Culture January 1, 1

It used to be that all music was recorded live. To cut a song in the Edison era, musicians clustered around a phonograph horn like bees pollinating a flower. The louder they played, the more the horn vibrated and the more undulating was the groove incised in the wax cylinder. If they didn’t like the result, they could try again, but editing was impossible. Eight decades later, the process had become more like an assembly line. For their album Hysteria (1987), the members of Def Leppard separately recorded not only each instrument (standard practice by then) but individual guitar notes,