Cactus Music
But then when those folks wonder why their recording still don't sound like a hit record after they have created a monster with 1,000 loops, 86 audio tracks, 96 midi tracks and effects on everything up the wazoo the answer is going to always be - garbage in garbage out.   

 
Damn, that sounds just like the project I'm working on now 
 
In all fairness though, you'll find a lot of modern electronic based music to be like this, whether it's dance music or ambient or whatever. LOTS of tracks of different layers (3 kicks layered together, 2 or 3 snares layered, synth sounds made of 3 or 4 layers of different frequencies or textures, 2 or 3 layered synth basses, lots of bussing and complex routing, lots of tracks with short lived sound effects or textures or ambiences etc). So it depends on the kind of music. If you have 86 audio tracks for a 4 piece rock band, then yes that's probably a sign of something gone wrong. 
 

Cactus Music I think we are mostly talking traditional Rock and roll ( or Country,  folk or Jazz)  here and not that new fangled electronic racket made by you youngsters.

yes - there's no way you can get some of those sounds "on the way in"

Cactus Music
I think we are mostly talking traditional Rock and roll ( or Country,  folk or Jazz)  here and not that new fangled electronic racket made by you youngsters. 

That's because we old guys used up all the good notes and chords already.

RobWS
It is always amazing to watch the old films of George Martin in the studio with the Beatles working to get the best performance out of them.  He knew what they were capable of, and had musical ears to recognize their best.  When we work in seclusion with a DAW, we have to be both George Martin and the Beatles.  That's a tall order.

Not only the performances but early stuff he produced on 4 track still stands up to todays standards.

Because we digitize tapes we get a lot of this original tapes.
We hear the stories of the makers that played a guitar-solo 20 times on the 24-track-machine to make it sound fat. Then the complete tape was played and synchronized back to the main 24-track-tape as a stereo track with a lot of flanger and echo effects.
It's nearly impossible to get the original tracks. And they did the same with vocals.
They all came with perfect composed songs to the studio and recorded them.

I think most people don't get the answer to the original question that started this thread. I'll try to explain again but a shorter version this time. Back in the analog days, the mix was 80 - 95% complete before you had even finished tracking. You would be committed to the sound you were printing to tape due to the constraints of equipment i.e. no reusable plugins on every track. Basically, most of your inserts on a channel would be committed to tape along with the channel source. Tasks like comping vocal takes would be done as soon as the vocal recording was complete. All takes would be redone unless absolutely there or at least had a really great bit at 2:03:56. There was no auto tune or the like. The take had to be right both from the performer's point of view and from the sound engineer's point of view. You would bounce the comp to another track, each take having the same EQ and compression/de-essing applied. Also, a major point that I didn't mention before is that the mix engineer was almost always the same person as the recording engineer. So you were mixing as you tracked, hence the mix was 80 - 90% complete by the time you got to the mixing stage. That's why if you shove an old multitrack tape on a machine, it sounds pretty much mixed. At this stage, all you have to do is balance levels a bit, add some gates and erase noise, maybe recreate busses for drums, reverb & other effects sends etc. and add some compression and EQ, get the tape opp to insert some head and tail leader tape, then mix down to a two track (often muting/unmuting channels and riding faders as you went) to send to the mastering engineer. Your job as the recording (and mix!) engineer is now done and you can pop to the pub for a well-earned pint before returning to the studio to set up for the next session.

It has absolutely nothing to do with perfectly composed songs. The OP wasn't referring to the composition but to the quality of the pre mix coming off tape which has more to do with a perfectly composed engineer!

John T
 
Myself, I don't think people are mixing up the writing stage and the recording stage; they're perhaps mistaking the demo stage for the recording stage.

That is probably the best assessment. My personal experience is similar in that ideas can be captured readily (and just as easily multiply and lost), and it is easy to fall into the pitfall of trying to salvage those into "final takes" when they best fit a demo. Perhaps is the belief that editing tools can make demos into final masters, but that concept is often promoted by editing tools. This is not meant to imply these tools are bad, but overuse and dependency is as applicable as elsewhere.

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)??

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

The analog version of ripple editing.
 

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.

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.
 
 

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.

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