I'd like to go over some of the concepts behind cutting music and where I come from as a musician and how that's translated to video editing. Because I really do think that's behind a lot of my success in video editing is just knowing how music works and how to use it to my advantage. So we've been over song structure, we've been over basic music terminology, and we've been over the waveform. So let's just jump right in here and check out some things I would do with just about any track depending on what video I have. Let's give a quick listen to this track. Okay, so even from the waveform, you can tell this parts loud, this part soft, as hard as loud as part soft and when we listen we can quickly tell that the loud parts have drums and the soft part doesn't.

So immediately think about your video. What is your video? What's the mood of it? who's trying to reach? And what style Are you intending to use to convey your message to that audience. If I were to be cutting a trailer right now, where I'd wanted to build trailers build and build throughout the, they hook you in and then they rise up in tension.

Now this is not trailer music. But I use the idea of trailer music throughout many different videos. And that's just starting off slowly. And not even slowly starting off low in energy, and ramping it up ramping it up. And either finishing the video on the highest note or bringing it back down for closing message. And so there's this sort of this arc that I found, and that comes all from the music.

So here's how I would edit this track. If I wanted to edit to build instead of starting where the track starts where it kicks in. With the drums right away, I would start on the soft part. So right here, this is the first beat of the bridge, or the interlude or the verse or whatever you want to call it is just the different section of the music. Make sure you get your playhead as close as you can to the beginning of that note, and by our work with the waveform, we can tell this is exactly where that piano chord starts, needs zoom all the way in that C to cut it, hit v to get back to your mouse. Zoom out using the minus key and let's save this for later.

Now we can move this to the front and this is how our video would start now Now the tempo is rising a bit. We're building the drums kick. And again, this isn't trailer music, but it's the idea of starting slowly and working your way up. Depending on the track you find whether you're getting it from a stock library or from YouTube, whatever, wherever you're getting this music, you're going to start recognizing themes in the song structure. Either the intro will be soft, or there'll be some bridge in the middle, that soft and use that to your advantage when you're cutting videos, because it can make for more dynamics. The more variation you have, the less bored your viewer gets and the more opportunity you create for your self to do cooler cuts and cooler edits because the more times the music changes It gives you impact moments.

Like right when the right when the drums kick in here. So right on that first kick drum that's a great chance for an impactful text or impactful footage. And the more times you have variation, the more opportunities for cool things you have on the video side. And so part of the part of the concepts behind cutting music is giving yourself as many cool opportunities as possible. If you're able to make the music as exciting and fresh as you can, then all the visuals on top are just a bonus. Now let's take a look if we were maybe editing sizzle reel, or something for social media for a company and they wanted high impact right away We would probably just start with the beginning of the track.

So let's say, let's see, we have upbeat for about 22 seconds, and then it gets into the bridge. What if it was a 45 second piece, and they didn't want this drop off. Or maybe you don't because you think it might hold energy too much. So then you do another cut. Let's see what we can do here to just skip the section. You know, I'm going to cut on that same cord.

Isn't this the start of measure. Now let's go skip over here and see maybe we can even come in halfway here. As the base comes in, now we can delete this delete this and see what happens here. And that way we've eliminated any downtime and the low period and we are really conforming the edit the music itself to the Edit to lend itself to what we're trying to accomplish.