How did we survive before digtal editing???

[konfyouzd]

Before digital editing, I did a few recordings with bands. I insisted we know our material cold before we walked into a studio - well enough that we could play them several times in a row without major mistakes. We didn't have the budget for lots of studio times and tons of editing. That's still a good approach.

Neil Young always said he was after a good recording of a great performance, not the other way 'round. Prepare for a great performance, let the guys in the studio figure out how to capture that. Don't try to edit your way to greatness.

I've heard this advice in so many words many many many times throughout the course of trying to learn audio engineering. It's invaluable--especially when it's so easy to hop on Google and say, "How do I get my <insert instrument> to sound more <insert adjective>?"

And in some cases people will throw out advice that takes you in every which way but the right one without any context for what it is you've done and/or are trying to do.

Case in point, I was trying to mix a song a few months back and I was looking to get advice. I provided as much info as I could about what I'd tried and almost all the advice I got was on how to "fix" something that should have just been re-recorded.

When I started trying to get it to sound as close to right before all the studio tricks and such, I found that the studio tricks seemed to actually do what others suggest. But it's something most people don't tell you, but maybe it's implied and I'm just not very smart.

That's a very real possibility.

 

[JimmyM]

To this day, I can still edit 1/4" reel to reel tape with a razor blade and make an edit on the "T" in the phrase "nineTeen eighty." It takes practice.

I was a video producer for some years, and left the video editing process behind just as non-linear (digital) editing came in. Stories, man, do I have stories........

The old rule was that it would take at least one hour of editing for every minute of finished video. Yup, for a 30 minute video piece, editing would take 30 hours. That's actually the minimum. I found that it often took much longer than this.

Example: I need a 6-second cutaway shot of a hawk circling in the air. I know we have it in our video library. I leave the editing room, go into the video library. I open up the PC there, do a search for the key words, find the number of the tape with the shot that I recall. Now find the tape, carry it into the editing room, pop it out of its case, and (if there's a shot list on paper in the case) fast forward to the section with the hawk footage; otherwise, start viewing the tape in FF to find the shot.

In a minute or two I've found the shot, so I set In and Out points for the edit, and hit preview. The source and master tapes both roll back, pause, roll forward, sync, and I see the edit. Well, close but not quite. So I change my In point on the source tape, and hit preview again. Tapes roll back, pause, roll forward, sync, and I get a new preview. Looks good, so I hit Edit. Tapes roll back, pause, roll forward, sync, edit happens.

OK, now rewind the hawk tape to its beginning. When that's done, pull the tape, put it back in the case along with the shot list. Either carry it back to the tape library and re-file it, or wait until I'm done.

This yielded SIX seconds of video. The process probably consumed at least 10 minutes.

Multiply that times about 300, and you have the average program (shot in the field) that I produced. No wonder editing was my least favorite part of the process.

OH!!

And by the way, that process was for an edit that was a CUT. If it was a FADE from one shot to another, then there were three tapes involved: the A source, the B source, and the target (master). You can multiply the exercise by the number of tapes involved, and to make a fade work, you had to have time base correctors for each source and you had to be using time code so you could be frame-accurate on each transition so there would be no visual jump cut on the A source or the B source as the new video faded in.

I imagine digital editing revolutionized video editing in much the same way it did music editing. It's still a fairly time-consuming process, but it's shorter now.

 

[micguy]

Agreed. But I'm still going to edit if it means bagging an otherwise great track. Can't turn dogcrap into gold, but you can turn gold into shiny gold

A touch here and there - absolutely. I have however, heard of people taking every kickdrum hit, and lining it up time wise.

 

[Frank Tuesday]

That is true, but if there's a lot of bleed into other mics, you can't just bump a snare hit over without accounting for it in the other mics. If I needed to fix one track, I'd have to do them all. And that's where the difficulty and increased possibility of major clicks and pops arises.

Bleed into other drum mics? For timing issues, just group them all so that when you edit one, you edit all of them. I can cut/paste or time stretch every drum track simultaneously. Once everything is lined up, ungroup and replace any bad hits on individual tracks.

Bleed into guitar mics is a whole different problem which I solve with a DI track and reamping.

 

[David Jayne]

The big difference is now you don't really have to learn the songs you wrote until the album is finished. : D

 

[JimmyM]

Bleed into other drum mics? For timing issues, just group them all so that when you edit one, you edit all of them. I can cut/paste or time stretch every drum track simultaneously. Once everything is lined up, ungroup and replace any bad hits on individual tracks.

Bleed into guitar mics is a whole different problem which I solve with a DI track and reamping.

That's exactly what I did, although I didn't have to time stretch. Our drummer really knows how to keep tempos where they belong! I didn't have to do much at all to his tracks. Most I left alone.

 

[And I]

Holy crap! First thing I'd do is create a new file for it, separate usable tracks from garbage, and delete the garbage. I get the idea of having options, but I seriously don't want to be dealing with 60 freaking tracks!

Yeah, I've done some underdubbing, that's fo sho. Some of the extra stuff will help thicken stuff up in the choruses, but yeah my "mix v1" files are pared down as much as possible. Certainly the flabby tom bottom mic tracks are gone!

DIY projects in the analog days were about the songs. Now it's about the production, with a lot of wrong decisions being made and fruitless paths followed. That's why they brought me in, they're really good at the music part of it, the songs are somewhere in there, and I can help with the rest...

 

[And I]

That's exactly what I did, although I didn't have to time stretch. Our drummer really knows how to keep tempos where they belong! I didn't have to do much at all to his tracks. Most I left alone.

The time stretching in Reaper is actually fantastic... luckily I haven't had to use it for drums either... but in places where we need all the vocal layers together but the different vocalist have different delivery, I'm lining up the phrasing just enough so it doesn't get in the way. I used to do that with splice, cut, move, crossfade, oh it sounds weird, try again some other way, etc. Now I just put in a few stretch markers and slide things around. Sounds seamless!

 

[David Jayne]

Really makes you take another look at albums like, the first Boston album for one of many examples. Seems like magic now, right?

 

[JimmyM]

Really makes you take another look at albums like, the first Boston album for one of many examples. Seems like magic now, right?

Except Tom Scholz had a small fortune to spend on gear to outfit his house, being an engineer at Polaroid

 

[David Jayne]

Yes but he still had to deal with tape!!!

 

[JimmyM]

Yes but he still had to deal with tape!!!

Geez, so many horror stories about tape! Look what happened to the Led Zeppelin II master with all that print through! And so many stories about flakes coming off and having to bake them to make them usable again. Seems like every popular band in those days has at least one story to tell. Even Boston has a story about the Third Stage masters!

 

[JimmyM]

Yeah, I've done some underdubbing, that's fo sho. Some of the extra stuff will help thicken stuff up in the choruses, but yeah my "mix v1" files are pared down as much as possible. Certainly the flabby tom bottom mic tracks are gone!

DIY projects in the analog days were about the songs. Now it's about the production, with a lot of wrong decisions being made and fruitless paths followed. That's why they brought me in, they're really good at the music part of it, the songs are somewhere in there, and I can help with the rest...

Right on! With all these options too many people think they need to throw the kitchen sink at their recordings when they just need to play and sing well, maybe do a little extra overdubbage, but second most importantly, they need to know when they're finished.

Of course, most important are the Auto-Tune rules:

---Auto-Tune is great for robot voices or for affecting instrumental parts in weird ways, and should only be used for such purposes.

---If you need vocal pitch correction, sing it again with better pitch and do not use Auto-Tune under any circumstances. No matter how slick you are with it, no matter undetectable you think your use of it is, someone will notice it, and it will be the only thing people hear once they detect it. Rascal Flatts cover of "Life Is A Highway" is now unlistenable to me because I can detect the Auto-Tune. Tom Cochrane's original version is way better, anyway. And he didn't need any stinkin' Auto-Tune!

 

[E S Anderson]

Right on! With all these options too many people think they need to throw the kitchen sink at their recordings when they just need to play and sing well, maybe do a little extra overdubbage, but second most importantly, they need to know when they're finished.

Of course, most important are the Auto-Tune rules:

---Auto-Tune is great for robot voices or for affecting instrumental parts in weird ways, and should only be used for such purposes.

---If you need vocal pitch correction, sing it again with better pitch and do not use Auto-Tune under any circumstances. No matter how slick you are with it, no matter undetectable you think your use of it is, someone will notice it, and it will be the only thing people hear once they detect it. Rascal Flatts cover of "Life Is A Highway" is now unlistenable to me because I can detect the Auto-Tune. Tom Cochrane's original version is way better, anyway. And he didn't need any stinkin' Auto-Tune!

On the Monday Night Football 'half-time' show Blink 182 debuted a new song, and it was all autotune, listen to this garbage...

 

[JimmyM]

On the Monday Night Football 'half-time' show Blink 182 debuted a new song, and it was all autotune, listen to this garbage...

I'm not crazy about the song, but it sounds like they were going for an electronic vibe on their voices and not trying to hide bad singing, so I actually don't mind the Auto-Tune in this instance.

 

[And I]

Pitch correction is actually completely undetectable if done properly. Putting an autotune plugin on a track in chromatic mode and letting it affect every single note is not the way.

If you're not dealing with a professional vocalist, or even sometimes when you are, no matter how many takes you ask them to do they will never sing the note in tune. You'll waste time and burn them out. Just manually correct that one bad note and no one will ever know. I've done pitch correction and had the vocalist not even know...

 

[hbarcat]

Again, it's more that the easy digital editing, limitless tracks, and auto tune changes the way we approach recording. I remember back in the day with 4 tracks - fill three tracks, then ping pong it down. You were forced to be economical. Also, since you could only fix a mistake by punching in or re-recording your track, you really had to concentrate and know your parts.

I started recording on a Tascam Portastudio (cassette format) in high school in 1986. Then quickly moved on to a ½" 8 track reel to reel (Tascam TSR 8) with a ¼" 2 track (Ampex) for mastering.

At first, I did a lot of tape splicing, but soon figured out that it usually wasn't necessary if we used scratch tracks for the initial recordings, bounced them all onto a single track, and then used that track as the timing standard.

We'd record instruments one or two at a time, with musicians listening to the scratch track on headphones. With one scratch track, we had seven tracks available for the other instruments.

Usually, we would record the drums first and then I would mix and master them right away. I'd bounce them onto two tracks (stereo) which left five tracks available for the bass, guitars, and vocals.

Then I would master the bass track and record that over the scratch track, which would leave one more track available for recording whatever else we might want.

This all sounds like a pain in the butt, but it goes really quickly once you get used to it. The real benefit is that every instrument is timed right (if it isn't, then they do more takes until they get it right) and we can have more than the eight physical channels to work with.

7 drum tracks
2 guitar tracks
2 vocal tracks
1 bass track
1 spare track

These days I've got 32 tracks of 24/48 digital to work with plus multitudes of effects and plug ins and there's no way I'd go back.

 

[garp]

And there was no constant tuning and retuning of drums, no banging of drums when we were trying to talk, and did everything with no more than 3 takes, and often only one. No fuss, no muss. Do your business, then get out. Every musician should be that pro in the studio!

Indeed. I can still recall the first jingle recording session I attended using AFM musicians. The drummer needed two takes, largely due to the composer/producer requesting a slightly different swing beat from the first take to better match a demo. The bassist and the guitarist needed just one take each. Amazing.

 

[Frank Tuesday]

@JimmyM to your point about too many takes / too many options... if ease of editing is the upside to digital, ease of adding more and more tracks is the downside. I'm mixing a record now (that I did not track) where they are using upwards of 50 to 60 tracks per song for a rock record. Sure, double the distorted rhythm guitar. But I do not need bottom mics on the toms, every background vocal to be doubled, 2 mics on every guitar, etc...

The last time I recorded drums, I had ~20 tracks just for a 4 piece kit. I only used 7 or 8 for mixing. I had the inputs so it only cost about an hour of setup/teardown time, and didn't hurt anything. Just mute and hide them and its like they never existed. I'd rather have tracks I don't end up using than wish I had a track that I didn't take 5 minutes to set up.

 

[Frank Tuesday]

A touch here and there - absolutely. I have however, heard of people taking every kickdrum hit, and lining it up time wise.

I'm more inclined to drag the grid to match the kick. Then you can keep the life in the track from tempo variations and still use clicks and midi instruments.