Post #355715 by OnyaBirri on Fri, Jan 18, 2008 5:40 AM

Before the advent of multitrack (thank Les Paul, among others, for helping to come up with the idea), records were played live in the studio directly to disc or tape. No remixing or overdubbing. A 'balance engineer' (obsolete job title) did a primitive version of what we now call mixing on the fly during the artist's performance.

In the early days of two-track stereo, it was not uncommon to have two engineers and tape set-ups at a session - one mixing the mono recording and one mixing the stereo recording. The two could sound radically different.