When Thomas Edison first captured sound, his audio recordings, made using a wax cylinder, were a simple reflection of a single moment in time. During the 1940s, when a number of experimenters began looking at different approaches to audio recording, guitarist and inventor Les Paul (b. 1915) worked on the idea of capturing a number of single events and playing them back simultaneously to produce something completely new—a synthetic recording.
In 1947 Les Paul's experiments came to fruition. Capitol Records issued his instrumental solo "Lover (When You're Near Me)," featuring Paul playing eight different guitar parts at the same time Paul made the recording using two wax-cylinder recording machines; after making one recording on the first cylinder the second would be of himself playing along with the first recording. He continued in this way until he had built up all eight parts. This pioneering recording technique is now referred to as "sound on sound."
Les Paul was also highly important in the evolution of true multitrack tape recording. In 1948 he received a gift from his friend, the singer Bing Crosby, of the world's first commercially produced magnetic tape recorder, the Ampex Model 200. Paul experimented with the machine, modifying the record and playback heads, and in 1953 he commissioned Ampex to build the first eight-track recorder, a machine that allowed tracks to be recorded in parallel on magnetic tape. By the end of the decade most of the major recording studios in the United States were equipped with multitrack tape recorders.
