Sony Acid - Chopper Tool

The chopper is an extremely useful tool if you're remixing music. I've give you the verbage of what the chopper tool can be used for and what i use it for. With the Chopper, you can take a whole song and dice it up and spit out the pieces of the track in the order you want. This allows you to totally rearrange the song how ever you please. you could do this on the main view but it is much more difficult beause it doesn't leave the original track intact. It also allows you to easily, with one mouse click, re-insert that same segment into the workspace over and over again without interfering with your orginal track overlay.

Sony Acid - Volume Indicator (redline)

One important factor to keep an eye on are the volume settings, especially the Master Volume level. You never want the Master volume indicator to redline while playing your track because it will mean an ugly sounding track once you render it. The appropriate setting all depends on what each volume setting you have on your tracks but I personally think that -7 for most track is appropriate and a Master Volume setting of ~18. Keep an eye on the redline indicator just above the Master Volume setting. If it hits, that means that you have to lower it a bit until it comes off of the redline.

Sony Acid - Using 'Bus'

Its a good idea to know how to use the Bus on Acid. They control the volume settings per set of tracks or just a track. The useful thing about them is that you can assign several tracks to one Bus and then apply the FX Animations on just the bus and it will affect all the track assigned to it instead of assign the same FX animations to all the multiple tracks. If you're making a complicated piece including many many instruments and tracks then this is useful. If you're splicing together several tracks for a longer compilation then this isn't as useful. Watch out on your Master Volume though. Don't let it peak. I will discuss about that another time. nmsRemix

Sony Acid - PreEdited Loops

There's a vast source of Sony Loops out there that you can get your hands on to add to your remixes or to enhance it. One way of getting them is by going to www.isohunt.com - This is a torrent download site and you will need Bitcomet to download these files. You can also get some from Sony.com but it might cost you a lil bit. If you require more explaination about Bitcomet, check out www.nmsRemix.com which is still under construction but will be up and running in a week from this post date. Check in soon.

Sony Acid - Visual Tutorials

I have been doing a lil searching on the web found that www.YouTube.com has a pretty descent video tutorial on some of the function of Sony Acid. Some of the videos show you how to remix tracks, make your own mixed beats and a swath of other things that will be quite useful to you all. Check it out.

Sony Acid - Extending Track Beats

One thing I found extremely useful is the ability to extend one or both of the tracks during transitions to allow for a smooth change. This is mostly helpful if you're not just remixing a track but are compiling a long club sequence for later play. When you transition between track, it helps to copy one playing track's background beats and repaste it at the end several times to extend just the beats and smoothly introduce the second track's elements. You simply do this by copying and pasting from the same track. Its easier to manage when you create a new plank track to past the copied section onto.

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Sony Acid - Optimal Rendering Volume

From the last couple years of using Sony Acid, I found that there is such a thing as the best setting of the volume. If you render the song with too low of a volume setting than you will have a hard time turning up the volume when playing it. If its too loud, it gets distorted when you play it later on. I, personally, think that the best volume is:

Track Volume setting: -7.0
Master Volume Setting: +17.0

Try that, perfect sound quality and volume setting!

Sony Acid - Isolating Vocals from comlete music tracks

This is very very difficult to do. There are only a couple of ways I know how to obtain the vocals from any track. The easiest is to see if you can download the acapella version of the song from the web and I can tell where to look if you're interested. If you got to this page from my main page, it should've instructed you on how to download what you need. The other option that I know of is to use Software with vocal isolation algorithms and one that I've used before is quite a popular one, Sony Sound Forge. I don't use it much, only because it is a very complicated an technical program to use. It is used for mainly for sound editing, so if you're an audio engineer, you're probably fly at it. Even though you manage to isolate most of the vocals with it, you will not be able to eliminate all the music from the background. They are just not as noticeabe but low enough to be drowned out by your new Music Overlay. An easy way to mix vocals from a track with beats from another one is to simply Enable the mid and low frequency filters to reduce the mid and low sounds. Now you mainly have vocals and whatever is left - usually but not always.

Sony Acid - Coyping beats from songs

Its a very simple thing, to copy the beats from most your favorite songs. This is how you do it. You move your audio file from your file management window onto your ACID workspace and the software will render it's Graphical depiction of the song. All you need to do then is to find a short segment of the track where it lacks vocals, but you need atleast 1 full Measure or one complete loop of the background music. As you all may know, most background beats are just 8 or 16 beats relooped over and over again with some variations to form a track's background beats. Once you've found the segment, copy it and create a new line of audio file on the workspace just by right clicking and inserting a new audio file then paste it onto the new track. Copy it and repaste over and over for the desired duration. Listen to it and make sure that your relooping of the segment is one continious flow without any noticeable interruption. Once you've got that perfected, delete the original track from the workspace you copied the loop from leaving just your newly formed non vocal background music track. Render it as an mp3 file and there you go. you can now go and use it for whatever mixing you choose to.