Tracktion Waveform has many different options for recording and editing audio files from
a microphone or instrument.
In this video, we’ll be covering how to setup all the settings on our audio tracks,
record an audio clip from our audio interface and make some basic edits to those audio clips.
This is part two of our Tracktion Waveform tutorial series, and in the previous video
we covered how to install Waveform, configure all the settings on our system, and went over
the basic layout of the program.
Before continuing, also make sure to subscribe to the channel and press the bell icon to
get notified whenever a new video is released, that way you catch all the videos in this
series.
Before we do anything with the tracks, we should cover how to navigate through the tracks
view.
There is a scroll bar along the bottom to scroll along the timeline, and there is a
scroll bar on the right side to scroll through the lists of tracks.
Each of these scroll bars has a zoom in and out button with it.
If we use the scroll wheel on the mouse, it will zoom in and out horizontally.
To use the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in and out vertically, hold down the control
key on the keyboard, then use the scroll wheel.
Let’s start with managing our audio tracks.
Click on a track to bring up more settings for it in the bottom center panel.
First on the top left, we can rename our track to whatever instrument it is.
Then in the bottom right, we can click on that box that says None, and select an icon
for the track.
This is just a visual label.
We don’t need to add it, but it’s there if we want to have images for the instruments.
Under the track name, the options are to mute, solo and solo isolate the track.
Muting turns off the track so we won’t hear it.
All the tracks that are muted will not be played.
Soloing makes it so that only soloed tracks will play; all other tracks that are not soloed
will not play.
We can use muting and soloing to change which tracks play, turning some on and off, and
isolating others.
Solo isolate makes it to the track plays whenever other tracks are soloed.
We would use with a reverb track so it still plays if we solo some of the tracks that are
sent to it.
Mute/unmute all plugins just turns the plugins on that track on and off all at once.
We can look at controlling plugins in a later video, and at that time we’ll also see that
we can turn on and off individual plugins.
Shrink and grow are just for the size of the track in the window.
Insert new clip allows us to insert an audio or MIDI clip.
Audio clips are usually just created by recording with a microphone, but you may want to insert
a MIDI clip if you’re working with the piano roll to create a track.
Insert new tracks can add new tracks to the project.
We can also delete the selected track with the button at the bottom center.
Freezing the track allows the computer to process the track to a file.
This processes all the plugins and effects on the track as it does this.
That way, you can reduce computer resources if you’re running into problems there.
This is only a concern on larger projects, especially with computers with limited processing
power.
Frozen tracks can be changed, but then you’ll have to unfreeze the track and wait for it
to re-process again.
Rendering tracks also creates a file, but this is a little more permanent.
You would only use this on tracks that you know for sure you want those changes to be
stuck on.
Ghosting a track causes the background of the track on the timeline to show a faded
out waveform of another track in the project.
That’s most of what we need to know for setting up our tracks.
Now let’s look at setting up the microphone inputs for our tracks.
On the left side of the track, click on this darker shape underneath the track name.
You’ll see it now asks us to select an audio input.
I’m using the first input on my audio interface, so I’ll select that for now.
We can see this brought up our audio input settings for that track in the bottom center
panel, and we got a little rectangle that says input 1 with a level indicator for that
input.
To the right of that rectangle, there’s a little circle for recording.
This is the arm record button.
Whenever we want to record a track, we need to tell waveform which tracks we want to record
on.
That way it doesn’t record and overwrite tracks that we don’t want it to.
We can only use the record button in the bottom right of the screen when there are tracks
armed for recording on the project.
Now let’s get back to that center panel.
The first option is Treat as Stereo Channel Pair.
An audio recording can be either a mono track that only records one input, or it can be
a stereo track that records two microphones.
In that case one goes to the left and the other goes to the right.
When we’re on Input 1, pressing this button will set inputs 1 and 2 on the audio interface
to a Stereo pair.
We’ll see that we lose the input on our track when we do that, and we have to go back
and select it again.
When we select it, it will give us the option for input 1 and 2 instead of just input 1.
We can undo this again if we plan on using those inputs in mono and it’s not permanent.
The next button says Live Input Monitoring.
Live input monitoring takes the input from the track, processes it with the effects,
and plays it back through the headphones or speakers connected to the main output of Waveform.
This allows us to listen to our track as we record it.
Be careful with this, since it can sometimes lead to some latency, which is a delay between
what you play and what you hear, and this can lead to playing out of time.
This is minimized by having our audio interface in ASIO mode, which is how we set it up in
the first video.
Some plugins will make the latency worse, and those can be plugins like autotune where
it requires more time to process.
Next is the input gain to increase or decrease the level of the recorded file.
You’re better of using the gain control on the preamp from your audio interface when
recording to adjust the level, instead of trying to do it digitally after the signal
is in the computer, since that can add extra noise.
The trigger level sets an audio level at which the track will start recording.
The audio track will show that it is recording up to this point, but it will automatically
trim the clip to the point where the audio level reaches the trigger level.
I like to avoid using this.
The problem is if there’s a bit of lower level sound below the threshold that you need
at the beginning, it can get cut off and you can’t restore it.
You can always manually trim the clip after if you need to anyways, so this just has the
potential to ruin the beginning of the track without too much benefit.
Time adjust is used to adjust for any delay between playing and recording, and that’s
done by looping the output of the audio interface into the input and calibrating it with the
auto-detect button.
Record mode determines what happens when we record over a clip that’s already there.
This is important to consider when we’re recording multiple takes.
The default is to overlay tracks, so they just sit on top of each other.
We can also replace the old clips, which trims them away and doesn’t play them, but they
can be trimmed back to overlap.
Finally, don’t make recordings turns off the input for recording, but can still use
it for input monitoring even though it’s not writing.
Under this, we have controls for the filename of the clips that are recorded from the input.
We don’t really need to change this.
Then we have file format, which is set to WAV as the default, and the bit depth, which
is 24-bit.
I like to leave these as their default settings.
Wave files are uncompressed, so we retain all the audio quality.
They take up more space, but that’s the tradeoff of maintaining quality in this case.
Bit depth determines how much data detail is saved for each sample of audio as it’s
turned into a digital format.
24-bit is the best setting to leave this as.
Finally, I like to check off to keep all these settings the same for all devices.
With all our settings done, we can start recording.
Choose the track, input, and arm the track for recording.
Then press the record button in the bottom right panel.
Once we’re done, stop the recording.
Now we need to cover how to manage an audio clip.
Click on the clip and we’ll get some options down below.
First, we can change the name.
This isn’t necessary most of the time.
Below the have the start, length, end and offset of the clip as beats and bars for the
timing.
Changing the start shifts the clip along the timeline.
Changing the length or end point can trim the clip or expand it, but if it’s expanded
it will just be empty audio.
If we turn on looping with the button below, we can expand the track and it will just keep
repeating.
Next we have gain and pan for the clip, but we’ll also see later that we have gain and
pan for the entire track.
The button to the right of the gain is to mute the clip, so we can mute individual clips
on a track without having to mute the entire track.
Below that, we have the timing for fade in and fade out of the individual clips.
The icons below that adjust the shape of the fade in or out.
If we have it set to Drag X-fade and drag clips to overlap, they will automatically
crossfade.
This basically just automatically adjusts the fade in and out of the tracks.
To the right, we have controls for speed and pitch change.
The button below will change the position of the clip if we change the tempo of the
song.
My recommendation is to make sure that the tempo is set for the entire song before recording
any audio clips, as this can degrade audio quality otherwise.
Last in this column, we have the button to reverse the audio clip so it plays backwards.
The last tools we have are some selection tools, split tools, move tools, and options
to delete the clip.
Next we’ll look at how to edit the clip on the timeline itself.
Some of these tools are the same as what we’re editing in the bottom center panel, but in
this case we’ll just be clicking and dragging the ends of the clip instead of typing in
numbers.
To edit the clip in the timeline, the things we need to know how to do are trim the clip,
move the clip, and fade the clip.
To drag the clip, click and drag it along the top bar, as long as we’re not clicking
on the icons.
To trim the clip, click and drag the unfilled triangle along the top of that clip.
We’ll see that it trims, and adjusts the timing of the start, end and length in the
bottom panel, depending on which one we drag.
The filled in triangle also adjusts the start and end points of the clip, but it drags the
content with it as it trims.
The unfilled square in the middle moves the start and end points of the clip, without
changing the position of the content.
The filled in square in the middle moves the contents of the clip without changing the
position of the start and end markers.
The L button turns on looping, so if we extend the clip it will keep looping.
The link button allows us to drag away a linked clip that is a duplicate of the first clip
and can be placed somewhere else on the timeline.
The FX button is used to add plugins to a clip itself.
Finally, the last button is to render it.
We just drag it away to somewhere else on the timeline and it will render a new clip.
To fade the clip, we just click and drag the square with the diagonal arrow through it
towards the center of the clip, either from the beginning to fade it in, or from the end
to create a fade out.
To adjust the shape, we still have to do that from the center bottom panel.
The last thing to cover is comping.
Comping allows us to record multiple takes by looping while recording, then select the
best takes.
Let’s start by setting the loop points by dragging them at the top of the timeline.
You may want to extend the loop region a little bit before and after the section you’ll
actually be playing so you have time to start and stop it and then transition smoothly.
Then turn on looping in the bottom right panel.
Then just record a few loops.
We’ll see the label is now the track name, recording number, and take number.
The default shows us the first take.
Press the plus button in the bottom right of the clip.
We can click on each take to switch it, expand it out to show all takes, and expand the takes
to multiple tracks.
I want to switch to Show All Takes.
Now on the one track, we have a stack of all the takes that were recorded for that loop
region.
Clicking on one switches the take.
The top green bar is what is playing on the track, it isn’t actually a full take, it’s
a combination of the takes we have selected down below.
That covers how to switch between full takes, but we should also cover how to switch between
different sections of different takes.
Say we want to use the first section of one take and the second section of another.
That is something we can do and we just have to click and drag over sections of a take,
and it will pop up in the main clip at the top and become highlighted in green.
We’ll see the main clip gets these white bars that show the transition points.
We can click and drag the white bars to move the transition and it will maintain our selection.
We can also click different takes for a time selection to switch between them to try them
out, without changing the time boundaries.
The one thing I haven’t been able to do is create a crossfade between different takes
in this way.
This is possible to do, but you would need to split the clip using the split tool in
the bottom center panel, drag them over each other with the trim tool, and create a crossfade
by fading out the end of one clip and fading in the beginning of the other.
Once this is all done, we can click the plus button in the bottom right corner of the clips
again to hide the takes, and we’ll just keep the parts that we like visible from now
on.
Thanks for checking out this video on recording and editing in Tracktion Waveform.
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