Will old school sound recording terminology ever die?

Some sound recording terminology is so entrenched it's doubtful it's will ever be replaced, even though in-the-box digital technologies and algorithms do things in a totally different way to analogue hardware.

Take subtractive analogue synthesis. We all know why it's essential to learn the terminology. It's not just because subtractive synthesis is popular and enduring, but also because most digital synthesis methodologies have adopted the same terminology for their GUIs.

At the birth of digital synthesis in the early 1908s manufacturers expected us to familiarise ourselves with new terminology such as algorithms and operators, but that didn't last long (we couldn't handle it!) and now all the major software synth interfaces present us with subtractive type controls even though what's going on under the hood is often utterly different.

It's not just synthesis. How many DAW users have ever operated a multi-track tape recorder and yet there's the transport bar, reminding us that we missed all the fun!

Apple's Logic ProX transport bar

And will we ever see the end of the analogue mixer metaphor with it's faders, auxiliary sends and buses?

The truth is, all these representations work pretty well, and until someone comes up with an alternative that is both genuinely innovative and immediately obvious and easy to operate, perhaps we don't have much to complain about.

Some of us remember being amazed by Steinberg Pro 24 (it was the first GUI emulation of a multi-track tape recorder, albeit MIDI only) back in the mid 1980s. How many of us could have foreseen that the transport bar would still be around in 2015!

Steinberg Pro 24 which ran on the Atari ST

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