📝 Here's the power to end a song whenever you want...

We’ve all been there as editors. We find the perfect track only to find out it’s too long for the section of the edit we want to place it in.

What do we do?

If we’re just starting out, we may just make the track as long as we need it then fade it out.

As we advance, we may learn to use dialogue or sound effects to motivate the fade and cut of the music.

But we still never really learned how to manipulate music.

This technique will teach you just that. It’s one of my favorite, but can be hard to get right. Even I still go easy level and fade out tracks sometimes cause I can’t get this technique to work right.

The 5 Steps

Step 1 - Mark You Music

In your music cue, mark all the beats you can. Sometimes there is software that can help like BeatEdit for DaVinci Resolve. Otherwise you’ll have to go the old fashioned way of tapping your fingers to get the beat.

Step 2 - Cut Before A Major Beat

When you prepare your music to be ended, you want to find the nearest major beat and cut right before it in the waveform. This beat serves as a motivator to end the song on.

Step 3 - Extending the clip, but not the song

So now you have the beat you want to end on, but you still have the rest of the song. Well here’s what you do.

You need to create a compound clip, add a blank clip or audio on top of the main beat you want to end on and extend it out as far as you’d like.

Next keyframe the end beats audio to go from 100% to the lowest it can go.

Go back to the main timeline for the next step.

Step 4 - Adding Reverb to End The Song

Lastly, to the compound clip you just created, add a reverb effect and set the effect to cathedral. By doing this you’ll be able to expand the compound clip and see how the reverb came out.

I hope this helps you edit your music better. If there is another technique you’d like me to cover, please let me know. 🙂