Introduction to Adobe Audition

Adobe Audition can be rather intimidating, as most Adobe Suite applications are. This is one part of Adobe that is rarely taught in schools and if it is it usually correlates with Premiere. Despite seeming like more of an add on than the main course Audition is worth learning.

Here is what Adobe Audition looks like when you first click on it through your applications on your computer.

From there a screen like this will pop up, this is where you would name your new piece. You can browse your computer and choose where you’d like it saved.

From there, this is the main page where you will be combining songs and editing multiple tracks at once. You can mute tracks, turn them up, turn them down, combine them, etc. This is where you should be spending most of your time.

This window is for the waveform of a track. This will give you a much more in depth look at the particular track you’re working on.

I circled in blue where you will click to pull access songs stored on your computer. You can access them through iTunes, any song on your desktop or through an external hard drive.

After shifting through the songs I have saved I decided to click on an instrumental version of “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry. After selecting it the song will pop up on the left hand side underneath the name of the mashup we’re working on. If you click and drag it to the right it will fit under any of the tracks listed. You can rename them, rearrange them, add and delete any number of them.

To layer songs what you’ll want to do is drag another song into the mashup and put it beneath the original song you placed.

In this window I’m listening to both tracks I expanded the top bar so that way I can see just how long the second track I selected is and I changed the sound so that way the vocals only song is slightly quieter than the instrumental song.

Because the vocals only song I selected, “Here’s To Never Growing Up” by Avril Lavigne, is longer than “Teenage Dream” I dragged the song to the right top corner shortening it. Make sure when you do this you grab where I circled so that way you maintain the song without chopping it off. If you simply drag it you’ll cut off the song but when you pull it correctly it will alter the song to fit the desired time. The other circle shows what was done to the song.

But let’s say you don’t like how it sounds when you drag it and would rather edit it by hand. Using the razor, circled at the top, you can cut songs into smaller bits and rearrange them as you please. You can simply line them up next to each other or lay them over one another. The circled yellow x shows where I laid one bit of a song over another, making a more smooth transition between the two cut bits.

Once you’re pleased with how your mashup sounds you can go ahead and export it. Here you can rename it, it shows you where it’s being saved to and how it’s being saved.

And finally, you have yourself your very own home-grown mashup.