There is a superstition in multiple cultural traditions that hand-knitted projects should include a mistake – it might be to keep you safe from faeries, or because only God is perfect, or because you don’t want to trap your creative spirit in the knit item.
Whatever the reasoning, I can tell you this – digital recordings benefit from a similar commitment to leaving “mistakes” in.
There is no doubt that with a DAW, I can have a multitracked choral entrance line up to the millisecond. Perfect.
But whenever I attempt that, the life is sucked out of the recording. If you listen, you don’t hear a perfect entrance: you hear an unnatural entrance.
The same goes for any number of other tasks that you can perfect in the recording and mixing processes. You can overcorrect to the point that a human recording no longer feels human.
Choosing when to fix something and when to leave it – when it’s an error and when it’s a life-giving imperfection – is part of the art of the studio engineer.