How to Cut Your Own First Dance Song
September 29th, 2008 @ 3:05 pm by Mrs. Avocado
Ask and ye shall receive, my friends. It’s DIY week for me, and I couldn’t be more excited to share the following projects with you. I wish I had five, because that would a be a complete workweek of projects, and it’s just a nice number, but I only have four. I am busy, so I might not even get them all posted this week. But they are going to be good ones. Well obviously I think they are, or I wouldn’t be posting them. 
Let’s begin with my tutorial on how to cut your own first dance. Mr. Avocado and I will be dancing to “Meet Me By The Water” by Rachel Yamagata, but it has this 50 second intro we would have to wait through. Plus we don’t really feel like fox trotting around for four whole minutes.
Before you begin, you will need to download the program Goldwave.
You can find it here. It’s free for limited use (like cutting your first dance song!) and un-installs cleanly.
Your song needs to be in MP3 format. If it is in a protected format, burn it to a CD (choose the “audio CD” option using iTunes) and then re-import the song back onto your computer. Now you have your previously protected unusable song in MP3 format.
Open up the Goldwave program, and go to File > Open, then browse through your computer files to find the MP3 version of your song.
Your song will open up and look somewhat like this. The waves can look intimidating at first, but you just have to remember that whenever the sound is louder, the waves are larger. All of those really small waves at the beginning are what I want to cut out (it’s the 50 second intro).
On the far left and right sides there are blue bars. I clicked on the left side, held the mouse button down, and dragged the blue band over to the right so that everything I wanted to keep would be highlighted.
I then went up to the toolbar and clicked on the trim button (the yellow arrows are pointing to it). This will eliminate everything that isn’t inside of the blue bars and highlighted.
Now, the beginning started really abruptly and I needed to have it fade in. I grabbed the bar on the right side and dragged it over until it highlighted the area I wanted to fade in. I selected fade in on the toolbar, and presto! I had some beautiful fade in action.
After all of this work, I wanted the song to be even shorter, so I decided to take out all of her singing in the beginning. I dragged the blue bars from the left and right side to highlight the area I wanted to eliminate and hit the “trim” button again.
This left me with an awkward break, so I highlighted the awkwardness and used the fade out button to help tone the transition down a little.
Now my song was complete. I went to File, chose Save As, and made sure to put “First Dance” in front of the file name so I knew which song was the cut one.
This is what the original song sounded like:
This is what I came up with*:
I think it sounds really natural, and none of our guests will even know I did a little home doctoring to shorten the length (although I might cut it down even more, since I think it is still really long).
Did you attempt to cut your own first dance song?
Please leave any questions or concerns you might have in the comments, I wou