Ongoing History Daily: Why do some songs fade out (part 1)
There are two ways to end the recording of a song. First, you can write it so it has a defined ending. Second, you can just keep playing and let the engineer fade it out until there’s nothing but silence. Who came up with the idea of fading a song?
No one is entirely sure but we do know that the concept of fading a song goes back at least half a century after the introduction of magnetic recording tape. In the old, OLD days of the 78 RPM record, recordings were made directly to a master disc and timed out to be about four minutes each, which was the maximum amount of music per side of a disc. It was only after music was committed to tape first that manipulations such as fading were possible.
More next time.