What's So Great About Non-Destructive Editing?

Ok, I'm in a rut. I just can't get anything finished.

It started with MIDI in the 80s, and got worse with Cubase VST in the 90s, and now that I'm into Pro Tools and Albeton LIVE, now that my hard disk is huge, now that I have the processing power to fill a hundred tracks, and redo, reprocess, repitch, auto harmonize, quantize to audio or MIDI, stretch time, reverse, reprocess, mimic any instrument, any aural environment and now that I have a library of a million loops. . . now it's possible I'll never leave my insane musical playground with a finished recording. I'm all lost in the supermarket!

I love my computer DAWs, but sometimes they offer too many choices.

All this technology has made things easier, and endless with possibility, but too many choices also confound, confuse and make it easy to fiddle forever. As technology has gotten better, I've finished fewer songs, fewer compositions, and spent a lot more time noodling around to no end. And I don't think I'm alone.

In the simpler times of linear analog tape recording you didn't have infinite choices. If you were a regular guy, you had 4 tracks, maybe 8, that's it.

You had to record your masterpiece from the beginning to the end. Sure, you could re-take or punch in a correction, but once you started building on that, you weren't really going back. The movement was forward, onward and upward.

Or downward. Yes, it was easier to fail, but you were also more likely to finish, where as now, living in a world where you never have to commit, you may just never, ever do it.

So what's a thoroughly modern man to do? Well I've thought about this a lot, and I've talked about this with friends. There are many approaches that one can put to use.

Deadlines: For those of us for whom this is not bread and butter, deadlines don't really exist. So give yourself a fixed period of time to finish your personal projects. Or seek to work with or for others, maybe even for money. You don't finish, you don't get paid. In the absence of cash, a collaborator is a good motivator.

Limit your toolbox: Set up a template. Say, 8 tracks, and stop there. A vocal track, a guitar track a synth track, a drum track and 4 more something else tracks. If you can't get it cooking within those, maybe there's really no idea there. You can stop wasting time and start fresh.

Keep Your Studio Simple and Wired to Go: That way you don't waste time getting ready to waste time.

Write It First: Focus on recording performances from beginning to end rather than piecing things together. In other words, plan it and write it AWAY from the computer, on your piano or guitar or tuba. On paper. Then sit down and play it, embellish it. And maybe after letting it sit a while, go in and chop it a little.

Shut Down the Computer All Together: One songwriter friend, like me, is on a computer for 8 to 10 hours at the day job, and finds being on one all night makes life seem an endless grind. She got herself a hard disk based Roland multitrack and uses that to make music. Sure, you could do some editing on that, or export your audio and mess with it. You have non destructive effects, and multiple takes to swap in. But somehow it isn't the same as the massive ease of doing and undoing on a computer based DAW. You instrument becomes your (musical) instrument, you guitar, your piano – not the mouse and quad core processor. It's more like playing, less like work, she said, and proceeded to record her first album that way.

Go Back to Tape: Lots of folks record on old tape machines for the sound, they'd say, but the vibe and creative process is very different when you work linearly. It's more like music, less like dicing data. It's more about performances, and requires more though and planning, which in turn makes for a smarter and better composition. John Vanderslice is a great example of this process, a favorite of mine, a very creative analog recording artist who does it on tape.

Lyrics First: This way song structure is largely finished before you begin recording. Make your music to fit. You run out of lyrics, you are done.

Me? A Drummer?

Young me practicing my paradiddles.
Note the jazz grip and my trusty cassette deck, at left.

I wasn't the guy who pounded rhythms on his desk or cafeteria tray, geez, I barely tapped my foot. But rock and roll is a powerful magnet. The idea of playing in a band was loaded with all the potential cool a freshly minted teenager could imagine and some friends happened to be forming one. They needed a drummer, so I got me some lessons at the local music shop.

My teacher, a jazz guy, was delighted that I could read music. I'd taken 5 years of classical piano lessons, and the drum charts he put in front of me were a piece of cake. I had a good ear and it turned out I was coordinated too. I started on a practice pad and soon I was begging for drums of my own.

Before you knew it I had my nose in the want ads looking for used kits – I found one across town. To me they were amazing: $125 of chrome, twinkle and marble-look laminate. In reality they were a little 4 piece kit with crappy, dull sounding pie tin cymbals, some no-name cheapo brand. Excitedly, I took them home.

Within a few months my buds and I had recorded a noisy cassette (I still have it) of "Sympathy for the Devil," "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Honky Tonk Woman." I wasn't that great, but I was keeping tempo and singing at the same time, to boot. I had taken to it. I was becoming a drummer.

I carried on practicing and jamming. I got better cymbals, added cowbells and blocks, experimented with tuning and muffling heads. I took my lessons but really learned by playing along with the greats on my trusty cassette deck. I broke sticks as I dueled with Moon and Bonham and absorbed Ringo and Charlies Watts' patient competence.

Those drums played exactly one paid gig: I was hired for the pit orchestra for an 8th grade catholic school production of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes." But playing rock with my friends was much more satisfying.

I became known in my little circle as a pretty good drummer. I felt cool and got some needed teenage cred. But drumming did more than that. Drumming is humbling. One must support and be never waver. I learned I could be dependable.

Sure, there was room for powerful showboating. Being a drummer was decidedly macho — important for a guy growing up in the estrogen bath our home had become with the departure of my father (two sisters a mother and me, the male minority). The emotional turmoil and angst every teenager feels was given a primal voice though rock and roll.

More importantly, I learned how to improvise and go with the flow. Something my classical music training did not teach me. A useful skill in life.

Soon I felt limited by those drums and after a summer toiling as a messenger in Manhattan, I'd saved enough to purchase a a beautiful cherry red Premier kit.

I ran my own classified ad and the first looker took them away for a paltry $75. I was sick with a fever and too weak to bargain. But that was fine. In the exchange they only cost me $50. And what I gained from those drums can't be measured in dollars and cents.