Majormixing

In the old days of audio recording, when tape was the medium and pretty much everything was analog, you really had only your ears to rely on when recording and editing audio. Even in the early days of digital recording this was the case. Some may argue that that's how it was supposed to be. I can sort of see their point on one hand. But modern PC audio recording allows us to get our eyes involved as well as our ears, and I just think that is wicked cool!

These days, we can see the audio waves on a monitor and it is now possible to glean a LOT more information about the audio than using just one sense. This makes audio editing much faster. For example, it is and always has been a common practice to comp (short for composite) different takes of a performance into a single track consisting of all the best bits.

If you had 3 or more takes to choose from, you really had to take a LOT of notes, as in writing stuff down with a paper and pencil. I used to have a million pieces of paper everywhere with start and end times in minutes/seconds/milliseconds written down to identify a particular passage of audio. Using a mouse to drag and drop passages from one take to another is now sooooo much faster. Plus it's greener, since I don't have to waste so much paper;).

I do want to suggest a bit of a warning, though. It is possible to use your eyes too much, and your ears not enough. One example is in tuning a performance like, say, a vocal recording. One of the other great things about recording nowadays is that there are cool tools like autotune setting, that allow you to correct pitch.

But boy-howdy has this been over-used! Without going into specifics, (which you can find in another of our posts about Auto-Tune), these tools allow you to see where the recorded pitch is on a grid representing the accurate pitch. It is very easy to simply drag the actual notes to the grid if they are a little off, even without listening! This is a mistake. You really need to listen BEFORE you correct, because humans are used to slight imperfections and variances in pitch.

If every single note is snapped to an exact note, it starts to sound unnatural. It's kinda like that line from the first The Matrix movie when the agent says "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost." You may even have noticed this in modern pop and country music. If you watch the television show Glee, you hear Auto-Tune over-used every Tuesday night. I still love the show though;).