[JASON WARD MASTERING A PROJECT]

JASON WARD: Hi. I'm Jason. This is Chicago Mastering Service.

We have to figure out the width of the groove we can cut given the base pitch that we're going to work with. So the further apart -- you set a base pitch without music playing is which is when this needle settles and it tells you, in this case, that our base pitch is 225 lines per inch, so if you just ran this with no music it would put 225 lines per inch on the record, and given that you can make the pitch -- or you can make rather the width of the cut a width that will approximately butt the grooves together for that given pitch.

The first thing we have to do basically is figure out the parameters of the lacquer cut like depth. Look at how long the cut is and then think about how loud you can cut it, which basically changes how far apart are the grooves are going to be as well as the dynamic range of the material does that, so this is a meter that gives you lines per inch which -- This pitch computer over here basically varies the spacing of the pitch, which is the distance between each groove. It's the speed at which the whole carriage here is moving towards the center of the record as a cut, so when you play music you can watch this meter and it basically sort of functions as a volume meter in that the louder the musical passages, the more it moves in the way that would normally look like louder but in this case it's actually indicating more space between each groove. So, you're trying to figure like, "Playing this music the way it averages here dynamically, I'm going to be able to fit that piece of music onto this record?"

So then I just cut a little bit of blank space -- a little bit of silence and just look at the spacing, set that on the scrap disc. I'll just find a little spot in between some cuts, and to do that we need the microscope on. So, every time you drop this stylus, you have to check that you're picking up the little thread that it's cutting out of the record -- out of the lacquer, and that's kind of one of the wildcards...

GRETCHEN HASSE: Oh. Because of the threads.

JASON WARD: Because if it just bunches up and doesn't go up this little suction tube, then it's just going to be a big mess and you can blow your cut, so the very first thing you have to do is make sure that it's picking up properly.

Once you get going with this machine, it does a pretty good job of not letting you screw things up but starting it as always, the part that's fraught with anxiety. We frequently clean this stylus with a little bit of acetone, which just gets any crud because it's heating. There's a little wire wrapped around this sapphire stylus that's actually heating it while it cuts to make it cut through the lacquer material easier, and sometimes you just get a little crud on there, so I generally clean it off a few times during a cut, every time it comes up.

So now, we're doing some super wacky electronica kind of stuff.

[JASON WARD CHECKING ON A VINYL CUTTING PROJECT]

The other big part of -- the other part of cutting that can be tricky is high-frequency information like vocal sibilance or really crazy [JASON WARD IMITATING NOISE SOUND EFFECT ON RECORD PLAYING] things like that, so you have these high frequency limiters that are built into the lathe's rack which serve to sort of limit the speed of those transients that are high frequency in nature because they'll just distort on playback if they're too extreme, so you can watch this thing kind of reacting pretty wacky to some of these heavy duty -- We're going to make a pretty loud cut here so we need to have this thing taking care of some business so that we get a distortion-free playback.

There are certain instruments that can be more difficult to cut, which is especially stuff like percussive instruments like bells and chimes and things of that nature because they're basically like a pure transient. They're so high frequency that it's like if you're thinking of a groove that's going along and then some transient or so high frequency that it's just like a -- it's like a dead end to the needle basically, like when it takes off in a direction that isn't anything like straight, the needle just comes up on that at 33 RPM or 45 RPM and sort of it's like the equivalent of driving into a brick wall more or less so what it will do, if those aren't managed is that it will just skip up out of the groove, and that's what you hear as distortion. It just kind of pops along the top of the groove until it can find a place it can drop back in. so what we're trying to do is make those just not severe enough for the needle to track it accurately, and that's really one of the only things that you have to kind of compromise on with vinyl cutting versus like digital. I mean you can cut really terribly compressed and limited digital material all day long but it's just the high frequency stuff like there's anything that's real fuzzy high frequency distortion, it just doesn't translate that well to vinyl, so you end up rolling off some really high frequencies and using the high frequency limiter but most of the time, we have pretty good luck getting a cut to more or less sound exactly like the source material that we're working from.