track
techniquesTRAK
A single recorded piece of music, or an individual channel in a multitrack recording.
A track has two primary meanings in music. First, it refers to a single recorded song or piece on an album or playlist. Second, in studio production, a track is one channel of a multitrack recording — a vocal track, drum track, guitar track, and so on, each recorded separately and mixed together. Multitrack recording, pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s, revolutionised music production by allowing producers to record, edit, and mix each instrument independently. In electronic music and hip-hop, a track often refers to the instrumental backing over which a vocalist performs. A click track is a metronome signal fed to musicians through headphones during recording to maintain steady tempo. The concept of tracks is fundamental to modern DAW-based music production.
Les Paul pioneered multitrack recording in the 1940s by bouncing between two disc recorders — the technique that eventually transformed all of popular music production.