The way music used to be recorded "back in the day" involved (at least) two distinct groups of people: the actual musicians, and the audio engineer(s). The work of the latter before the advent of automation (which is essentially, a kind of "undo") was long an arduous, and it's easy to understand why they were so happy when mixing consoles began to have recallable settings & automation of parameters. None of this impacted the musicians' work, or barely affected it.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, you had people like Eno (and to some extent Zappa, not to mention the electro-acoustic traditions in Europe) who started to use the studio as an instrument. That is, it was precisely the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the recording and mixing technology that was the subject of a "performance".
Meanwhile, the bass player played bass. If called for, they played it again. And again. And then they went home.
Modern DAWs would not change this at all, were it not for two notable changes.
First, the job of audio engineering has been taken over, not completely but extensively, by musicians and "producers" themselves. This means that making a piece of music now tends to include a series of decisions and processes that used to be the domain of the engineers.
Secondly, the phenomenon of composing/producing "in the box" has emerged, in which there is no actual recording of any sort of instrument that exists outside of the DAW (or computer), and thus working on a musical composition now frequently means working in a DAW rather than working on whatever instrument you might have played back when Fostex was a company.
Both of these things mean that the tweaking/recall/automation/editing features of a DAW, once "reserved" for audio engineers, are things that "just musicians" consider to be a part of their own toolkit.
The way music used to be recorded "back in the day" involved (at least) two distinct groups of people: the actual musicians, and the audio engineer(s). The work of the latter before the advent of automation (which is essentially, a kind of "undo") was long an arduous, and it's easy to understand why they were so happy when mixing consoles began to have recallable settings & automation of parameters. None of this impacted the musicians' work, or barely affected it.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, you had people like Eno (and to some extent Zappa, not to mention the electro-acoustic traditions in Europe) who started to use the studio as an instrument. That is, it was precisely the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the recording and mixing technology that was the subject of a "performance".
Meanwhile, the bass player played bass. If called for, they played it again. And again. And then they went home.
Modern DAWs would not change this at all, were it not for two notable changes.
First, the job of audio engineering has been taken over, not completely but extensively, by musicians and "producers" themselves. This means that making a piece of music now tends to include a series of decisions and processes that used to be the domain of the engineers.
Secondly, the phenomenon of composing/producing "in the box" has emerged, in which there is no actual recording of any sort of instrument that exists outside of the DAW (or computer), and thus working on a musical composition now frequently means working in a DAW rather than working on whatever instrument you might have played back when Fostex was a company.
Both of these things mean that the tweaking/recall/automation/editing features of a DAW, once "reserved" for audio engineers, are things that "just musicians" consider to be a part of their own toolkit.