What is it that I do exactly?

I met up with some old friends and new ones too recently and usually the first question we ask is so what are you doing currently. Usually I would tell my friends I'm a sound/audio engineer.

Usually the reply I get would be along the line of, "Oh so ya like a DJ at a club?" or "Oh you specialize in DSP(Digital Signal Processor)?"

Well nope, I'm none of the above. So today I'll show you what I do exactly. A picture (or sound rather) is worth a thousand words rite?

Original and Unedited portion of a band I recorded

Mp3 of the original file

Same part edited

Mp3 of the edited file

I basically did a couple of things. First there are 2 vocal parts and they are not in sync nor are they in pitch. So I edited it until they are pretty much in time although I did not sync them perfectly cuz in real life it would be almost impossible to do it, gotta have some realism too :p

Next up I used a great software call Melodyne to tune the pitch. Notice how I used Melodyne to elongate the vocal at the very end of the clip!

Every time I do something like this, I will end up talking to some of my friends. I've a number of friends who are professional sessionist or gigging around the world, and a lot of them put in countless of hours and years of hard work to perfect their craft.

I'm a musician myself and I've never believed in using a software to make up for something you can't do, like in the above example, I feel that musicians now a days are not spending enough time to perfect their trade. I get people who would ask me questions like, "but you can fix it during mixdown stage rite? Lets move on to the next part..."

If you are a professional, shouldn't you be spending time perfecting your skillz and not relying on the engineer to perfect it for you?