History of Music Production

Recorded sound began with Thomas Edison's phonograph in 1877, but 'production' as a craft really started mid-20th century, when Les Paul's experiments with multitrack recording let artists layer performances instead of capturing everything live in one take.

Analog tape and large mixing consoles defined the studio era for decades, and sampling culture, chopping and reassembling existing recordings, central to hip-hop's rise from the late 1970s onward, added a whole new production vocabulary built entirely around manipulating recorded sound itself rather than performing it live.

The digital audio workstation (DAW) arrived in the 1990s and put a full multitrack studio on a single computer, and by the 2000s and 2010s that had put professional-grade production tools within reach of anyone with a laptop. It is the same shift that made bedroom-studio hits like Billie Eilish's possible, and it now means production is as learnable a skill as playing any instrument.