somehow messed up my songs with reverb

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I’m using Audacity 2.3.0 on Windows 10.

I’m a fairly new user of Audacity. Yesterday I recorded these three songs that you can see/hear on my site in this folder:

http://suzann.com/music/clips/help/

  1. Tonight You Belong To Me
  2. Tracks of My Tears
  3. Top of the World

The first song is fine.
The second two have distortion or a fuzzy sound throughout. They sounded great until I mixed them. It was only after I mixed them that I heard that distorted sound.

The only difference in my recording of the 3 songs is that I turned down some of the reverb for the other two. How could that make it sound fuzzy, and why didn’t it show up before it was mixed?

Here’s what the reverb looks like in my Audacity
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/reverb.html

I didn’t know it had presets, or I would have used those. But anyway, I just moved the levers on the right back a little to cut down on the amount of reverb. This is what I used to do in Cool Edit Pro. What did I do wrong?

Please help…thanks!

Suzanne

2

The problem is that the mix is too loud. This has caused the peaks to be clipped off, resulting in that nasty distorted sound (see the flat tops / bottoms where the blue waveform smashes into the top / bottom of the track).

First Track000.png
When working with multiple tracks, it’s a good idea to mix the tracks before you export:

  1. “Ctrl + A” to select all tracks
  2. “Tracks menu > Mix > Mix and Render”

Then, before exporting, normalize to about -1 dB (see: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/normalize.html)

If you wish to retain the Audacity project for possible additional editing later, “undo” (Ctrl + Z) until you get back to separate tracks, and then save the project. If you save the project after it is all mixed down to one track, it will not be possible to edit / process the vocal track separately from the backing track.

3

Thanks so much for your help!