Why did tape splicing make early electronic music difficult to produce?

In the early development of electronic music, tape splicing was a fundamental but laborious process that made production difficult because it required composers to physically segment, reorder, and manually assemble pieces of magnetic tape to create their compositions.12

This method was inherently inconvenient and time-consuming, as it demanded specialized equipment and technically skilled personnel to achieve precise results. Because composers had to physically cut and join tape to rearrange sounds, modify the attack and decay of audio, or create complex montages, the process was often tedious. Without the automated systems available in later years, composers who were not satisfied with simply linking effects in a crude sequence faced the significant challenge of manually editing vast amounts of material to build a unified artistic structure.312

Furthermore, when integrating tape with live performers, coordination became an overriding difficulty; the tape would move forward at a fixed, remorseless pace, making it challenging for musicians to follow the recorded material exactly.2