Tape gave recording two things the disc could not: you could cut it and you could record over it. From those two came editing, overdubbing and the multitrack studio.
Germany, 1935
Magnetic tape recording as we know it was developed in Germany in the 1930s at BASF, then part of IG Farben, and AEG, working with the state radio. AEG's Magnetophon K1, the first practical tape recorder, was demonstrated in Berlin in 1935. Eduard Schüller of AEG built the machines and the ring-shaped head; Friedrich Matthias of IG Farben/BASF developed the tape itself.
At the end of the war the Allies captured Magnetophon machines from Radio Luxembourg. In America, Jack Mullin demonstrated recorders based on them, and in June 1947 gave Bing Crosby a private demonstration. Crosby saw the commercial potential at once; Mullin and Crosby were key to tape's commercial start, and Ampex is the name tied to the American machines of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Multitrack
Recording several channels to separate tracks on the same reel of tape became possible in the mid-1950s. Ross Snyder at Ampex developed Sel-Sync in 1955, which let any track on the machine record or play back at any point on the tape, and the first machine, an 8-track on one-inch tape, was sold to the guitarist and inventor Les Paul for $10,000. Les Paul, Mary Ford and Patti Page used the technique in the late 1950s.
| When | Machine |
|---|---|
| 1955 | First Sel-Sync 8-track, one-inch tape |
| 1963 | The Beatles record "Please Please Me" on twin track |
| 1960s | George Martin builds Beatles records by bouncing between four-track machines |
| Late 1970s | Cassette four-track Portastudios at home |
| Later | 16-track, then 24-track on two-inch tape, then twin 24-tracks for 48 |
What it changed
Multitracking let an engineer set the level and tone of each track on its own, redo one part or overdub another to fix a mistake or find a better take. A song was no longer one performance captured but a set of performances assembled: the way records are still made in every DAW.
Sources
Every date, name, tempo and origin on this page comes from these pages, read on 2026-10-24.