The Drawback of Just Using
Using music recording software has made the album making process a lot easier and faster for engineers, and more accessible and user friendly to novices. It has created the opportunity for a professional recording studio at home, which is every independent artist's dream.
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You may have heard the term "cold mix" before if you've ever been in a recording studio or read up on various digital and analog recording techniques or sound processors. It refers to the sound quality of the recorded audio. Digital music recording software programs--when used independently of any external analog sound processing equipment--tend to produce cold mixes. There are quite a few reasons for this, but to put it simply, the problem isn't so much that the digital music recording software itself makes music "cold" per se; the majority of the problematic issue lies with the inner circuitry surrounding the analog/digital conversion.
Even though the advancements of digital technology have triggered numerous positive developments in the sound recording process, something that digital music recording software lacks is audio warmth. If you patch your acoustic instrument sound source (microphone) directly into your music recording software and turn up the volume in your headphone monitors, you're going to hear a very "thin" and possibly "shrill" sound reproduction of your instrument or voice. If you're playing guitar with a pick, each string will probably sound somewhat choppy and icy. If you're playing a bowed string instrument, like violin or cello, you'll notice that the sound resonation depth has dropped out a bit, and notes in the higher treble register have a harsh piercing quality to them.
Top shelf music recording software can oftentimes remedy this problem to an extent with what's called "plug-ins." Plug-ins are compatible with usually a wide variety of digital music recording software programs, and can be "applied" to audio tracks that you're either recording or have already recorded. There are plug-ins that are produced specifically for "warming up" these cold mixes.
(How do plug-ins work? Let's use a popular plug-in called Amplitube as an example. It allows users to plug their electric instruments straight into the interface of their music recording software, assign the plug-in effect to the track where the audio source is routed to, and choose any one of 1,000+ amp sounds that Amplitube offers. If you live in an apartment and you can't be blasting distortion or overdrive through your amp, this is a great tool to have at your disposal.)
How effective are some of the plug-ins at warming up cold digital mixes? It depends on which one you use. To be honest, a lot of audio engineers detest plug-ins because of their emulation quality. Most plug-ins are basically copycat rip-offs of high end audio processors on the market, and once you've used the real thing, you'll realize the true quality of plug-ins that are used for music recording software.
The preferred way by professional engineers of using digital music recording software is to use the music recording software program as tape would be used- the last link in the recording chain. So instead of recording all the tracks directly into the music recording software program, they patch the audio through a chain of analog gear and then route the audio from the outputs of the A/D converter into the inputs of the music recording software interface.
For the home studio recording engineer, the few downsides of using just music recording software are outweighed by the benefits. The bottom line is that digital software programs have so much to offer that their few shortcomings shouldn't weigh heavily in your decision of whether or not to use music recording software because there are always solutions for fixing these inconveniences. Using an all-analog studio is admirable, (and audiophile purists would applaud you,) but the time and expense is something that needs to be taken into account, especially for someone who is unfamiliar with recording to tape. Audio can just be manipulated so easily and effortlessly with music recording software that for home studio engineers, (especially novice ones,) it's usually the best choice.
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