Fade (audio engineering)
Professional turntablists and DJs in hip hop music use faders on a DJ mixer, notably the horizontal crossfader, in a rapid fashion while simultaneously manipulating two or more record players (or other sound sources) to create scratching and develop beats.
Club DJs in house music and techno use DJ mixers, two or more sound sources (two record players, two iPods, etc.)
[2] Gustav Holst's "Neptune, the mystic", part of the orchestral suite The Planets written between 1914 and 1916, is another early example of music having a fade-out ending during performance.
[4] Although commonplace today, the effect bewitched audiences in the era before widespread recorded sound—after the initial 1918 run-through, Holst's daughter Imogen (in addition to watching the charwomen dancing in the aisles during "Jupiter") remarked that the ending was "unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women's voices growing fainter and fainter ... until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence".
With the advent of electrical recording, smooth and controllable fadeout effects could be easily achieved by simply reducing the input volume from the microphones using the fader on the mixing desk.
[6] An 1894 78 rpm record called "The Spirit of '76" features a narrated musical vignette with martial fife-and-drum that gets louder as it nears the listener, and quieter as it moves away.
The segue allowed for longer songs (such as Count Basie's "Miss Thing"), symphonies and live concert recordings.
However, shorter songs continued to use the fade-out for unclear reasons—for example, Fred Astaire's movie theme "Flying Down to Rio" (1933).
Fade-ins and fade-outs are often used as cinematic devices that begin and end scenes; film language that developed at the same time as these early recordings.
Some examples of this are "Helter Skelter" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" by The Beatles,[9] "Suspicious Minds" by Elvis Presley,[10] "Shine On Brightly" by Procol Harum, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" by The Smiths,[11] "Thank You" by Led Zeppelin,[9] "In Every Dream Home A Heartache" by Roxy Music, "It's Only Money, Pt.
2" by Argent, "The Great Annihilator" by Swans, "(Reprise) Sandblasted Skin" by Pantera, "Illumination Theory" and "At Wit's End" by Dream Theater, "Future" by Paramore, "Doomsday" by MF Doom, "Outro" by M83, "Cold Desert" by Kings of Leon, and "The Edge Of The World" by DragonForce.
In 2003, on the (now-defunct) website Stupid Question, John Ruch listed the following recordings as possible contenders:[12] Bill Haley's cover version of "Rocket 88" (1951) fades out to indicate the titular car driving away.
In fact, The Supremes had used this effect on their single "Come See About Me", issued a little over a month before "Eight Days a Week".More recently: "At the meta-song level, the prevalence of pre-taped sequences (for shops, pubs, parties, concert intervals, aircraft headsets) emphasizes the importance of flow.
The effect on radio pop programme form [is] a stress on continuity achieved through the use of fades, voice-over links, twin-turntable mixing and connecting jingles.
[15] A listener's interest can be withdrawn from a sound that is faded at the lower end since the ear accepts a more prompt rounding off.
A linear fade-in curve makes it sound as though the volume increases sharply at the beginning, and more gradually towards the end.
The same principle applies on a fade-out where a gradual drop in volume can be perceived in the beginning, and the fade gets more abrupt towards the end.
Because of the initial drop in perceived volume, the linear shape is ideal if there is a natural ambience or reverb present in the audio.
[18] This curve more closely matches human hearing, with finer control at lower levels, increasing dramatically past the 50% point.
Traditional S-curve fade-in has attributes of the exponential curve can be seen at the beginning; at the midpoint to the end it is more logarithmic in nature.
In the perfect case, the crossfade would keep a constant output level, an important quality for a club DJ who is creating a seamless mix of dance tracks for dancers or a radio DJ seeking to avoid "dead air" (silence) between songs, an error that can cause listeners to change channels.
[21] This type of crossfade is quite subtle depending on the proportion of the received note velocity value of the loud and soft sample.
However the earliest commercial documented example was designed by Richard Wadman, one of the founders of the British company Citronic.
Many equal power shapes have the property that the midpoint of the mix provides an amplitude multiplier of 0.707 (square root of one half) for both signals.
[26][27][28] Equal power shapes typically have the sum of their curves (in the middle of the mix range) exceeding the nominal maximum amplitude (1.0), which may produce clipping in some contexts.
[29] The advantage of working with mix automation is that only one engineer can perform the job with minimal effort;[29] it can be set up or recorded beforehand to make it even simpler.
[16] An example of this is when Ken Hamman installed linear faders that made it possible for him to alter several channels with one hand while mixing, thus he assumed an interactive role in the process of recording.
[22] In live sound reinforcement, this is useful for stage monitor mixes where changes in the Front of House channel levels would distract the musicians.
In recording and post production, configuring a send to be pre-fader allows the amount of audio sent to the aux bus to remain unaffected by the individual track fader, thus not disturbing the stability of the feed that is being sent to the musicians.
[32] When the mixer is equipped with VU meters, the PFL allows to visually monitor an audio source without hearing it and adjust its input gain.
