45 vs 33 RPM

Why are some records 33 rpm, while others are 45rpm? What are the differences and how do you decide which is best?  Why should you care what speed your record was cut at?
Scott Hull - Chief cutting Engineer at Masterdisk explains the difference and goes deep into the details with sideman KJ of the Oddysy.

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Music heard :
Steely Dan -  Jack of Speed
From the Album Two Against Nature
listen to it on Spotify: Jack of Speed 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:07

Hello and welcome to Making Vinyl at MasterDisc, a podcast with Scott Hall, Chief Mastering Engineer and Disc Cutting Engineer at MasterDisc. Today I'm joined in the studio with KJ from the Odyssey.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hello, hello.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

And we're going to talk about vinyl. Today's topic came from our uh our listeners and uh our clients' uh questions. And we're gonna really try to demystify the difference between speeds. We're gonna talk about whether we're gonna turn fast or we're gonna turn slow. This is a question of 45 RPM or 33 RPM.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Yeah, this one's been on my mind for a little while. You know, my I I've mentioned my friend Otto before in a podcat in this podcast, and uh, you know, he's a a real and true audiophile. And a little while ago he started collecting nothing but 45. You know, it all sort of changed. And you know, I used to always think that a 45 was just this, you know, little seven-inch record with the giant hole in the middle, and if it was any bigger than that, then it was 33. But it it seems to come down to an issue of of audio quality, uh uh, you know, sometimes. Is that is that right?

SPEAKER_02 1:14

Yeah, when some people say a 45, they're they really are referring to a seven-inch, a seven inch forty-five single. But these days, um for the in the album format, we have the option of cutting a 12-inch disc at either the the traditional 33 and a third revolutions per minute, uh 33 RPM, or at uh 45 RPM. Nearly every turntable on the planet is compatible with both, so if you choose to go at the one speed or the other, you know, your consumer will be able to play it. It's a a direct relationship between um quality and uh well, quality goes up as the speed goes up, but the playing time goes down, so it's a inverse re inverse proportion to the how much material you can fit on the side of a disc.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Well, let me let me stop you right there. Why does the quality go up?

SPEAKER_02 2:06

Well, okay, so the way we play back audio off of the disc, the audio itself wiggles the stylus back and forth. And it turns out, you know, recorded music is is actually pretty challenging to record into a physical media like that. Um just spoken word or something that doesn't have a lot of high frequencies uh in it um would be easily recorded. And actually, you know, if you think about in your head what a 78 sounded like, or if you've ever heard an L Edison cylinder or a wire recorder, uh you'll know that there was there was really very little high frequencies in the in those recordings. They weren't really trying to reproduce the full bandwidth of sound, though they didn't have the capabilities so much then. Um along came the LP, and we have now for a variety of reasons the ability to record nearly full bandwidth. Bandwidth meaning frequency response in this case. So high frequencies can now be encoded and played back. But they they're very, very, very small squiggles. And um the faster the medium goes past the needle, the more accurately it can be inscribed.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Okay, so that's uh that's the crux of the matter right there. I mean it it's it's it's higher quality from from inception, right?

SPEAKER_02 3:18

It really is, because we're dealing with uh um you know a physical format. This needle literally has to go back and forth. You know, um if it was going up to the limits of human hearing, 20,000 times per second it has the wind wiggle back and forth. That's a very fast wiggle. Right. Um twenty thousand times it goes left and right each second.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

It's almost inconceivable.

SPEAKER_02 3:41

Yes. An interesting fact though is that when we cut the disc, the cutter head you know forces its way through the the material and is driven through the material, so we can actually inscribe a really accurate playback at 33 and a third, but when it plays back, the needle is just riding um in the groove with a very slight force um to avoid wearing out the disc and to and to cut down on uh unwanted noise. Um it's hard to describe. The fact that it's going faster and it's not my brain suddenly snapped to um the spinal tap, and this one goes to 11. Right. I mean, we literally have more recorded media going past the c the cartridge each second, and the more material the better. The higher that speed is the better. Um but let me say there's a reason why 78 didn't sound great. It wasn't because of their speed. All of the other technologies that have developed since then weren't in place. And so the only way that they could possibly get a good recording back then was to speed the disc up a lot. So each advancement in technology down to 45 and down to 33, um allowed us to get actually better playback performance, but also um uh while reducing the speed and reducing the speed that increases our playing time. And that's you know why the LP format exists as it does.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

I know that the go there was a goal of of increasing the quality. Was there a goal specifically for decreasing revolutions per minute? Was it so you could fit more on the side of the record?

SPEAKER_02 5:12

Yeah, that's the only point. The seven inch could only fit a song and people wanted to have a larger body of work than that. And and quite often outside of the pop realm, you know, a classical or jazz performance, you know, eight, ten, fifteen minutes or a symphony, you know, might span multiple discs. It's a lot more pleasant if that spans, you know, well, two sides or three sides instead of fourteen sides.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Right.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

Um, so there's an interesting thing that's happened since the digital m millennia, uh the digital uh decade. Era era things. We started with CDs imitating vinyl. And about forty-five minutes or so uh went on a CD. And people realized that if they put bonus tracks on and extra material on, um they they could fill the disc out beyond a sixty minutes and they could actually go to sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five minutes, and it would all still fit on a CD. In my opinion, is I think um we kind of went too far with that. And I think the C D format actually kind of proved that m people's uh attention span really weren't up for listening to 75 minutes of the same, you know, the same artist.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

And um, mine ain't even yeah, I mean I don't care if it's prints or whoever, like after a while I need a minute, you know, I need a break.

SPEAKER_02 6:24

Yeah, yeah. So the uh it's almost sort of magical the twenty minute side on on vinyl. Uh turns out to be kind of a um a sweet spot. But now in this day and age when we've produced records to make them fit on digital, and now we're trying to say, well, let's take the same material and put it on vinyl, we run into a funny problem. We've got too much material to fit on two sides, but not quite enough material to fill out four sides. And so 45 ends up being an in-between where we can also benefit from the improved playback quality.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Okay, so it's it's not always just about the uh, you know, uh putting out a more high quality product, it's also about spacing, you know, it's uh it's about timing, is what you're saying.

SPEAKER_02 7:10

Yeah, it usually gets driven by the fact that it uh if someone's gonna make a 45-inch 45 RPMs uh a 12-inch, it's usually driven by the fact that they want it to sound great. They want it to sound as good as they can. And so then they make some uh usually some creative compromises so that it fits. So a 45 RPM disc, you know, really can only be reliable on it on a 12-inch, you know, it's about 14 minutes or so, 13, 14 minutes. You can put more time on, but you have to end up reducing the level, so you kind of lose some of what you This was the the whole point of what I wanted to thought we we should talk about is this what you gain and what you lose by going between 33 and 45. And um it's hard to talk about, even harder to to make the decisions um on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

But so a couple questions I have here uh as far as making the choice, because you know, from my perspective, it's uh I I'm coming from from the artist side and and I'm you know I wanna I want to talk about what happens when an artist comes in and talks to you about making a record and you have this discussion, 33 or 45. Um, so let me ask you a couple specific questions that I think an artist would ask. The first one is if I have too much material for you know for either a 33 or a 45, what are my options here? What do you tell somebody to just leave a couple songs off of the of the record entirely?

SPEAKER_02 8:39

Yeah, that's one of the options. It it really is a less is more kind of situation. If we can reduce the the material, the running time, then we can increase the level and and I can get a full audio quality. Maybe it's worth saying that duration is a function of yeah, we talked about the high frequencies being better at 45 RPM. Um base response on a vinyl disc actually takes up more space on the disc than high frequencies do. Okay. Real quick, why why is that? Well, base frequencies are bigger. They're longer, but they also cause the needle to move back and forth more. In a wider arc.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

So you're you're literally taking up more space on the platter, right?

SPEAKER_02 9:21

Yes. So it and the operator are constantly monitoring what kind of lateral left to right motion is happening on the cutter head, and you have to move the cutter head across the disc at a rate that's satisfactory to avoid overcutting the previous groove. And you have to move that cutter head faster if there's a lot of bass on the recording, a lot of low frequencies information on the recording. It also is affected by out-of-phase material, but it gets really kind of esoteric and very engineering a bit. But we don't necessarily want to make the artist conform to the format, uh, with the exception of we have to limit how long the material is. So, case in point conversation yesterday, client wanted to put a bonus track on a record. Uh, we had 22 minutes on each side. It's a little bit long, but it's kind of a jazzy record. There was some quiet moments, so that we kind of decided that that was going to work. Then they found another track that they wanted to include, and it was another four and a half minutes. We couldn't really tack it onto one side because then we would have had 27 minutes on one side, and it was just really too much to make a high quality product. But they considered rearranging the sequence so that we could put, you know, move one longer song to the second side and put the bonus track on the first or vice versa, so that even the sides out. But at best, after all the experimentation, it turned out to be about 24 and a half minutes as our our longer side. And I've just explained it to him that you know it it's going to be noticeable. Um, the difference between 22 and 25 minute side is going to be noticeable uh sound quality change. Now, you know, the funny thing is the consumer never notices this because they only have the one version, they don't have the other to compare it to. But if you want your record to be loud and be competitive sounding, and now this isn't the same as loudness wars for digital files. This is just means if the music is louder than the noise floor of the disc is less pronounced. You you don't hear as much surface noise. So when I say you can make it sound better, we're actually saying I can make it sound quieter by raising the recording noise. Um it's a little counterintuitive, but if you think about the noise floor of the disc being a constant, let's just say for argument's sake that it's you know 25 dB down from a nominal level, there's this constant record noise. It's actually a little higher than that, but let's just say it's 20 dB down, we have this sort of constant sh record noise. Well, if I tried to put 30 minutes worth of pop music on a side of a record, um my audio level would be about 18 dB down, just barely above that replay noise. And when you turn your amplifier up so that you could hear the audio, you'd hear just as much surface noise as music. Conversely, if that side was only 18 minutes long, um I would be able to set that record level much higher. You would actually then turn your volume down when you played back the disc, and the noise floor would drop even lower. So it would, it would almost it could get to a point where it almost sounded like a silent disc. And quite honestly, the most of the time when a hi-fi record is playing back and it sounds really good, that's because we've been able to record it hot, generally because it's not a super long side, not you know, anything over 21, 22, 23 minutes. And so that kind of comes into the conversation with a 45, because that number of 20 minutes is relative to a 33 RPM disc. Well, we gotta we gotta cut the side off at about 14 minutes on a 45. You'll have a better sound quality of 45, and you could divide your record into four sides, four shorter sides, but the listener will have to flip the records over and it won't be as a continuous, you know, sort of a playback environment. Right. But if you have too much material for 33 and you're gonna have to do it as a double disc anyway, then you really have to then consider whether or not a 45 RPM is a good move. To make it simple, I'm afraid a lot of uh discount cutter locations around the world have just tell people we're not gonna cut over 21 minutes on a side at 33 rpm. That's just we're not gonna do it. You're not gonna like the way it sounds, and so we're we're not gonna cut it. But that's really, really, really oversimplifies the the questions because I I can cut a really great sounding record at you know twenty five or twenty-six minutes if one or two of the songs are quieter, you know, without a full instrumentation. Right. So you you have to communicate your intention with the the cutter, with the person who's going to actually make the record. Because um there's some trade-offs that won't affect sound quality and other trade-offs that are dramatically do affect sound quality.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Well, like so many aspects of this process, that's you know, it's it's just another good reason to work with somebody who knows what they're doing. I mean, you you know, you have to you have to have somebody, you know, sort of honestly present the pros and cons. You know, if you if you have this much music, then this might be your best option. Whereas if you have this much music, you know, we can fit it on here, but if we do this and this, it'll be lower quality. You know, it's it's a it's a lot to it's a lot to keep in your head.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

Well, and it's not a formula, it has to do with the audio that's on your production. Um if one person came in with a jazz record that's sort of like an old school ECM or Blue Note jazz record where there's lots of quiet bits in the middle and some peaks at the top and and at the song and peaks at the end, but a lot of quiet space. If there's a lot of sort of white space within your recording, that allows the computer to conserve the real estate of the disc and it allows me to raise the overall level as a result of that. But if the record is heavily compressed and limited pop record, you know, of any genre, um the every groove on that record is is deep and wide. And that means it uses up more disk space, which means we can't fit as much audio on it. So if somebody tells you just tells you that uh 21 minutes is gonna work or 23 minutes isn't gonna work, they're only giving you half the story because they have to listen. You have to listen to the material. And even sometimes I have to put the um the audio on the lathe and do it a um practice run, uh, a dummy run, and uh see exactly how the lathe is gonna react to that audio. So even with experience, there's still uh a need for trial and error to find out what the limits really are. Because if you don't push the limits, you never find out really just how loud you could make it.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

And it's it's fascinating to me. This is another one of those technical aspects that happens to also be a creative endeavor. And I feel like with vinyl, we come across these things uh so often, so much more often than with digital audio, where the best product is will be produced by uh by by somebody like yourself working in concert with an artist to make creative decisions about the overall quality and the length and the you know where where the songs are placed and and you know when when in the process of listening you have to flip it over and and the expense of the whole thing, you know. I'm I'm assuming that, you know, certainly for an artist uh producing four discs or two, you know, two discs instead of one, that's that's gonna be a more expensive proposition, right?

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Yeah, it really is, and that weighs heavily into the decision. I present the facts, and it I really it's up to the individual artist and producer and and or label to make the decision of you know where their priorities land. It's quite reasonable, and I mean I'm not gonna fight with it, certainly with anybody to um to insist on a proper way of doing this, but it's quite reasonable for a label or an artist to say, we're not gonna sell enough of these, and we really want to fit all this material on because we think the consumer's gonna be upset if they only get, you know, three-quarters of this record, and it's really a whole thought, so we really want to put it together. Let's just squeeze it on, and we're gonna, you know, we may pay the price and it being a little quieter, or maybe not being quite as nice a hi-fi record, but this is what our budget and this is what our market can bear. With a um with a specialty project where sale prices can be increased because it's now a double record. Maybe it's a 45 RPM double record, and maybe it's done on 180 gram to continue to improve the feeling of quality, of the perception of quality, and sometimes and and often the reality of an improved quality disc. My point being the client has to be able to make that decision ultimately. I just want to give them the information so that they really have a feeling for what they're giving up with each of the compromises that that becomes necessary.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

We can't hear you. That's all right.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

So from a listener's perspective, um try to, and I know this is this is really uh an unfair question to ask, but I'm an artist and I'm considering 33 versus 45. Try to quantify for me what is the difference that my fans will hear when they when they put the record on. Will that for instance, would they be would there is there any level of disappointment, you know, with the 33 versus 45 because there's lower quality? Or does it does the disappointment just come be you know if we try to squeeze 28 minutes on a side? You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 19:18

Well, it really that does depend on how engaged the listener is and and and so to some extent um how much they've invested in their playback equipment. A entry-level turntable played back with a a young adult that's just you know establishing the beginnings of their record collection may not have any real impact on them until they start to accrue some sense of what a good record sounds like in comparing that to another record. Uh uh many years ago, you know, pop artists would put out their records and then they would license uh the hit songs to a um a variety of different companies, but one very popular one was K Tell. Columbia House was another, but K Tell would make these compilation records where they'd put all the hits from a a number of different artists on the same record.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

And I already know how this story is gonna end, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 20:09

Well, you can't imagine that it's gonna you know sound as good as the original, and and uh in many cases it was dreadfully different. Um and I think there was enough pushback on that that uh many artists uh chose not to allow uh record clubs and um resellers to do that. But in many cases the labels had the prerogative, they had the control over the uh uh creative license for the media, so they might have been able to do it even if the artist wasn't um didn't agree. But it if you never bought a Jackson Brown record and your first experience was uh you know one of these um hit collection records, you you might not be very impressed.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Yeah, you th you end up thinking it was recorded like crap and he doesn't know what he's doing in the studio.

SPEAKER_02 20:50

Right, right. Well, because of everything that we said, they would squeeze way more time on a side than they really should have, but it really didn't matter to them. They were um they wanted to license as many titles on one processing as possible.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

Sure, of course. It's it's art produced by bean counters in that and that that's a really it's a whole other interesting perspective, especially for artists who are involved with investors or uh or labels, uh, you know, or or some some bank of some sort where there's a you know, is there's somebody somebody there thinking, well, you know, screw the quality, I want return on investment here. It's a it's a whole other dynamic.

SPEAKER_02 21:26

Yeah. Well, I actually because artists tend to not really think about that um as they're going through the process, to be honest, if if you've really stopped to think about your return on investment um before you were buying, you know, your next bass guitar or your um or your even your next set of strings or your next amplifier or next gig bag, you know, it it you'd probably not be choosing you know the best impossies that you could find. But you know as an artist that it matters um because it makes you feel good, it makes you create better music. Music sounds better, you perform better, um, you know, everything about it is better. But so an artist tends to not really be thinking about the bottom line in the whole process. They'll spend, you know, hundreds of times more on the making of the record than than they will likely recover. But it's the passion, it's what they do. It's, you know, they fund that with live performance and other licensing and things like that. Because we're not we're you know, vinyl sales are strong and are increasing, um, but it's still uh in many cases just barely uh enough to support a a person, let alone a you know, person with a family.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Yeah, and that and it's sort of it sort of attaches itself to a concept we've talked about previously, which is that there's a certain mentality um held by by a certain kind of artist who l loves their their creative process so much and is and is so careful about curating the listening experience or the experience in general for uh for the viewer or the listener that they go the extra mile and will you know will will create you know what is essentially to a to a bean counter, a loss leader, but they do it, they do it out of a of out of a passion for creativity and art and how you can almost tell, you know, it we go back to this sort of the Jack White archetype of somebody who just cares so deeply and passionately about it that they'll create something better. And so you just you you come to know that you're gonna get better whatever, better art, better product from from a certain kind of person.

SPEAKER_02 23:37

It's it's branding in the big sense of uh uh it it in all of it. It's it's what is what is your customer, what is the person that picks up your record gonna think of you and how are they gonna relate to the decisions you made.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

Absolutely. And and you know, how much they care uh about you. Again, you know, the the bean counter trying to put as many Jackson Brown tunes or whatever greatest hits on on that thing, and it's gonna end up sounding like crap versus somebody who really who really does care about the end user.

SPEAKER_02 24:08

Yeah. Yeah. So what I try to get people thinking about before they decide what they're gonna do about their record, whether it's um, you know, gonna be uh a gate in a gatefold package, whether it's gonna be one disc or it's gonna be two discs, if it's gonna be thirty-three or forty-five, you know, run each of those scenarios out and figure out what your cost per unit is gonna be. And then think about how many that you reasonably need to sell um, you know, to get back close enough to what you put into it to make it worth doing. One of the the big gotchas with this is so much of the expense of making vinyl is in all of these one-step one-time charges. Masterings of one, you know, mixings of one step one-time charge. Um you you know, you mix a song, it doesn't matter whether you sell one of them or or ten thousand of them, you still have to pay the mixer to mix it. So you still have to pay the cutting engineer to cut it. You still have to pay the uh plating person to turn it into metal parts. You still have to have the test process made. You still have to do the setups for the artwork and the printing. It's not until you get up into the three or four or five hundred quantity that you start to get re start to see sort of reasonable per unit prices. I know you did a um we're the process of doing a um a real limited edition record, um, but have chosen to make it an exclusive and high return kind of item.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

Well, we're we're pricing them above what they're actually worth. We're we're you know, our our for the Odyssey that is what we're talking about, and we're gonna put out a seven inch that we've discussed previously on the on the podcast. And what we decided to do was use it as a method of you know raising funds for the band and putting out some a limited edition exclusive, and we're and you know, we're gonna we're gonna price it out more than you would pay for a seven-inch single. But what um but what's interesting about what you just said is that I originally asked you about doing a hundred, and I we're ending up with two hundred because the cost per unit, it just it just didn't make any sense to do a hundred. Yeah. And we so we ended up spending a little bit more money.

SPEAKER_02 26:14

Yeah, you really have to what I'd like to get people thinking about is if there's any way that they can find a another avenue, another way to sell, even if it's a discount uh sale, to sell some of the discs. Um obviously you want to take you you start making a record thinking, well, I'm gonna sell them to everybody that I can sell them to. But as as you and I know, it's um people only know records for sale if they're looking at it, if it's if they get their directed to it. It if you have a solid social media experience and that you can direct your fans, you know, to uh a place to buy your records or whether you sell them directly or you sell them at shows. But you know, look at different ways of moving a higher number. Um so many people, literally nearly every first-time vinyl maker um contacts me thinking that the right answer is to make a hundred discs and they're gonna test the waters and see what happens. And that would make sense if the cost per unit weren't so high, but at a hundred, um the cost per unit um for an album um you know can be like seventeen, eighteen, nineteen dollars. Uh you know, if you're selling that thing for twenty dollars, you haven't even made money on on just the this the storage of the unit, let alone shipping it. You know, it's it's not for the faint of heart, folks. Well, no, but once you get above, but but uh it you almost uh at each step you can double the quantity, you know, for uh a very small amount of money. So, you know, 200 200 records costs about the same as 100. And so if there's any way that you can figure out how to make an ex make a a special edition out of part of them, sign some of them. To be honest, even if you're gonna uh just speculate on them, um one of the things I'm uh you know experimenting with is the concept of um of getting on on projects that I really enjoy and I really think people are gonna need to really want to hear is getting um financially involved with the with the project and kind of helping uh the producer uh get over this this production hurdle. Because by doing so, they might be able to produce twice as many records, which means every one of those records uh costs the the owner half, nearly half of what it would have cost if they'd done only the small run. So we just have to find new ways of of moving them, getting a little more engaged and a little more um finding some more information out about distribution really before you go ahead and press the disk.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 28:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

So basically, um my takeaway here uh back to the 45 versus 33 thing that we started talking about in the beginning is it's an issue of uh it's an issue of quality that you have to consider, but also timing and also sequence and um and also production costs, which we got into uh you know towards the end there a little bit. And uh, you know, my my personal takeaway as an artist is you know, is you need somebody to uh you need somebody to talk to, somebody knowledgeable like Scott, uh to you know, to to help sort of state the facts and and uh and and you know give you options and help you figure out you know where to you know how to how to navigate this in incredibly nuanced experience of of creating a record.

SPEAKER_02 29:27

Yeah, I that's what I believe. I I believe we we prove to our clients every day that that service, that information, and and walking them through all of the discussions of which plant they should use and how they should format the record and you know how it should be mastered specifically for vinyl, custom mastered for vinyl, and those things, walking them through all those options. We we have to um or you know earn uh the price that we charge for those services every day. If at any time someone feels like, well, they could just send it off to cut it and press it cheap plant somewhere, and uh it's really not worth the extra effort that that we put through to it, we're not gonna be the one chosen. But we really um can prove and we do uh day after day that we've we've enhanced people's projects by uh by encouraging them to spend a little bit more money, we've actually protected their bottom line because of giving them more opportunities to sell the record and and potentially make a profit. And even more directly, I get way too many calls from people who've gone the cheap route initially, gotten some interest in the record, but the quality wasn't there and they didn't make enough copies of it. So now they're, you know, trying to get it right the second time. And absolutely obviously it costs more and they lose opportunities for marketing and you know, while the record was was hot, while they were touring it or while they were um trying to promote it. One other thing just popped into my head, and if this is something that the listeners are thinking that they might want to do, do not let me let me make as as much emphasis as I possibly can on the radio on the podcast, is is like really encourage everyone to not plan for your release party, your main event, until these records are in your hands. Um everybody that works in in this business of making vinyl is trying really hard to push turnaround times so that we can get records done and out on the streets in a reasonable amount of time. But it takes time. Uh, all of these details we talk about, just the conversation with a client about 33 and 45 and how much time to fit on a side is sometimes several days of going back and forth with me and the producer and the artist and the label, maybe even the pressing plant, all on CC on a big on big emails trying to decide what well what's really best, what's our priority? You know, the label chimes in and says, we can only spend this amount of money, so it's gonna have to be a single. But then, you know, I convince the artist that, like, well, you know, it really may not be good, and we might not get the reviews. So they go back and talk to the label and said, well, what if the you know artist changes their agreement with us a little bit and um and they kick in some money for the additional costs, then you know, we can do it as a double album and everybody wins. You know, you just kind of have to um really figure out what your priorities are. And um, but the point I was making when I interrupted myself was that these things all take time. And over and over and over and over again, I see people panicking at the very end of the tail end of their production, going like we've got this date on the 18th, and all these people are showing up, and we gotta have this record in place. And it ends up being a huge letdown. And so they've spent all of that time and effort planning for this event and and paying for the vinyl. And when the vinyl's not there at the event, when everyone's there excited about the band, you know, you're not gonna move, you know, 100-150 uh records that day. Um, and um so uh the only way you can control that process is to simply wait until the records are in your hands and then schedule the you know the big event.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

You heard it here, folks. You were warned.

SPEAKER_02 33:05

You you it's gonna happen to you. I'm afraid. Until it has, you'll you'll probably say, nah, nah, we're we're fine. Three months out, what could possibly get in the way of that? We had a client tied up earlier this year with a press a particular pressing plant. Um, they ran into some problems. It literally took them six months to get the record. It it was longer, much longer than usual, and we hope that doesn't happen to anyone listening here. But um, you know, that plant tried really hard to make the deadlines, and then those deadlines ended, and then they ran into more trouble, and then there was a couple revisions, and one thing led to another, and everybody was disappointed. So um give yourself time. Um, don't expect uh to make simultaneous release. Go ahead and release the digital product first and get uh and make sure you get everybody's email address because that's who you want to market your vinyl to initially when when the vinyl comes out. Um but give yourself time to get the record done right.

SPEAKER_00 34:05

Right on.

SPEAKER_02 34:06

All right, you want to take us out, Scott? Well, this is another episode of Making Vinyl at MasterDisc. And I'm Scott Hollow, chief cutting engineer here at Master Disc. And uh I want to thank KJ from the Odyssey for being with me and uh asking all the right questions. All right, but we'll see you next time. Take care.