Congrats Joe, sounds like it was a fun and fascinating day in the studio.

Now that everything is digital, the process you described has become pretty standard, I think. Sound engineers have become really good at looking at the sound waves, and using the computer to cut and paste them together. It's pretty amazing, when you think about what sound engineers used to have to do with splicing tape and scissors.

I once heard a (probably apocryphal) story about a sound engineer who was working on a Barbara Streisand album in the pre-digital days. He was anxious to impress her, and he wanted to go the extra mile on her recording project. So he took one song that she had recorded a vocal on, and spent hours and hours painstakingly cutting all her breaths out of the track, and splicing it all back together, until he had what he thought was the perfect vocal. The next day he played it for her and she hated it. She asked for all the breaths to be put back in. I often think of that poor sound guy when I'm in the studio...