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Perhaps
one of the greatest assests of modern digital sound
recording, apart from its ability to record at fantastically
high sample rates, is the sophisticated digital sound
editing facility that the new breed of recording software
allows. With the arrival of Steinberg
Nuendo and a number of other digital sound
recording platforms it is now possible to construct
the perfect take from a series of different takes and
edits.(sometimes even recorded on different days!).
Digital
sound recording platforms such as Pro-Tools
and Steinberg Nuendo enable
the recording engineer to approach the recording session
in a completely different way. digital sound editing
is now so sophisticated that invisible edits can actually
be made across a single note which brings huge advantages
to the recording session. Having confidence in the editing
software allows the engineer to say exactly what bars
need to be retaken and quite often a piece is now only
recorded once in its entirety. Then, after listening
back with the score, smaller sections can be recorded
to cover any mistakes or extraneous noises.
This
certainly cuts down recording time and in the case of
brass bands helps enormously to preserve the lips of
the players. Until recently the only drawback was that
everything had to be mixed down to stereo before any
editing took place so major decisions on balance, EQ,
reverb etc all had to be made before the editing stage.
Using
Steinberg Nuendo and its ability to edit complete multitrack
recordings, this has all changed.
Now
for instance when we make a jazz band recording we might
have separate sections or even individual instruments
on their own track and sometimes a large band may end
up across 20 individual tracks. The new software allows
us to perform sophisticated digital sound editing across
multitracks, assembling the final edited version before
we have to mix down to a master and because the mixdown
is fully automated and saved to disc it means that at
any stage we can go back to any individual track and
make any adjustments we need to get a perfect result.
New
sophisticated software emulations of reverb, EQ and
compression mean that what once required a huge studio
outlay can now be fitted into a laptop and multitrack
digital sound recording and editing make the whole mobile
recording process so much easier for the performers
and recording engineer alike
.
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