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.
