Mondo Knows Facts
Tape made editing possible
Engineers cut and rejoined tape with a razor blade to build a take Before tape, a performance had to be recorded whole. Splicing let a producer drop a mistake or repeat a chorus, and the edit became part of the craft. The practice survives in the digital cut and paste. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Dolby put hiss reduction in the homeThe system boosted quiet high frequencies on record and cut them on playbackEight track cartridges rolled the tape in one loopThe end of the tape simply joined the start, so it played for everTape speed wobbles have two namesSlow drift is wow and fast tremble is flutter, both audible as pitch waverEvery analogue tape copy loses qualityHiss and distortion build up with each generation away from the masterPro Tools moved editing from tape to screensDigidesign's software let engineers cut and undo takes without losing themRecords got measurably louder and flatterHeavy compression raised average level while squashing peaks
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Tags: tape, editing, production
Tape made editing possible: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Engineers cut and rejoined tape with a razor blade to build a take. The figure is taken from Library of Congress, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.