They literally cut the tape, took sections out, and stuck it back together.
 
 

John T
They literally cut the tape, took sections out, and stuck it back together.

The analog version of ripple editing.
 

jackson white

John T
They literally cut the tape, took sections out, and stuck it back together.

The analog version of ripple editing.
 

With no UNDO button.

soens
So in the old days of vinyl & tape, how did they cut a song to make the short version (usually the single) from the long version (usually the LP)??

It was usually done on the master, but I used to drive people crazy by doing it on the multitrack so that, for example, reverb could spill over on a track and help cover the splice.

Yep, good musicians make for killer recordings. 

We are kinda talking apples and oranges here.  In the old days if you were a pop/rock musician you joined band, practiced a lot, did some gigs and if you raised the money you could go into a studio.  And you had better be polished or you came out w/ half a demo.  Lots of people did that and learned - either not to ever go back into the studio again or to get their act together beforehand.  If you were the Rolling Stones you could spend however much time figuring out Sympathy for the Devil in the studio - see the movie "Sympathy for the Devil" - while documenting about a million dollars worth of mics today set up all over the place.
 
Many  musicians today start recording at home and if they gig they have no idea of the difference between studio and live.  I worked with an All Mom band who sang great choruses live after midnight w/ a few drinks under everyone's belts.  The first time they did a chorus in the studio they almost collectively threw up, they were so out of tune.  I was told another time that the  cover song only had one guitar on the "real" recording.  It sounded better with two on this version, perhaps a statement of the guitar player's experience or talent?  And if you are still learning guitar, just how much time do you realistically have to learn about setting up mics, or arrangement (a full time position back in the 60/70s and one of those George Martin tension things that separated the Beatles in the studio) or just keeping the trash cans empty.  I planned on working on my maschine integration last night and spend all the time updating splat (on 2 machines), maschine itself, and trying to figure out why Vegas 14 wouldn't load but crash on Kontakt.  Welcome to the working week.
 
Many musician's today simply start recording and build up the song that way, through trials and serious errors.  Not that it isn't fun and you can't learn it all and record a song or CD as you learn along.  Many do but they learn that putting a 57 through their Neve knockoff delivers a tone that sounds right off a record most of the time.  And still sounds that way after it is mixed.  Experience helps.  Talent helps.  And having the right tools helps.  Like a guitarist reaching for a Gibson on a particular song because it works for that song.
 
 

I don't think the differences are exclusively about "back in the day they did it this way."  The main thing is that there is a whole team of people who are all seriously experienced at their particular craft in different stages of the production, and they all are given the resources in time and money to get each step as perfect as they can. This is still practiced today I think.  I watched a video not long ago in which a mix engineer who was a graduate of Full Sail (I think?) giving a lecture to current students. He had worked on a number of successful recordings, and he was giving a demo of his mixing process on a certain song that had been a pretty big hit recently, and he emphasized a couple of times that the recording engineers had done such a superb job of getting everything recorded perfectly that he had a lot less work to do in mixing than one might think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPH9LrLAmmo

In another video, a couple of recording engineers were being interviewed about vocal recording, and one guy was talking about riding the controls on a compressor during tracking. He went on to say that big name vocalists often bring their own recording engineer who knows their vocals extremely well, and have all the specific gear to capture them perfectly.

So yeah, it's a lot of teamwork from a lot of talented and experienced people, and having just the right gear (mics and such) to get it all right at every step of the way.

This thread is amazing. Not only does it seem that most people responding have gone off at a complete tangent to what the OP was commenting on, it also seems that some people are spouting about crap that they have absolutely no idea about. People surmising how it used to work "back in the day" without having ever worked as an engineer "back in the day". It amazes me how many people just jump into a thread like this to offload their "theory" of how it worked while ignoring those who have already explained how it actually worked because they have hands-on experience. This is why loads of people end up learning so little - their opinion is so much more important to them than the actual facts. Sorry for the rant, but people, really, quit the forum fever! The OP's comment is nothing to do with great performers, fantastic songwriting, the involvement of loads of people, whether they developed the song in the studio, whether they were recording them self or a band, orchestra etc. It's to do with the "sound" from the tape, the "engineers" and the "recording techniques" used "back in the day" which were very different to today due to the tools available at the time.

Hmm. The conversation just meandered that way. I didn't realise the conversation police were on patrol.

The music I work on in my DAW isn't pre-planned at all. I write tunes for acoustic guitar sometimes, but that's just tinkering with my guitar and remembering good stuff which, through a bit of solo jamming and experimentation and filtering, ends up as a tune over a span of days or weeks. At the DAW, I'm all about experimentation and evolution and I take full advantage of all of the modern technology at my fingertips. This means I will jam, compose, arrange, sound design, mix and edit continually in a circle according to where my creative thoughts take me.
 
For instance, I'm currently working on a piece that started as a rough fingerpicked riff played on electric guitar, then this was translated to MIDI with Melodyne, edited in the piano roll and generally messed around with until I had a nice plunky keyboard part which pleased me. And then it was expanded into an 8 bar pattern, and a few drums added, and a bass, and some more synths, and generally bounced back and forward on and off for a period of weeks. At some point I decided that I didn't like the original keyboard sound, so I designed a new one, and that immediately sent me off on a completely new tangent in which all other parts had to be changed to suit the vibe of the new sound. Extra bits were added during completely whimsical sessions of idle tinkering, and before you know it I was working on a whole new section of the tune and the original section was laid to the wayside. A few more sections later and the piece was at 8 minutes long, and then new parts were experimented with to tie the existing sections together. Entire sections were moved around and rearranged on the timeline, and before you know it, the original keyboard part was relegated to a small section later in the piece. However, the MIDI of this part was used throughout all of the new parts and mess with, turned upside down, reworked and manipulated in bizarre ways using strange Reaktor instruments, and then this led to more evolution, more tinkering, more rearrangement and more sound design. 
 
Before I knew it, the piece was 20 minutes long, had almost 100 tracks, something like 40 synths in the synth rack (only a few turned on at a time and used to generate and record audio), hundreds of clips all over the place (some stored in "storage" tracks hidden from view) and dozens of markers all over the place. And all the time, I'm doing rough mixing with EQ's and compressors to get a nice sound going as inspiration. They're inserted at will, hundreds of them, and swapped out and messed with continually. New "bridge" sections are added to transition one part to another, and oftentimes these turn into entire sections themselves, and I'm adding another 32 measures to the project here and there, perhaps deleting some as well. Right now I think I'm about 60% of the way there, but parts are continually being reworked and added to and edited so who the hell even knows. 
 
This is a completely nuts way to work, and I'm pretty sure I have some ADHD and this is why I end up working this way, but the point is that it would have been completely impossible for someone like me to work in such a whimsical way 30 or 40 years ago. Unless they were rich enough to own a fully fledged studio, and even then they would only have access to a fraction of the tools I have at my disposal on my computer. So while I can completely see the benefit of the old workflows described above with their careful planning and preparation and foresight, I thank God that affordable tools exist these days which allow complete and utter scatterbrains like me to have a crack at it