A history of recording

Every tool on your laptop is the answer to a problem someone had with the one before it. Recording started as a way to draw sound on paper, became a needle cutting a groove, then magnetic tape, then numbers. Each step changed how music was made, not just how it was kept. Here is the short version, from 1857 to the laptop.

Writing sound down (1857 to 1877)

The first person to capture sound wasn't Edison. In Paris in 1857, a typesetter called Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented the phonautograph: a horn, a thin membrane and a bristle that traced the vibrations of a voice as a wavy line on soot-blackened paper. He meant people to read the lines, not hear them; nobody could play them back. Then in 2008 a group of audio historians called First Sounds scanned his tracings and turned them into sound with a computer. One of them, recorded on 9 April 1860, is a man slowly singing the French folk song Au clair de la lune: the oldest recognisable recording of a human voice, heard 148 years after it was made.

Playback arrived in 1877 with Thomas Edison's phonograph: a needle cut the vibrations into tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder, and the same needle could trace them again. Ten years later Emile Berliner's gramophone used flat discs instead. Discs could be pressed from a metal master by the thousand, which is where the word master comes from, and why the record industry was built on discs rather than cylinders.

The acoustic era: playing into a horn

For almost fifty years there were no microphones and no electricity. Musicians played into a large horn, and the sound itself pushed the cutting needle. That had big consequences for the music:

• The balance was set by where people stood. Loud brass went at the back, quiet strings and the singer leaned into the horn. The arrangement was the mix.
• Only a narrow band of frequencies got through. Deep bass and the top end were mostly lost, so arrangers swapped double bass for tuba and violins for special horned violins that were louder.
• One take, start to finish. There was no editing. A mistake meant cutting a new disc.

Electrical recording (1925)

In 1925 the record companies Victor and Columbia adopted a system from Western Electric, the research arm of the American telephone company: a microphone, an electronic amplifier and an electrically driven cutter. Records suddenly captured far more of the bass and treble, whole orchestras could be recorded properly, and singers no longer had to shout. Quiet, close singing to a microphone, crooning, became a style of its own because the microphone made it possible. Recording was still straight to disc, and still one take.

Magnetic tape (1935 to 1950)

The German company AEG showed the first practical tape recorder, the Magnetophon, at the Berlin Radio Show in 1935. In 1940 engineers at German radio found that adding a strong, inaudible high-frequency tone while recording (called bias) made tape sound dramatically cleaner. After the war an American Army engineer, Jack Mullin, brought two Magnetophons and fifty reels of tape home to California. Bing Crosby heard them, used them to pre-record his radio show from 1947, and put money into a small company called Ampex, whose Model 200 (1948) became the studio tape machine.

Tape changed everything because you could cut it with a razor blade and stick it back together. The best parts of several takes could become one performance, mistakes could be removed, and a recording could be erased and reused. The long-playing record (1948) and the 7-inch single (1949) followed, and stereo records arrived at the end of the 1950s.

Multitrack: building a song in layers

The guitarist Les Paul had been stacking parts by recording onto one machine while playing back from another, a process that added noise with every pass. Ampex built him something better: a machine that could record new parts on some tracks while playing back the others perfectly in time, which Ampex called Sel-Sync. His 8-track, delivered in 1957 and nicknamed "the Octopus", cost US$10,000.

Through the 1960s, four tracks were the professional standard. The Beatles made Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) on four-track machines by mixing full tracks down onto one track of another tape to free up space, a technique called bouncing, or a reduction at Abbey Road. For A Day in the Life, engineer Ken Townsend linked two four-track machines to run together. By the end of the decade 16-track machines were in use, and 24 tracks became the studio norm in the 1970s.

Multitrack split recording into stages: record the parts, then decide how they sit together later. That second stage is mixing, which has a history of its own.

Home recording began in 1979 with TASCAM's Portastudio, which recorded four tracks on an ordinary cassette and had a small mixer built in. Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska (1982) was released from four-track cassette demos he made at home.

Digital: sound as numbers

Digital recording measures the waveform thousands of times a second and stores each measurement as a number. Copies are perfect, there's no tape hiss, and nothing wears out. Japanese company Denon was making digital recordings in the 1970s; Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop (1979), recorded on a 3M digital machine, was the first digitally recorded major-label pop album. On 1 October 1982 Sony's first CD player went on sale in Japan with the first 50 CD titles. The CD's format, 44,100 measurements a second at 16 bits each, is still the baseline for music today.

The computer becomes the studio

In 1989 Digidesign released Sound Tools, which recorded and edited stereo audio on a Mac; its four-track successor Pro Tools followed in 1991. In 1996 Steinberg's Cubase VST did something new: it ran the mixer and the effects on the computer's own processor, and it let other companies make plug-ins for it in an open format. That is the format Liminal still uses (VST3) today, alongside Apple's Audio Units.

The last two steps were about getting music to listeners. MP3 files made music small enough to send over the internet, Apple's iTunes Store sold songs one at a time from 2003, and Spotify launched in 2008. Today most music is recorded, mixed and mastered on the same computer that streams it, and the tools that once filled a building fit in a backpack.