Thread October 17, 2015 editorial: comments

I Can’t Recall

These days, being able to instantly recall a session in your DAW is something we all take for granted. Want to switch to another song when you’re mixing? No problem, just close one file and open the other. Want to revisit a mix six months later? Piece of cake. Just open the file. As long as you still have all the same plug-ins, you can get back to the exact spot where you last saved a session.

This contrasts greatly with the way things worked in the days of analog recording. Back then, when a mix was finished, you pulled all the faders down and returned all the knobs to their defaults in order to ready the console for the next song. Of course, that meant you were wiping out all the settings for your mix.

Doing a recall was time consuming and relatively imprecise. You had to have written down all the settings on the board and your hardware at the end of the mix session, before you zeroed out the console and the outboard gear. Studios typically printed “recall sheets,” that had simple line drawings of all their gear, which the assistant engineer or intern whould use to mark all the knob and fader positions when the mix was finished.

Even with recall sheets, it was very difficult to precisely recall a mix. As a practical matter, it was best to definitively finish one mix before moving onto the next.

We’ve certainly come a long way since then technologically, but I wonder whether the old system, clunky as it was, had some advantages. Now that we have the option to endlessly reopen and tweak a song, it makes it harder to say without reservation, “It’s done.” 

Don’t get me wrong, even if I could give up total recall, I wouldn’t do it. But I do wonder whether it enables my obsessive nature. Unless I have a deadline that's forcing me to finish, I know in the back of my mind that I can always revisit the mix. There’s just not the same kind of closure.

Thoughts?