For a nice account on how things were done without computers
see <http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1995_articles/oct95/queen.html>
I've never done anything *that* complicated, but the techniques
described in that article were common practice in those days,
no engineer would panic or complain when having to use them.

Ciao,

--
FA




It is fun to read how things were done back then and it certainly influenced the type of music
that was done, which is worth analyzing and thinking about, but I am not
sure that is inspiring. I am myself now a bit interested in a hardware setup, I have two grooveboxes
and plan to buy a mixer two get those two and a laptop together into one sound and I can imagine
that making just one tune can be a difficult process.
But romanticizing this process is the same as saying - "Remember when getting from Europe to India
took months?"

It is a different situation when you know that EVERYONE goes through this. It is an absolutely different
story when you know for a fact that users of another operating system have good working solutions of the
problem you are having. And so not having automation is a bit weird. As shown above, automation is
essential in certain very widely spread types of electronic music when you need to turn many knobs at
the same time to achieve the result. Asking 15 of your friends to help you do this during recording is
a bit too much I think though it might make for a good record into the book of records.