After a recent trip to Amoeba Records and remembering the joy of flipping through 12s and album artwork, it became apparent that after all this time I have never stumbled upon anything that explained how vinyl was made. I remembered there was a process where a master is created and used to stamp other vinyl, but the process in creating that master, how grooves are made and vinyl is cut wasn’t anything I ever understood.
There is a pretty cool article in the latest De La Soul issue of Frank 151 that has an interesting interview with Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records. He describes the cutting the first three groove record on the “Me, Myself and I” US 12″. I didn’t really understand what he meant the first time round, but this cool YouTube video gave me a cool overview of the vinyl making process and what the hell Silverman was speaking about when it comes to continuous grooves.
More on Tom Silverman, De La Soul’s experimentation with phonograph records, and part 2 of the vinyl making process after the jump.
On releasing the first, innovative De La records…
Tom Silverman:
And we did the first three-groove record with them. Remember when Prince Paul says, on Three Feet High and Rising, “How many grooves are there on a record?” I had been encouraging them to push the envelope on what was possible, so they did that whole gameshow thing with Prince Paul. So there’s 18tracks and bug out pieces in between, and that was a whole invention that nobody’s ever done before we did it with De La Soul. I was pushing them to experiment with the medium, to go further. We thought that stuff was great, and it also made it look like there were over 20 songs on the album, so it changed the perceived value. When we went into 12″s, we tried to do cool things, whether it was colored vinyl or clear vinyl, but the best thing was this 12″ where we cut parallel grooves on one side.
Anyway, Prince Paul says, “How many grooves are there on a record?” There’s only really one, it goes around and around, to the center, but people say “thousands,” because they look and see all these grooves. But people don’t think about it. So we did a record that had two grooves on one side. We ran the grooves wide, so the second groove ran in between the others, and also went to the center, inside the other groove. So depending on where you put the needle down, it would be a different song.
Now, DJs complained about this, because when their records skipped, it wasn’t just skipping forward a beat, it would go itno a different song altogether. But it was the first three groove phonography record, ever.
