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1 – Introductory concepts–Real and virtual tracks on the 788
12 TASCAM 788 Digital PortaStudio
Editing
One of the most useful features of a disk-based
recorder such as the 788 is the ability to edit material.
When working with a stereo tape recorder, the usual
way of editing was with a white pencil, a razor blade
and sticky splicing tape. In this way, unwanted parts
of tape could be removed, and parts of a song (e.g.
verses, choruses, intros) could be moved from one
part of the song to another. However, there were
many disadvantages to this (and it didn’t work with
multitrack recorders).
The other way of tape editing is assembly from one
recorder to another—you need two recorders, and
some very precise (and often expensive!) synchroni-
zation equipment to do this.
Nondestructive editing on the 788 By con-
trast, the 788 allows you to use a wide variety of
sophisticated editing techniques with no additional
equipment.
If you have ever used a computer for word-process-
ing, you will know that you can cut and copy parts of
a document, and paste them into other locations in
the document, saving you a lot of boring, repetitive
work.
Since the 788 stores its information as digital data,
just as a word-processor stores your documents as
digital data, parts of a song can be cut, copied and
pasted to other locations in the song. You can cut,
copy and paste all the tracks which have been
recorded to make a song, or just one or a few tracks.
As a practical example, let’s suppose that you’re
recording a song that has three chorus sections, with
an identical, rather complex, guitar hook at the end of
each of them. If you were recording to tape, you
would record the hook for these three sections three
times, each one in the appropriate place. Because this
is a slightly tricky passage to play, you might only
get it right once or twice. You’d have to go through
the process of punching in and out at the places
where you made the mistake, until you got it right
three times.
With the 788, this becomes easier. You can copy and
paste the part which was recorded properly, and
replace the bad versions. This makes life a lot sim-
pler and quicker, as you only have to get the hook
right once—the other times are simply “clones” of
the perfect recording.
There are other ways you could use this feature—
used with care, it could be used to correct timing
problems with an out-of-time player, or signals from
microphones which are widely separated.
788 editing On the 788, you can copy, move,
paste, add silence, close up gaps, wipe whole tracks,
etc. in very simple operations. See “Track editing” on
page 65 for details of the track editing operations
available with the 788.
Undo and redo Furthermore, compared with a
tape recording system, disk offers one very big
plus—the ability to undo changes. For instance, if
you make a mistake and copy a bad take of the cho-
rus over a good copy, you can undo it and restore
what you originally recorded. You can’t do this with
tape. This is why we call editing with disk “non-
destructive”—you don’t actually destroy the data
immediately when you write over it, cut it or delete
it, but you have a “safety net” to catch your mistakes.
However, the undo function is not available for every
operation, though. For instance, there is no way to
undo formatting a disk (and destroying all data on it).
This is an operation from which there is no escape,
once it has started (there are a few other non-undo-
able operations, such as erasing a song—these func-
tions are explained as being non-undoable when they
are described in this manual).
Copy the good version and
overwrite the bad takes
Bad take Bad take
Bad take Bad take
Good
take
Good
take
Good
take
Good
take
Good
take
Good
take
Good
take