Tuning Twisted Wave (and other) Keyboard Equivalents

Spend less time at the editing desk and more time in your booth.

Common steps buried in menus? Make your recording workflow more efficient.

Make your voiceover recording workflow more efficient by using keyboard equivalents to reduce your dependency on menus. With a few key changes, you can become quicker when editing projects or auditions.

While the mouse is an elegant interface for using computers, it can actually slow things down. If every time you want to “Save” a file, you reach for the mouse, click on the “File” menu and then scroll down to the “Save” command, that may seem like a minor movement, but those detours add up over the course of a day. Having basic commands “under your fingers” helps things move more efficiently when getting auditions out the door or keeping projects on schedule.

Core functions, which are the same in all programs, are good tasks to concentrate on first. That includes Save, Save As, Copy, Cut, Paste and (of course) Undo.  Other good ones to know include switching windows if you have multiple files open (typically “Command ~”), switching between different apps/programs (Command TAB) and Redo (Shift Command Z). All of those will let you cut down the amount of time you spend on projects.

To really tune your recording workflow, learn the fast keyboard equivalents inside Twisted Wave.  “F” for Amplify, “S” for Silence, “Shift-S” for Insert Silence have probably saved me hours of extra mouse moves.

There are some noticeable omissions. Normalize has no keystroke, nor does the Analyze function. Those get used a lot in my workflow and have always mocked me with their inaccessibility from the keyboard.

Luckily, Twisted Wave and many other DAW’s provide a way to tune this to your needs.

Down at the bottom of the Twisted Wave EDIT menu is a function called “Edit Keyboard Shortcuts…”  This lets you change or add specific keys (or key combinations) to almost anything which appears on the Twisted Wave menus (specifics for Audacity and Ocenaudio are in the “Notes” section at the end of this article.)

This is where you find it:

When you select “Edit Keyboard Shortcuts…”, a small menu will pop up on screen:

Then you simply select the menu item you wish to enhance… in this example, I’ll select “Analyze” because I use it frequently.

As you can see in the image below, it has no keyboard equivalent in the stock/default configuration:

When I select Analyze from the menu, this pops up –

I type “Option A” (holding down the Option key while pressing the “A” key).
And… voila!

Pressing Option A will now immediately open the Analyze tool.

Another useful way to use this is to assign a keystroke to specific Effects.  I mentioned “Normalize” earlier, it’s actually a Twisted Wave function, so it makes sense that you can assign a keystroke to it. But, you can also select any other effect which is loaded into your system. That means if you have Izotope RX tools, or other plug-ins which appear under the Effects menu, you can call them up from the keyboard rather than mousing your way through the Effects>Audio Units & VST>Flat List (three mouse layers down..ugh!)

Keep In Mind…

In order for this to be helpful, you have to actually remember these keyboard equivalents!

The first two I created when I first started using Twisted Wave were “Move to Selection Start” and “Move to Selection End” (which will also go all the way to the Start/End if nothing is selected). But I had forgotten about them because I didn’t use them regularly.

Start with things you use a lot. Only add one or two per week until you are comfortably using them on a regular basis. Then pay attention to those things which make you reach for the mouse or trackpad.

I particularly like the three keys above the RETURN/ENTER key – the “[“, “]” and “\”.  Because those aren’t used for much else and live very close to where my fingers are anyway, I reserve those for the three most used Effects.

My 13 most helpful Twisted Wave keyboard equivalents

These are the Twisted Wave tools which I use frequently enough to make it worth creating (and remembering!) the keystroke equivalent. The five I use most are Normalize, Mouth DeClick, Voice De-noise, Graphic EQ and Analyze. (Three of those are Effects – and depending upon the type of project I’m working with, I may swap out Voice De-noise for another Effect if I’m reaching for it frequently.)

Useful Stuff I found while poking around Twisted Wave menus

While digging through the details of the Twisted Wave menus, I came across these options and tools which tend to be forgotten, but are really powerful and functional:

Auto Mark Recordings / Auto Mark Cuts – These are on/off settings which can be helpful. The Auto Mark Recordings drops a Marker every time you hit “Record”.  If you are doing multiple takes in the same file, it makes it easy to find the Record start point of each one.

The Auto Mark Cuts can be helpful if you are working in the middle of a larger audio file and jumping back and forth between edits.

Remember that you can use these with the Markers Window and having “Auto play” checked to quickly jump between sections.

Move to Next Transient (uses the Tab key) – This looks for the next recorded sound in a file. If you have long chunks of silence in your recordings, or want to find a noise in a longer file, hitting the tab key will jump forward to the “next” sound. Sometimes this can be quicker than scrolling with the mouse/trackpad.

Crop (Command K)  – … I have forgotten about this more than once and it’s an exceptionally useful tool. It is the reverse of how I typically think of my audio files. Usually, I’m trimming what I don’t want – chopping off the head and tail of my file. But this lets you highlight what you do want and “crop” out everything else.

Center on Cursor (C) – This shifts the audio file so that the Cursor (the yellow vertical bar) is centered in the window. Provides a quick way to jump back to where the audio will start when you press play.
Zoom to Selection (Command-B) – When you have an area selected, this zooms the view so that it fills the screen. Good for immediately jumping to a high detail view if you are trying to clean up an edit or attempting to find a noise.

Set Up Keyboard Equivalents in Ocenaudio, Audacity or Audition

Ocenaudio

To set keyboard equivalents, go to Ocenaudio Preferences/Settings and select the “Key Bindings” tab. I imagine the first one you will update will be the “&Gain” tool so that you can just tap the “A” key to Amplify audio. Find the menu command and highlight it, then enter the keystroke you wish to use.

Audacity

To set keyboard equivalents, go to Audacity Preferences/Settings and select the Keyboard tab. Find the menu command and highlight it, then enter the keystroke you wish to use and save it.

Adobe Audition –

To set keyboard equivalents go to EDIT > Keyboard shortcuts. There’s a comprehensive help page here

Want to gain a deeper understanding of Twisted Wave in your recording/production environment? Would like to make your workflow more efficient? Set up a session or contact me with your questions.