Once you have all your tracks recorded and you have started to get a good sound with mixing and plug-ins, you'll want to take a look at one of the best reasons for using a computer-based DAW: the superior editing of MIDI and digital audio that DAWs offer.

Audio Editing

Audio editing is the process of trimming, cutting, and manipulating digital audio. The vast majority of audio editing takes place in the arrange/edit window of your DAW, although some will take you to a new window for more precise edits. No matter which DAW you choose, you'll be able to do the following things (although they may go by different names):

• Cut. You can edit sections of audio with precision. You can cut out large sections of audio to rerecord, or do microsurgery and remove single notes or errors in the audio.

• Mask. Just like masking tape, you can silence the start or end of an audio region. This is handy if there's a delay from the time you press record to the start of your performance (the same holds true for the end).

• Looping. You can extend any region to loop over and over again with the loop tool.

• Moving. You can take any region and place it anywhere in the timeline you want. This is one of the key differentiators for digital audio versus tape. It's nonlinear, so you can place it anywhere you want.

• Fades. Manually or automatically fade in and out. An important technique when you're editing regions of audio together into a performance.

These basic tools are just the fundamental set of tools you'll see in a DAW. Modern DAWs also give you more advanced editing tools such as pitch correction and beat correction. Chapter 19 is an overview of some of these exciting new ways to edit audio!

Don't forget that when you edit audio in a DAW, you're editing it nondestructively. You can always change your mind because you're working on a copy of the original audio. This is true for all DAWs. Once you get used to nondestructive editing, you'll have a newfound respect for records that were cut and edited on magnetic tape!

MIDI Editing

Because MIDI predates digital audio by a number of years, MIDI editing has been around for a long time. There are some standard things you can do with MIDI in just about every DAW.

• Quantize. With MIDI, it's easy to correct rhythmic inaccuracies by quantizing. Quantizing places all MIDI notes and events on a rhythmic grid. You can quantize to different note values and even quantize to “groove” templates to inject a different feel.

• Pitch. With MIDI, changing pitch is very easy; just drag the MIDI note/event to a new note.

• Velocity. The volume of MIDI notes range from 0 to 128. You can edit the velocity of any individual note or group of notes.

• Duration. With MIDI it's easy to change the duration of any MIDI note/event.

• Controller data. MIDI allows you to control more than just the notes themselves. Continuous controllers allow you to manipulate parameters of your synth or plug-in. A good example of a continuous controller (CC) would be controlling the pitch bend with a wheel controller. You can edit this data, too.

• Humanize. A form of quantizing that has small errors in the timing. True quantizing is likely impossible for a human, so humanization helps you stay in time, without sounding like a computer.

Can I view my MIDI data as notation, rather than data?

Yes! More and more DAWs have score windows for viewing MIDI events as traditional notation. Pro Tools, Logic, GarageBand, Cubase, and Sonar all have score editors. Pro Tools can even send Sibelius files right to Sibelius, one of the most popular notation software programs in the world!

As you can see, MIDI is very malleable and powerful. With the wild popularity of virtual instrument plug-ins that respond to MIDI input, MIDI (now more than twenty-five years old) isn't going anywhere!