The digital realm, at least for audio recording, gets a bad rap from most of the old-schoolers out there. An assumption among most audio engineers is that analog is quantifiably “better” than digital. In as much as overall pleasantness and punch, a clear case can be made for tape. But, for budget and accessibility, digital is almost a no brainer. Almost.

Very few studios are running tape anymore. It's just too expensive. Many of the quality tape manufacturers have closed their doors, too. Now-a-days aspiring musicians have access to extremely useful digital audio workstations (DAW's) that are fully capable of making professional sounding multi-track recordings at a fraction of what it used to cost in analog studios.

Recently I was tweaking my chops with an instructional video regarding mixing in Pro Tools, the industry standard audio recording platform. The engineer made a valid point that many old-schoolers over look: digital gives back to you exactly what you give it. Being so, you have to be careful what you give it. Analog had a way of smoothing out roughness—that's why multi track drum recordings almost always sound better when they are played off of tape. If you've ever had your ear right next to a cymbal when a drummer hits it, you know just how unpleasant reality can be.

And yet, it would be remiss to claim that digital is inferior to analog. It's just a different thing. When working in digital, it's important, more than before, to be aware of what you are recording into your DAW. If you're giving it a non-de-essed vocal, you'll get a non-de-essed vocal in return.

The point of this post isn't to sway you into thinking that digital is somehow better. The point I want to make has more to do with engineering. Because digital is so precise and because analog isn't around much anymore, good engineering is of an even bigger importance than in the old-days. Mic placement and EQ take on a slightly more critical role than before. Not to say that you could get away with bad mic placement when working with tape. In fact, an acute awareness of the trueness of digital is of the utmost importance to the new-school DAW recordist.

What makes matters more complicated is that the EQ options on a DAW are so vast that the potential for seriously screwing up a decent sounding track is exponentially higher than before. On an analog console, there are often just a few EQ choices. On a digital virtual console, the options are nearly infinite. Where in the analog realm, you might have the option of cutting or boosting at 1.2 kHz just a few db, in the digital realm you can change a sound much more drastically and at a greater level. So, in spite of the availability of quality recording gear, the propensity for crappier sounding recordings is even more available.

The best solution for the modern recordist is a simple one: do as little as possible. By that, I don't mean to imply that you shouldn't record very much. What I mean to say is “don't touch the knobs unless you absolutely have to.” Even then, seriously reconsider touching the knobs. Because digital is so accurate and the options are so vast, a wise engineer would endeavor to get the sound she is searching for my mic placement and artist performance first rather than immediately squashing, cutting, boosting, or limiting the signal.

Here's a real world application of this concept. Suppose you are recording an acoustic guitar for a moderately thick sounding band recording. It would stand to reason that you'd want a moderately thinned out guitar that has some nice top, not a lot of bottom, and a carved out mid-section with enough presence to sound memorable but not too much so that it competes with the vocals and electric guitars. Rather than record the acoustic guitar with a large diaphragm condenser mic and then tweak out the track with digital eq and compression, a cleaner option could be achieved with mic choice and mic placement. Knowing that the lows and highs of an acoustic guitar tend to converge where the neck meets the body, and knowing that a small diaphragm mic would scoop out a lot of the extremely low garbage frequencies, a much cleaner version of the “digitally tweaked” signal can be placed in the track. This technique takes a little trial and error, but it certainly sounds better to my ears.

The better engineered a track is, the more eq and compression can be used as an enhancing effect rather than as a sonic necessity. When an acoustic guitar take consistently runs too hot at times and then is too quiet at other times, it is completely acceptable to limit the signal in order to catch the clips. (A setting of 10:1 with fast attack and release times with no more than 6 dB of gain reduction is almost undetectable).

So, because the proliferation of digital home recording systems is wider than ever, it is all the more important to be aware of what you put in those things. If you put garbage in, you'll certainly get garbage out. The safety net of analog, which is not a myth, has been pulled out from us all. Be careful when you press “record.” In the digital world, the fluorescent lights are always on.