[ardour-users] can ardour help?

[vanDongen/Gilcher]

On Thursday 17 March 2005 20:00, Aaron wrote:
>
> Working with another engineer we were sweating donkeys to find
> suitable sounds and massage them to do what we wanted, it was a major
> pain. Assuming I can find the sounds I want (this is very hard also) I
> need some way of easily finding them and being able to try them and
> discard them easily.
>

Don't know if it helps, but here is how I work for similar projects:

I make a session with a lot of tracks. 
I import/embed the sounds the I want.
I put them all on the top couple of tracks ordered roughly by type.
So I have a track with all scrap-metal sounds, a track with all plastic bag 
sounds, a water-dripping/toilet flushing track .Etc.
Possibly copy the regions a couple of times per track, so you don't have to 
scroll to the beginning when you are working on something at 19 minutes and 
the sounds you want are at the beginning.(Often these sounds are so short 
that they are next to ungrabable when you zoom out to session.)

These tracks are muted, or even set to "inactive" so they are a visual audio 
region list.
Cut/trim them all in the right shape.
Using either "listen" mode, or the "." keyboard shortcut you can audition any 
selected region.
Ctrl-drag what you need to your working tracks. This makes a copy to work 
with. And you always have the sounds in your "data"-tracks. 

Then it is just cut copy drag trim , adding plugins, automations, etc. etc. 
All in your work tracks.
Export regions to put them through non realtime manipulations.
Import the result again.

For me the best thing is to use a lot of tracks. Ardour can handle it easily, 
and even if you only have 4 basic sounds going, I find it a lot easier to 
work with the overlaps and controlling the fades and plugins it I spread it 
out. But then I like lots of white-space in score-layouts as well.

Still, this kind of work takes a lot of time. But remember, the musique 
concrete composers of the early fifties did it all with 2 tape recorders and 
a razor blade. And I think you can hear the time investment.

regards

Gerard

PS
Actually formalizing this kind of work, where you have a region repository as 
a non scrolling "track" above or below the scroll bar would be a cool 
feature.
Won't happen for a while, but I'll keep it in mind.