Use Your Ears
After college I took an internship with a local post-production facility. The engineer I was assigned to was constantly overbooked and I was often given free run of one of the small studio rooms.
I had been using DAWs such as Cakewalk and Cubase for several years so I was very surprised to see what they were using. They were running a black and white terminal with no mouse, only keyboard. The system could display waveforms but it would take about 60 seconds to refresh the screen when waveform drawing was turned on. To get to the sample level you had to zoom in (and let it refresh) about 10 times. I was very accustomed to visually zooming in and cutting on a beat but trying to do it on this system was excruciating.
After about an hour the engineer came in to see how I was getting along. He saw my screen and suggested I turn waveforms off as they were too slow. I asked how I was supposed to tell where to cut and he gave an answer that still influences how I work:
“Use your ears, no one else is going to see your waveforms either.”
It’s one of those truths that I should have already known but needed someone else to clue me in on. In the age of computers we are so used to trusting our eyes above all else that we defer to them even when the end result is not visual. You should trust your ears above anything else.
Even knowing this it can be hard to disconnect the visual feedback of a program from the audio. When I am laying out a song I will often still look at the overview of song layout while trying to listen back. In order to really hear if the parts work and the song is done I have to minimize all programs shut my eyes and just actively listen.