Take it to the next LEVEL

If you’re frustrated with pure mic audio and want to make your soundtrack more flashy, you can use clever tricks to add positional sound. For instance, if you have multiple people taking turns to speak, or perhaps sound effects like tyres squealing or gunshots, you can isolate these sounds by copying them into a new track and muting their presence in the original source. Then in the new track, you can simply use the pan slider to assign their position within the stereo landscape.

Techniques like these can even create stereo tracks out of old mono sound sources. This can get tricky when multiple sounds play at once, but clever use of EQ and techniques like vocal isolation (or vocal removal) can help cut out other noises and focus on the sound you’re trying to isolate.

The truly ambitious might try a surround sound conversion.

Audacity’s interface isn’t really built to handle surround sound – the GUI is designed around mono and stereo – but creating surround tracks is possible nonetheless. Although we won’t be showing how to make surround mixes in this issue (there are plenty of Youtube tutorials on this if you want to know more), we will give you one tip to get started.

Enable ‘Use Custom Mix’ in the Import/export tab of Preferences, which opens a new mixing menu when your export your work. However, don’t do this if you’re only going to work in stereo, as it will greatly complicate your workflow. And as always, remember to keep a backup version of your original audio!