Print

Most computer users (or people who have used a pencil and a piece of paper) know what this means, but it has a specific meaning for audio production as well. Printing something in audio and video refers to recording it, as in “printing to tape.” The context in which this comes up is centered around sources and signals that may not normally get recorded to the multitrack tape in a project. An example of this could be sequenced MIDI parts that are often synchronized and flown in to a project as virtual tracks. Another example is effects that are normally returned to an auxiliary channel on the mixer and mixed in with the recorded tracks. Sometimes it is useful to actually record these things to the multitrack tape (or disk in the DAW world). Let’s say you are moving a project to another studio for some overdubs, but don’t want to carry the entire keyboard rig there and mess with getting all the instrument levels set in another room. You could just print a rough mix of all the keyboard parts to tape and use that as a reference for the overdubs.