If you're just joining us in our Yuletide tale, check out the previous stories of the Yulelads playing tricks on your tracks right here.

Today we have Bowl-Licker scurrying down the mountain to make a mess of your music productions.

As you would expect, his schtick is to sneak into your house and lick all the leftovers from those soup bowls you keep leaving around.

Unfortunately, when he gets into your studio he leaves a few leftovers for you in the form of annoying slurping noises in the background of your tracks.

So when you get to your studio today you discover that all those edits you did to your tracks prior to mixing were all for nothing!

You're back to square one and need to edit all your tracks over again, deleting silences between phrases, adding fades where needed, and removing any extraneous slurping noises you might hear throughout the process.

Here's a quick process you can use when you need to edit your tracks:

First of all, make sure you edit all your silences out. There's nothing more distracting to a vocal performance than the hum of a guitar amp. Once your silences have actually been silenced make sure all your instruments have been edited to the grooviest instrument in the song. If you're producing a human band then find the person who keeps the best time. This is usually the drummer but if he can't play for shit you should edit him as much as you can before you edit everyone else to the drums. Don't anally edit to the grid if it kills the feel of the performance. Use editing to enhance feel, not take it away. Find the intersection of excitement and technical precision. If you edit to a click track you will always sense when the performance is slightly off. If you silence the click and you can't notice the slight variation in tempo then don't worry about it. Only edit that which detracts from the enjoyment of listening to the performance.

Keep that in mind anytime you're editing a human performance and you'll end up with something exciting and fun.

For a complete run-through on how to edit like that, I show you all my methods in the Editing package of Quick Mixing.

Check it out here:

www.QuickMixing.com