1951 The first 24 track recording?

[AcousticDreams]

Very embarrassingly, I was unaware of Les Paul's true musical genius as a guitar player until very recently. I viewed him as a guitar creator like Leo Fender, & did not realize how amazing he is on guitar.

Even further to my astonishment to find out his pioneering recording & electronic skills.
As you see in this video, he creates 24 tracks for his Million and half record sale of " How High the Moon" in 1951. However he created Sound on Sound in 1949.
"Paul invented sound on sound recording using this machine by placing an additional playback head, located before the conventional erase/record/playback heads."

Is he really doing this with absolute accuracy on the fly? Recording back and forth on two tape machines, or is he just demonstrating the process of the pre recorded song? Regardless, to keep overdubbing with absolute level perfection each time to a mono source.....I am blown away.

Some also credit him with inventing Flanging.







It looks like in 1953, he actually invented a multi track machine
"It was 1953, while filming the TV show, when I got the idea for the first multi-track recorder, the eight track. Working with film audio inspired me to want to build an eight track recording machine where the heads were all evenly aligned, what we call sel-sync."

https://www.les-paul.com/multi-track-recording/



So why did it take so long for Recording studios to get into 8 track recording?

[Bob Womack]

Two things:

1. Les Paul was human. The sound-on-sound scheme he devised, actually playing back and forth between two machines, allowed him to do as many takes of each part as were necessary to get the part right. He didn't just go bang, bang, bang, and layer the tracks, he had to play takes to make them sync. Live, it was discovered that he was using Mary Ford's sister off-stage to create some of the parts.

2. Les was an idea man. Though he was mechanically and electronically adept, the fleshing out of many of his ideas was done by proper electrical engineers. Les came up with the IDEA of sel-sync (selective synchronization). The engineers at Ampex had to figure out the way to take care of the impedance differences between record heads and playback heads and not just switch between heads, but between impedance circuits, so that unity gain and relatively similar playback frequency response could be achieved. They also had to do it noiselessly.

I've long said that I own my career as a recording engineer to Bing Crosby and Les Paul. Bing heard German broadcasts during the war that were obviously recorded and time-shifted but were full-fidelity. America had no such technology. For radio they either recorded onto wire recorders or wax audition discs. Neither were up to magnetic tape. The Germans had also discovered the concept of record bias that allowed for a much flatter response from the tape. as soon as the war was over Bing got together a bunch of specialists and sent them over to Germany to find and bring back those amazing tape recorders. They did. He went in with partners and formed Ampex Corporation, who basically created the American market in tape recorders. When Les came up with the idea of sel-sync he was already pals with the guys at Ampex and trotted his idea over to them. After much head-scratching they delivered the first eight track to him.

Incidentally, it took until about 1989 for sel-sync to really become perfected. Sony bought MCI electronics, improved their twenty-four track, and actually for the first time created a machine where the frequency response of both record and playback heads were flat across the audio spectrum. When it came time to mix, it didn't matter which head you played from. That, and digital control of the variable parameters of the analog record system were the ultimate and final development of the 24 track recorder. I've got one of them sitting in the machine room to my left right now.

Bob