Audacity tutorial: Align and mix independently recorded choral sources

A basic tutorial video created for my friend Aubrey. He and I work with two separate recordings of our choir in a challenging environment (a bouncy-walled, reverberant church).

This tutorial covers import, track alignment, speed syncing, normalization, selection, and export.

If any of the steps shown can be accomplished more easily, I would love to hear your methods in the comments section. Thanks!

[sdkess]

That's cool stuff. I'm also involved with music at my church. I've had to learn a lot of stuff that I never really paid much attention to before I started helping.

[TheBinaryWolf]

When the amplitude of a wave is small, I drag the lower border of the track down, which visually stretches the waveform and helps identify the spikes.

[andrewcheal]

Hello friend, I am coming to your website rather late, But with 30 years experience as a radio news and sport report /Producer.

Hope you are still ready to offer advice.

I am producing a multitrack Of 10 voices, all of which are independently recorded in separate locations. They are recorded by individuals while they listen (On headphones)to the professional version of the song. Rock choir I believe does this.

My voluntary project is with a folk choir workshop.

I can synchronise the beginning and end of tracks using tempo. However, there are numerous occasions during each of the ten voices that they are late starting a phrase or early finishing, or whatever. Random!

They are all amateur singers and unfamiliar with click track (I am only just learning about it myself)

My method at the moment is to tweak each individual track by removing a nanosecond of silence or Creating a break and moving the track on a nanosecond.
This seems very Heath Robinson! However it has worked quite well so far, but I am determined to improve.

Having watched a number of your Excellent videos, and listened to advice from others, I wonder if my best move might be to supply all our singers with the following:

1 Professional singer track.

2. Click track.

3. Professional singer/click track combination

Do you think This might help them provide me with a much better synchronised track throughout its duration?

Sorry to go on at length – as a journalist I should know better!!

Best wishes and many thanks for all your videos. Cheers Andrew Sent from my iPhone

[libertygal]

This was so helpful!! It was just the information I was looking for. :-)

[RaysAstrophotography]

I use this software once in a while. Very good one.

[NoirL.A.]

do you know how to separate out drums from a recording? there's tons of tutorials on how to separate vocals but none for drums. i did it with 2 other songs succesfully (my tunes) but there's one more i wanna do and i can't for the life of me remember how i did it. the recordings are mono signle track (guitar, bass, drums) but i did it somehow and like the results but can't remember how i did so.

[peternapoliello]

Not a good explanation. Way too confusing.