Real World Digital Audio

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With all the raw materials of a song, composition, or other digital audio

project in place, the next step is to assemble those materials into a finished

form. Part of the appeal of digital audio software is the flexibility with

which you can creatively manipulate a project’s structure. Traditional com-

posers like Beethoven littered their studios with sketches and scraps of

notation on paper. Even a couple of decades ago, arranging with analog reel-

to-reel tape involved cutting the tape apart with a razor blade. Digital audio

software, in contrast, offers nearly endless “what-if ” scenarios. Far from

being limited to the structure you created when you recorded your tracks,

you have a great deal of compositional control in rearranging materials,

from making minor adjustments to radically recomposing your music.

Arranging music can mean adjusting a wide range of different elements,

including bass lines and harmonies, chord voicings, and instrumentations.

All of these are vital to music, but they’re well beyond the scope of this

book. What we’ll examine here is how you’ll assemble audio and MIDI ele-

ments into your finished music, arranging them on the timeline of a project

in your digital audio software.

Mix Project Files

A digital audio mix project is a collection of audio files and/or MIDI data.

These chunks of sound and notes could include a range of different kinds

of content, like looped MIDI patterns and looped audio (as in Chapter 5),

recorded vocals, spoken word, instruments, and field recordings (Chapter 6),

or MIDI-recorded phrases and soft synth lines (Chapters 8 and 9). The

mix project file, or simply “the project,” brings all of these pieces together

and organizes them into a finished piece of music.

When you make a new multitrack file in your DAW, whether you’re

starting a new “session” in Pro Tools or creating a new “set” file in Live,

you’re creating a project file. It’s the file that will hold (or refer to) audio

files and note data, your arrangement, mix information, and other edits.

You’ll notice that the size of this file is relatively small, often less than a

megabyte. That’s because recorded audio data, whether you recorded it

directly into your project or imported it from another source, is stored in

separate files. (MIDI data is stored in the project file, but, as we’ve seen,

it’s very compact.)

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Nondestructive editing

Audio files you record or import into the mix project are stored in files on

your hard drive, independent from the project file. That way, when you

move the audio as represented graphically on the screen or process the

track’s output with effects plug-ins, you don’t directly impact the original

audio files. The rectangular blocks you see on the screen in an arrangement

view, which act as pointers to the underlying audio files, are called regions

(Figure 10.1).

When separate copies of audio are kept on the hard drive, independent of

and unaffected by any edits you make, your manipulations of the audio are

called nondestructive editing. Editing the audio in the project files has no impact

on the original audio files. Your software reads the audio files from your

hard drive, so that you hear the audio edits in the mix project. But if you

need to go back to the original audio for any reason, you’ll find that the files

are unchanged.

Certain edits do require modifications to the file. For these, most DAWs

automatically make duplicate copies of the file. Automatic duplication can

sometimes create redundant files you don’t need, so you might routinely

take a look at the file window in your audio editor to see if there are files

you can delete (see “File management,” next page).

Figure 10.1 The rectangular blocks (regions) you see onscreen in your DAW (1) act as

placeholders for audio files (2) stored on your hard drive, as seen here in Pro Tools.You

can slice up, alter, and move the regions without damaging the associated file.Your

DAW then plays back the mix by streaming the audio from the files on the hard drive

or by preloading them into RAM prior to playback.

Underlying audio filesNondestructive regions