I wrote this guide the other day for a friend, and thought I might share it with the forums. ========================================================== Vinyl is expensive to produce, and you won't appeal to as wide a range of listeners because turntables aren't very prevalent anymore, but it does have the added bonus of being SUPER COOL. That said, if you want to get into vinyl, here's a quick and dirty guide. The first step after the recording process is sound mastering. This ensures that your finished record will sound really nice. The best place in the U.S. to get this done is The Kitchen, in Chapel Hill, NC. If you don't want to go all the way out there, give them a call at 1-800-603-2584 and ask them for someplace closer to you (they keep an extensive database of recommended mastering facilities). Once you've mastered the sound, you need to master the vinyl. This is tricky, and there a few things you need to keep in mind. You should probably choose mastering and plating services that are relatively close to each other (if you decide to use someplace that won't do both), because a master oxidizes quickly and won't sound very good. If your mastering and plating places are far away from each other, make sure they both know what's going on and that they FedEx your master quickly with a minimum of delay. Also, you should decide whether to do two- or three-step plating. See, you can only make one plate from a master before the master is useless. You can only make one stamper from a plate before the plate's useless. You can only make about a thousand records from a stamper before the stamper is useless. So, with two-step plating, one master equals a thousand records. For this reason, unless you don't plan on ever making more than a thousand copies of a particular record, you should probably go with three-step plating so you can make more plates and stampers without remastering. Got all that? Okay. One place you might want to check out for plating is James G. Lee Record Processing, at (310) 768-1001. They're quick and very high quality. If you can't get them, try Frankford-Wayne in NYC, at (212) 302-8300. They're a bit more expensive than James G. Lee, but quite good and reasonably fast. John Golden, at (805) 498-3490 does a good job for a good price if you don't mind a wait. If you need it now and/or are strapped for cash, try Richard Simpson at (213) 462-2545. Really quick and really cheap, but he doesn't do as great a job as the others. Now you want to get down to the actual vinyl making. You may have heard good things about United, but they're mostly lies. They're super cheap, but their vinyl is so thin you can see through it if you hold it up to the light. If you really need a cheap place, you can try them but I make no promises. Alberti, at (213) 286-5446, and Bill Smith, at (312) 322-6386, both do a good job for a reasonable price. If you want a funky-shaped record or a colored one or something weird like that, try Erica records in SoCal. I don't have their phone number handy, and I don't really want to look for it right now, but it should be easy to find. One caveat: they get a lot of celebrity business, and they usually give celebs priority over the common folk. But if you don't mind the wait, you can get some neat stuff from them. There's one place in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which I'm not sure is still around. I seem to recall that they were called Allied or Anti or something, but I can't find their contact information. If you can track them down, they're cheap and fast and really good (the last I heard). Just Google "12 inch record pressing Ann Arbor" or something; there can't be a whole lot of pressing places around there. Okay, you've got your musical genius carved into a couple thousand slabs of vinyl, and now you want to make them look pretty. Searching around, you might find a few places who offer to do everything for you. It's easy, but you don't get to learn how it works, and it's more expensive. I would recommend, for at least the first record, to use black-and-white for the sleeve graphics because it's cheaper. If you really want four-color, you'll need to find a graphics place and make four films for printing (one of each color). Once you've done that, call Bags Unlimited at 1-800-767-2247. They can supply you with record sleeves for a good price. All right, now you've got the records and the sleeves to put them in. Now you want to distribute. Unfortunately I can't help you with that; you'll have to figure that out for yourself. Good luck! A final note: These contacts are a little out of date, and some of them might be gone by now. However, I'm sure that with a short Google search you can find plenty of places. Be sure to ask around to make sure the place you're about to pick (still) does a good job.
