Daily Blog - April 30th 2021

Sometimes it's the little things, the small problems that are easy to fix that can cause major issues when overlooked. This is one of them. And it happens all the time.

Make it a habit to put a short fade at the end and the beginning of every single audio event in your DAW.

That's basically it. Why should you do that? Because not doing it is the #1 reason for audible clicks and pops in your audio. Sometimes these can be fixed after the fact, but sometimes they become a real issue and you should prevent them for ever happening. For example, if you have a click in your audio and you send it through a reverb and delay, the click will not only appear in one spot (easy to fix), it will now have a decay and it will be repeated with the delay. That's a problem and I get files like that all the time.

So, from now on, every time you cut an audio event in your DAW, make sure to put a very short "fade in" at the beginning and a very short "fade out" at the end of every event.

And when you're putting two events together, make sure to create a crossfade between them. Every single time.

Btw: An "event" is the box with the waveform in it. Sometimes it's called an audio clip, I'm sure you know what I mean. It's the content of the audio tracks you're looking at. The thing you're editing, cutting, etc.

It takes seconds, can be done with shortcuts/key commands and there's not excuse not to. Just look up how to do it in your DAW, make it a habit and do it even when there seems to be no audio where you've made the cut. Just do it and never think about it again.

This simple habit would have saved many of my clients hours of phone calls, emails, troubleshooting, recalling sessions, shooting in the dark and fixing problems.

-Benedikt

PS: You'll also find these daily blog posts in my Instagram Stories: @benedikthain