greetings everyone, i'm wondering how important this is. on a vox track there are always spaces between lines, what i've always done is create clips where there are words then split at the end of whatever i'm singing, then drag the dead space over to the next set of words, then after that set of words repeat the process until the end. then i lasso the track then use the trimming tool then use bounce to clips so i have one track again.
now, there are 2 questions, does anyone think it's a waste of time? because i do this on multiple tracks at the same time and it's very tedious and time consuming. also, question 2 is, i notice with platinum when i hold control and highlight multiple tracks sometimes a automation bar appears, real annoying. i think the problem with that lies where i click on a particular track/clip.
am i making any sense?
i would appreciate any thoughts on this.
thanks
jp 

Hmmm...I must admit I'm not at all sure I understand your post correctly. As there needs to be the same space between vocal clips anyway (as they follow the music), when you bounce to clips the total clip length is the same in any case...? Are you talking about slip editing the end of a vocal clip to reach the beginning of the next vocal clip??
 
Anyway...what is the purpose of this method of yours? What do you achieve?
 

If I understand what you are doing (and I may well not!), if you are trimming clips between phrases to remove, for example, any background noise in your vocal take, then there is no point in then extending and bouncing the clips. Just trim and leave spaces in between.
 
If you have multiple clips and just want to join them, just select them all and use bounce to clip.
 
 

Joey, if you're asking:
1.  if it's a waste of time
2.  to trim the part of the track where there are no vocals
3.  to reduce any possible unwanted noise that might become part of the sound floor of your track,
 
that really depends on what your background noise is/might be. I've had tracks where I trimmed as you described after hearing noise I felt was too imposing when I listened back. Other times where I just left it as is.
 
But I'd say I do trim it most of the time. As an experiment, I gave 2 versions of the same vocal track — one with the non-vocal space trimmed out and one with the quiet room left in — to a very experienced mixing engineer to compare, and he said he didn't think it would make any difference in the mix.
 
But he did say this as well: if the song would have been a very quiet, single guitar with vocal, that trimming might actually be worse depending on what kind of ambiance was ultimately desired, as the sound floor if trimmed out, might sound "on and off" and odd.

I'm not sure if I understand the original post, but if it's basically asking "do your clips continue when there is no useful audio information there" then no - I split/cut/trim clips so that when the instrument is not playing, there is no clip there. Not just on vocals, but on everything. Within reason, of course - on drums, I wouldn't split between every snare hit, but I would commonly split between tom hits (as they're so sparse).

I used to do that, trim the clips to remove all dead space, but in my mind, whatever background noise is present (which should be fairly minimal if it was recorded properly) can actually add to the "feel" of a recording.
The descent from background noise to digital silence may not be appropriate in a lot of cases and can sound fake and also slightly disconcerting.
 
For these reasons, I'm a fan of using volume automation to reduce the levels of the audio between clips so that you retain some element of the background noise but at a low enough level to not detract from the overall sound of the track.
 
Obviously this has to be considered carefully on a case by case basis - I would employ a different strategy for high gain guitar work than for vocals, for example.

Sure, I write metal, so everything there is expected to be hyper-edited. I wouldn't slip edit overheads or a drum ambient/room track, but for everything else, background noise is something to remove.

If the purpose is just to remove a threshold of background noise during the gaps, rather than spend time editing and creating multiple clips why not just insert a gate? The build-in Sonitus/Cakewalk ones will do the job.  If you want to lay the vox out so you can move individual phrases around or copy them, then editing in the way you describe makes good sense to me.

I'd say that the idea is good, but it depends on how short the vocal phrases are.  If it's literally only a second or two between phrases, then obviously it's kind of pointless.  But, if it's a song where the vocal phrases are more sparse and there's some instrumental stuff going on between the phrases, then it makes more sense in my opinion....

Visually it makes sense to split into smaller clips, not just for vocals but all instruments.  You can get an overall feel for what is happening in a song very easily just by looking at it.
 
As far as the audio is concerned it's easier just to add automation,  I tend to automate the clip gain rather than output volume to ensure no noise is fed to pre-fader FX...