Recording - May 2016 - 60

By Paul J. Stamler

Part 17: The Digital Audio Workstation-1
We've set up our chosen mics, amplified them, applied EQ
and compression where appropriate, and decided to record
digitally. What we use for that is the item which is as ubiquitous in today's recording as the Ampex tape recorder was in a
previous era, the Digital Audio Workstation, or DAW. DAWs
are used today by everyone from the neighborhood garage
band to the engineers recording megaselling hits. They
deserve a book, not just an article (or two), but I'm going to
try and cover some highlights here and in our next column,
starting (as I often do) with a little history.
Set the Wayback machine, Sherman
When digital recording was first developed, there was a
problem: it produced too much data to handle conveniently. A
16-bit recording (all you could do in the early digital era), sampled 44,100 times per second, produces 42,336,000 bits of
data (1s and 0s) per minute. That's too much to store on standard recording tape, so the engineers did a clever end run.
Storing that many bits requires the same sort of bandwidth as
a video signal (an analog one), and in the 1970s and 1980s,
when digital recording was being developed, there were multiple formats available for recording video signals: amateur
videocassette formats like Beta and VHS (which used 1/2" tape),
and professional/industrial videocassettes like Sony's U-Matic,
which stored the video on 3/4" tape. (There were also reel-toreel video recorders, but they weren't used for audio; they were
too expensive for studios to afford, and so was the tape.)
Digital audio could be recorded directly to these tapes as a
video signal, using special converters. Some enterprising/
desperate engineers-like our Editor-even did sound-on-sound
overdubbing by swapping tapes between playback and recording VCRs connected to the same converter box.
Editing these recordings was difficult, verging on impossible.
By dubbing recordings from one video recorder to another,
taking advantage of digital audio's ability to be copied without quality loss, you could crudely assemble an album of
songs (a technique known as "butt-editing"). That was about
the limit of subtlety; classical recordists worked to get a complete take of a single movement, because the video editors of
the time would not edit to an accuracy greater than 1/30 sec.
The editors used computers for controlling the machines, but
the idea that you could put the actual audio data into the computer was still pie-in-the-sky. How come? Well, it was still the
1980s, and except for huge mainframes owned by corporations, universities and NASA, available computers had very
limited processing and storage capacity (inferior, in fact, to my
not-too-smart flip-phone). Personal computers were in their
Neanderthal stage; Bill Gates famously remarked then that no
computer would ever need more than 64k of memory.
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RECORDING MAY 2016

You know what happened: computers got better, in a hurry,
and software was developed that could handle audio data-
crudely. One famous hardware editing console normally
worked at 16 bits, but when the gain was anything but 0 dB
(output level = input level) it would revert to 8 bits. As you
might imagine, fade-outs done in that editor sounded pretty
raunchy.
But once editing digital audio became possible, programs
that we'd now recognize as DAWs sprang out of the woodwork. They could crunch audio numbers in increasingly sophisticated ways, and as computer power (and storage) got exponentially cheaper, the sky became the limit. Today you can get
DAW software capable of serious audio at prices ranging
from $1800 (Nuendo) down to zero (Pro Tools | First, Studio
One Prime, and versions of Cubase, SONAR, and Live that
come bundled with audio gear).
Another great divide
While these developments were happening in audio editing/mixing software, parallel developments were happening
in the world of MIDI sequencers, and the DAW as we know it
today is the result of convergent evolution. Most DAWs incorporate both MIDI sequencing/editing functions and audio
manipulation.
There's something of a divide, though, between software
that began with MIDI sequencing and added audio processing
later (Cubase, Digital Performer), and software that began
with audio recording/editing/mixing and incorporated MIDI
later (Pro Tools, Live). Newer programs started out incorporating both (Studio One, Reaper).
Why should this matter? Well, it's really a matter of emphasis; if you're planning to do a lot of work with MIDI-sequenced
music it's been my experience that the programs that began as
sequencers will be easier to work with. If your intention is to
record mostly audio, with little sequencing, I think you'll find
that your work flows more smoothly with software designed for
that from the start. The most recent bilingual programs typically
work smoothly in both domains.
So, after all that history, what does a DAW actually do?
That's a sort of three-part harmony....
Part the First: the recorder
It turns out that the functions of a DAW can be divided into
three parts. Surprisingly, two of the three are also derived from
history, because they emulate the design of a well-equipped
recording studio control room from the 1970s-1980s. The first
function of a DAW emulates a multitrack tape recorder, but
with a big difference-aside from the DAW not taking up the
space of a washing machine on the control room floor.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - May 2016