In general and stated in all courses as well I think, emphasis is given to “know they tunes”.
Many of us come from vinyl and early days of CDs. No waveforms (not on CDJs til way later on more recent models) or even displays at all (apart from a basic bpm read-out). Knowing your tracks intimately was not a luxury but a necessity. It had another major advantage too. While my ears were listening to the track as it played, my brain already knew when, where and how to transition into the next track (of which I knew when, where and how to transition into), giving me lots of peace of mind and time to interact with the crowd or be browsing for other tracks that would follow the next one nicely (often two or three which I knew had nice “hooks”).
To this day I can still tell you from many of the -then- popular stuff from my collection where the breaks where, what (re)mix had the best intro/outro, where the vocals where, what special sounds they had (like sirens, applause, yells).
Visual mixing (i.e. using waveforms and other on-screen tells) is helpful with dealing with unknown material. However, the whole point about “know they tunes” is that there is no unknown (or even unfamiliar) stuff in your collection.
Am I guilty of occasionally peeking at the waveforms? Sure, if only because I was doing three other things at the same time like taking a request and fixing some lighting setting. Looking at the waveform will quickly “snap” me back to where in the track I am. And it’s a nice looking visual indicator to indicate time left on your track.
That said, as always, if it works for you, it works for you. At the end of the day it’s rocking the place that counts.
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