MULTITRACKING

This is one of the great technical innovations in the development of recorded music, comparable to the development of the typewriter in the production of writing. The original recording technologies—first, the wax cylinder, then discs, then wire, and finally audiotape—were monophonic in the sense that they could record only one line of sound. Two-track tape recorders arrived in the 1950s, to record simultaneously live sound through two separate microphones, each of which purportedly had a different...