hear the
difference so as you can hear it's much
much cleaner but with any editing it's
always advised that you listen through
all of your edits just to make sure that
you didn't access accidentally do
something you weren't supposed to such
as cut out too much or leave in
something you didn't want to be there so
that's how you use strip sence now today
I was just editing on a tambourine track
but I used strip silence every day to
clean up background vocals Toms I mean
anything with silence I want to clean up
now a word of warning sometimes the
jangling and breathing and everything in
between the hits is where the vibe of
the track is so as always be listening
while you're editing to make sure you're
not taking away from the music strip
silence is a pretty powerful tool and
can easily be abused so uh until next
time
[Music]