How Non-linear Editing Affects Songwriting

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to talk to you about non-linear editing. Now what is non-linear editing? Well, non-linear editing is really why digital recording is the way to go all the time. Traditionally what people did when they recorded music was linear editing and the way that linear editing works is that you record things in one straight line and you're stuck with that. Then whatever else you record you have to record on top of that but you can't move things out of sequence. I'm going to illustrate. So with linear editing, what you would do is, you would record all of the drums like that. This is the beginning, this is the end. And then, on top of that, you would be recording different layers. So you'd record guitar here maybe vocals on top of it over here. But the point is you couldn't move these things around and once they were there they were stuck there. Now let's say you didn't like this part right here. Well then you could rewind the tape to right here, press record and record something different, but you couldn't actually cut this out. Let's say you like this but you wanted it over here, you couldn't do that unless you actually physically cut apart the tape and reglued it together. Now, this was done really often with the Beatles recordings when they had the money that they could actually go ahead and do that. But generally speaking, linear editing is very risky because you can do permanent damage. If you record on top of this part and you record a little too far, then you've destroyed something that was good. So linear editing is not the way to go. Non-linear editing gives you the ability to move ideas around wherever you want. So lets say I record the drums like this. Then I decide, well I'm going to put a guitar over here, from about here to over here. And then later on I think, 'well, the guitar part really belongs over here.' Well, then all I have to do is click cut on this, it disappears, and then I paste it wherever I want it. Let's say I put it over here and then I think, well it needs to be a few seconds earlier. Then I just click and drag and I pull it over here. What if I don't like the way the drums are put together? Well then I can cut this last part of the drums and move it over here. It's very easy. So I can take things out of order, which gives me a lot more flexibility and it means that I'm not destroying what I've done. So non-linear editing means that you can be much more aggressive in how you explore new ideas. Really, the opportunities are endless with non-linear editing."