I typically will shorten songs down to about 3 minutes, via cutting out sections of the song. I try to do it in such a way that you'd never know it if you didn't know the original version of the song well.
The hardest example I have done this to was Go Fish's Little Drummer Boy. I cut this down from almost 5 minutes to about 3:15 last year, and was really pleased with it. This song was particularly difficult because each verse tells part of the story, so I couldn't just cut out a verse or two like I would normally do. Also, the bridge sections between verses is what makes that version of the song really cool (IMHO) so I didn't want to lose those either. What I ended up doing was speeding up the tempo by about 20%, and cutting little bits and pieces off of each bridge section. I was really pleased with the final product -- in fact when I hear the 'real' version now it sounds too slow to me!
Anyway, back to your question, I've also made a bunch of 30-second-ish "bumper spots" that play between songs. Each one is based on a different Christmas TV/Movie (e.g. Polar Express, Charlie Brown, NLCV, etc). It gives some promo info for our website and display, interspersed with quotes and music from the movie/special. We got a lot of nice comments about these this past year, and I hope to extend this for next year. I'll have to upload an example or two and link them here when I get home.
-Tim
P.S. I now do all this work in Audacity as well.
Last edited on Tuesday April 8th, 2008 07:45 pm by tfischer
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Tim Fischer
http://www.plymouthlights.com
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