Working with regions

Sections of audio are called regions in Ardour. To compose the short rhythmic passage we’ve been working on, we will need to know how to select, move, split and trim these regions, as well as how to fade in or fade out their volume and create crossfades between them. Some of these options may need to happen at specific edit points in the composition, or according to the musical meter we can define with the timeline and the grid as well.

Selecting Regions

The Grab mode (G shortcut) is the tool to select and move objects. It is located just below the transport menu in the Editor window (the little “hand” icon). You will use this tool a lot in your Ardour work.

When it is active, your mouse pointer will look like a little hand icon.

Try all of the operations below, for practice:

• Click on the waveform of the region to select it. Click and drag on a region to move it around (left and right within the same track, but also up and down onto other tracks).

• Use Ctrl+Click to create and drag around a copy of the region.

• You can select multiple regions by holding the Shift key while clicking on each region you want to select.

• You can also drag a selection box over multiple regions to select them all.

• Move multiple regions at the same time after selecting them.

• You can select several sequential regions on one track all at once by holding down the Shift key while selecting the first and the last regions of the sequence (copy a few regions on the same track to try this out).

• When you select a single region, make sure to click on the waveform section of its rectangle. The lower stripe with the region name is used for a different action (see the Trimming Regions section below).

• Use the Del key to delete selected regions.

• Standard copy (Ctrl+C), cut (Ctrl+X), and paste (Ctrl+V) operations also work with regions.

Moving Regions

While moving a region, a timecode will appear on the screen in yellow numbers. This timecode is the region’s starting point on the timeline. The unit of this timecode is the same as the unit of the primary clock, which you can change by right-clicking on the clock and choosing a new unit (Minutes:Seconds, Bars:Beats, etc).

You can move regions horizontally (sideways) to a different point in time on the same track, or you can move the selected region vertically (up or down) to a different track.

When a set of one or more regions is selected, you can move the whole set by dragging with the mouse.

Duplicating Regions

In addition to Ctrl+Click+Drag and standard copy/paste, Ardour offers other handy ways to duplicate regions. Use the Grab mode (select/move objects) to select one or more regions, then use the Duplicate function to make one or more copies (menu Regions > Duplicate). Three options are available:

• Duplicate (shortcut Alt+D): make a copy of the selected region on the same track, immediately after the original.

• Multi-Duplicate (shortcut Shift+D): make multiple copies of the selected region at once (same track, in sequence). You can specify the number of duplications.

• Fill Track: make as many copies of the selected region as needed to fill the entire track, all the way up to the End marker on the timeline.

In the following screenshot, regions have been duplicated using the methods above.

Using Edit Points

When you use the standard copy/cut/paste commands, where exactly will the regions be pasted? The exact location is determined by the edit point drop-down menu.

If Mouse is selected as the edit point, the copied region will be pasted at the current position of the mouse.

If Playhead is selected as the edit point, the copied region will be pasted at the red playhead line on the same track where the original region is.

Finally, if Marker is selected as the edit point, then the copied region will be pasted immediately after the currently selected location marker.

Markers

It is very useful to be able to tag different locations in a session for later use when editing and mixing. Ardour supports several ways for doing this. The most common method is using location markers, which define specific positions in time.

Location markers can be added to the timeline by right-clicking on the Location Markers strip and selecting Add New Location Marker. If you don’t see the Location Markers strip, right-click on the timeline and select it to make it visible. Location markers can also be selected with the mouse and moved to new positions. Right-clicking on a location marker lets you rename the marker, among other options.

Splitting Regions

To split a region simply means to divide a single region into two independent regions. There are two ways of accomplishing this:

• You can use the Cut mode (C shortcut) to point and click anywhere you want to split; or

• You can stay in the Grab mode and use the S shortcut (for “Split”). In this last case, the point at which a region will be split depends on the currently selected edit point. If Mouse is selected as your current edit point, select a region and place the cursor at the point you would like to Split, then type S" (same as going to menu Edit > Split/Separate).

After being split, the original single region becomes two independent regions, with a new name for each, as in the image above. The two new regions are now entirely independent. You can move and edit them separately.

Regions can also be split by using the playhead or a marker as the edit point.

The split regions will receive a name derived from the original name of its parent region, and you will see this reflected in your regions list. For example, in the image above, you see two regions called pink.15 and pink.16, which means they were split from a parent region called “pink” (not shown in image).

Trimming Regions

If you move the cursor near the left or right side edge of a region, you will see that the pointer becomes an arrow. Click and drag inwards from either end of the region, and the region will be shortened accordingly. This is called trimming the region. Regions can be trimmed from the start of the region (drag from left to right at the edge) or from the end (drag from right to left).

This action is non-destructive: no audio is actually being deleted. It is as if you were just “hiding” those portions of the region that you don’t want or don’t need anymore. Later on, you can “un-trim” the region (i.e., extend it back to its original full size), even if it has been moved or copied to a new track.

Deleted Regions

Because Ardour is non-destructive, the regions you have deleted from tracks are not completely removed from the session. They can always be accessed again from the region list on the far right side of the Editor window (Regions can be dragged from the list onto any tracks).

Creating Fades in Regions

A fade is a change in the volume of a region, either as the region starts or as it ends. A fade at the start of the region is a fade in, and at the end of a region it is a fade out. Each region has two small handles along the top corners, which can be dragged inwards from either edge to create a fade in or fade out. The screenshot below shows a fade in (indicated by the shaded area).

In fact, every region has a fade in and fade out built-in. By default, the region fade is very short and serves to avoid clicks in the transitions at the start and end of the region. By adjusting the regions fade length as shown above, a more gradual transition can be accomplished.

By right-clicking on one of the fades (the shaded area), the speed of the fade can also be adjusted.

Crossfading Between Two Regions

When one region fades out while another fades in, this is called a crossfade. If the two regions are in different tracks, you can use the method described above with the fade in and fade out handles. The following screenshot shows an example.

However, if both regions are in the same track, you need to overlap them in order to create a crossfade. When regions overlap on the same track, Ardour treats them as layers, that is, one of the regions is considered to be on top of the other. The important rule to understand is:

The fade in (or fade out) of the topmost region represents the crossfade between the two regions.

Once you understand this principle, it’s easy to create and control crossfades between regions. Here’s an example. The two separate regions seen below will be made to overlap in order to create a crossfade.

Note that we did not add any extra fade out to the first region, but we did add a longer fade in to the second region. Then we drag the second region partly on top of the first:

The fade in of the second region works now as the crossfade between the two regions. In other words, the first region will fade out in a mirror image way as the second region fades in.

In order for this to work, though, we need to make sure that the region that has the desired fade is on top in Ardour’s layering system. In order to change layering of regions, select a region and go to the menu Region > Layering.

The difference may be hard to hear if you are doing this with the very short percussive sounds we imported earlier. To really hear the effect, import a couple of longer samples to try it out (for example, a sample of rain sounds, and another of a human voice). Overlap several seconds of your long samples on the same track. You will hear the difference as you move the second region to the bottom (Lower to Bottom), and then back to top (Raise to Top). When it’s on top, we will hear the desired crossfade. When it’s at the bottom, we will hear no crossfade, just an abrupt change from first to second region (assuming your first region has no fade out specified, as in the screenshots above).

Using Grid Settings

Experiment with the Grid Mode setting, as discussed in the Setting Up the Timeline chapter, to give different kinds of quantization — in other words, to constrain the boundaries of each region to certain grid points. Here, the grid has been activated and set to Beats/16, to quantize the regions to sixteenth notes within each bar. You may wish to trim the endpoints of some of the samples, as discussed above, to fit within the metric structure you have set up.

Continuing

In the next chapter, we will explore a few more things you can do with regions

Next: FURTHER REGION OPERATIONS