Unlike today where singers sing through electronics to adjust their voices and sections of a song are digitally spliced artists of old actually had to play and sing well to get a take. The link below has a pirated tape of a Beatles recording session in the early 1960's. You can hear George Martin in the control booth yelling the take numbers to mark the master tape. If you are familiar with the song Thank You Girl after several takes the group decided the ending of the song had to be different. The edit pieces are Ringo trying to get what the group wanted. The amazing thing about all this is once they had the edit piece they wanted George Martin actually physically spliced the master tape to add the ending to another take. The released version of the track had tons of reverb added and I always wondered why and I believe this it the reason. If you listen closely to the record the tempo changes slightly where the splice is and the reverb helped to mask that. Check out the links below.
Listen closely. The splice is at 1:49 in video.
Yes there were very few tricks. As an artist you actually had to be good.