information Bergh agreed to MacMahon's plan to attempt to film a full recording session with twenty artists. MacMahon hired T Bone Burnett and Jack White to produce and arrange songs for the sessions and booked all the artists. Recording process The Western Electric system was a live direct-to-disc recording method. The earliest condenser microphone was wired into a six-foot amplifier rack comprising a preamplifier, a first level meter, a monitor amplifier, a line amplifier to drive the cutting head which etched the grooves onto a wax disc on the turntable of a Scully cutting lathe that was rotated by a pulley system and a 100lb weight. The performers gathered around the microphone and carefully positioned themselves to achieve the correct balance. The performers were cued into when they needed to start and stop playing by a light system operated by the sound engineer that hung in the live room.The pulley allowed approximately three and a half minutes to record before the weight hit the floor. The calibration of the lathe has determined the length of the pop single to this day. The Western Electric recording system favored small vocal led groups and this had a fundamental influence on them being the dominant musical aggregation to this day. The recording system did not allow for any changes to be made to the live recording. The Scully lathe itself predated the switch from acoustic to electric recording. In the acoustic era, the lathe was connected to a large conical horn which the musicians had to gather around and sing and play at the loudest possible volume to create enough air pressure to physically vibrate a diaphragm attached to the cutting head. During the filming, MacMahon persuaded Jack White and his band to make an acoustic recording on the lathe, replacing the microphone with two horns – the first such recording made in 90 years. A rough cut of the film containing this sequence was screened at the BFI London Film Festival but it was subsequently cut from later versions to bring the film's duration to under two hours. Editing The editing style of the film was designed to feel like a dance between the camera and the musicians and was devised between editor, Dan Gitlin, and MacMahon. The use of cutaways were infrequently employed in favor of full takes of the musical performances, to make clear that the performances were live and