

Before samplers: music made with razor blades and scotch tape - mambodog
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXEBDCX_O6M

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chipsy
The same year this mix was made, Ultimate Soundtracker was released:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ywaCR5Tg4A>

Commercial sampling keyboards were available for the big budget productions
around the late 70s(the big breakthrough being the polyphonic Fairlight CMI in
'79), but memory prices dropped low enough to make mass-market products like
the Casio SK-1 available by the mid-80s. So my impression(not having been
around for that era) is that extensive tape mixes like the one in the video
were primarily inspired by digital samplers; since at that time, samplers
couldn't hold entire songs, tape splicing technique improved to allow the same
concept to be used in a longer format. The move to computer-centric editing
came with multitrack editing of entire songs(e.g. Pro Tools) which happened
during the 1990s.

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mambodog
This video gives you some idea of how this could be done:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z7jwZK2-Gw> however most people doing this
kind of analog audio editing with tape actually had to cut the tape by hand,
and all had to make careful calculations to keep the edits in musical time.

