Having Picture Discs made?

[Curley-Ann]

Can someone please advise the best way to go about having 12-inch picture discs made?

[mossboss]

The best advise I can give you is To place an order with your artwork as well as your music to a pressing plant and let them do the work
It's not that hard for a plant that does it all the time but a hard act to follow for some one that has no exposure to it at all
You need artwork for side a plus b in offset colour printing quality
It should sufficient in size so as to cover the record all the away to the edge less say 1/8 of an inch
Thats all there is really in so far as the client is concern the rest is quite simple
The printing is done by the printers for the two sides it is cut to size in the round shape required it is delivered to the plant and it is placed in an oven so as to dry them out about 24 hours at say 100 c
They are than given to the press operator who proceeds in pressing picture discs
That is another step that is as follows:
A single sheet of clear PVC is placed on the bottom of the open press which has the mold as well as the stamper mounted on it
Than one of the printed images say side a is placed on the single sheet of PVC
Than a puck or cake of PVC is placed on that than another of the images is placed on the cake than another clear sheet of PVC
The press is than closed on the "sandwich" which is pressed so as to make a record
The record is removed inspected and if it is ok it is than trimmed down and placed in a clear envelope
That's it really not hard if you know what you are doing as well as having the right gear and you know what steps are required
By the way that is all done on a manual press by an operator who as a rule runs two presses The process is really slow about a minute cycle
On another point in the same type of machine splatter records as well as multi colour records are made again manually
Multi colour ones are made by having two or three extruders making a cake each out of different colors than they are cut and made into two cakes half
and half of two co ours than the process is just like the pic discs
The cake is placed on the open press than it is closed and the record is pressed and so on so on
So here you are Curly
Cheers

[Hamilton]

Hi
Take a look.......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHGQ39usyjM&feature=g-upl&context=G2bae1ebAUAAAAAAAFAA

Cheers

Hamilton
www.hamiltonrecords.com.ar

[Aussie0zborn]

Welll there you have it... Get them pressed or get small quantities lathe cut. You can get them pressed in Europe by Phono Press, Italy, in South America by Retro-Activo Records, Mexico, or in the USA by Erika Records. There are a couple of German plants that press them too.

[fraggle]

yeah Aussie dont forget the germans:)

[Curley-Ann]

So...by that YouTube video...they're cutting directly ONTO a picture disc?!?
How would you be able to mass-produce it using the same pic?
I guess I was under the impression that the disc would have been pressed with clear vinyl with the picture image sandwiched in-between...
Very interesting...

[Aussie0zborn]

To reiterate, you have two options....

1. Get Hamilton to cut them for you one by one, as seen in his YouTube video. Good if you just want a handful made.

2. Get them pressed. Good if you want a commercial quantity made.

Tell us about your picture disc project.

[GeorgeZ]

Welll there you have it... Get them pressed or get small quantities lathe cut. You can get them pressed in Europe by Phono Press, Italy, in South America by Retro-Activo Records, Mexico, or in the USA by Erika Records. There are a couple of German plants that press them too.

Hey, and what about our Czech plant GZ Vinyl?
http://www.gzvinyl.com/vinyl-27/products-506/records-507/record-12-510/

I've seen several records incorrectly signed as "Made in Germany", but we are of Slavs and not Germanic lineage (mostly)

[Curley-Ann]

Tell us about your picture disc project.

Well...in order to tell you about my picture-disc idea--there's a story behind it.
(Grab a cup of coffee and get comfy, kiddies...)
Back around 1990 (or so), a friend of mine, who is also an avid record collector, decided we would make some of our rarer items available to fellow collectors by offering a series of cassette tapes.
But--because I had been in broadcasting for several years (until claustrophobia did me in), I hit upon the idea of doing something MORE than just a tape of music...why not offer it in the form of a radio DJ program?
So--we came up with our own fictitious station (KSWI), and the tapes seemed to take off.
Over the years, KSWI began to develope a story-line in my head as to it's history (how it came about, who created it originally and so forth), and we decided that KSWI was born on the demise of KCW. KCW was begun in 1921 by Charles Wentworth--who owned a huge department store, hotel and ballroom IN ONE BUILDING! He decided--after hearing of the success of KDKA in Pittsbugh--to spend a huge amount of money to have broadcasting facilities put in the unused portion of the roof ballroom in 1921.
When a fire destroyed the building in 1938, Wentworth died a broken man.
Within a year, the building was gutted and re-built for offices...and a NEW station was installed: KSWI!
So--now we FINALLY come to my idea for the picture disc--
As the story would go...after some cleaning in an old part of the upper story, an old metal crate is discovered and inside are some old transcription discs from the KCW days! Everyone thought all of the discs had been destroyed in the fire--but here a few remained! (Not in good shape--but still playable!)
So--the picture disc would have the OLD logo of KCW joined with the present KSWI logo (circa 1952 when we would be setting the action of the recording), and the written info as to what is ON the recording:
"The Lost 1921 KCW Broadcast".

[kgutzke]

If needing one-off custom made picture records, try customrecords.com If needing duplicate picture disc vinyl pressings try Erika Records in California.

[Steve E.]

1921 would be very early for a surviving broadcast!! In fact, no radio recordings are known to exist from this era.

http://www.midcoast.com/~lizmcl/earlyradio.html

"No authenticated radio recordings are currently known to exist from this time period [1920-22]. ....Documentation exists of numerous recordings of broadcasts made by technicians working for the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company and the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1921-23, but none are known to survive. Periodic mentions of other experimental recordings in the US and abroad are found in the radio magazines of the day, but none of these examples have survived. "

But that's OK. Claim that yours is the first! and have them added to that page.

Acetate recording was introduced in the mid-1930's, and this made it much easier for radio stations to archive their shows. But, as that webpage will show, there DO exist earlier radio recordings.

I don't intend to be a nay-sayer or killjoy. I loooooooove your creativity, and I think this is a wonderful idea. All it would take is a sentence or two to help keep this in the realm of the believable. You could even say that the guy was innovative to be archiving shows so early. Obviously, it COULD have been done, whether or not people did this as a matter of course.

[piaptk]

Are the printed centers on standard paper? I mean, theoretically if I wanted to make 500 7" picture discs, would I be able to submit the printed middles, and have a different image for all of them?

[Angus McCarthy]

Oh now that is an interesting idea - a super limited run of picture discs with individual artwork and series numbers fused into the disc itself! You would probably need at least one spare for each disc in case of mis-pressings though.

[Aussie0zborn]

For picture discs we used 120gsm matte art paper. If you can digitally print onto this paper I would say you can have an individual print on each disc.

With the picture discs we produced I noticed that the black vinyl would occasionally show through when we had large white unprinted areas (eg: Velvet Underground & Nico with the Andy Warhol banana cover). Where the print was solid (eg: VU "White Light White Heat or Kiss "Destroyer") all was good.

So if you have a large white area in your artwork I would think a heavier paper stock would be better. Standard offset printing ofcourse.

[piaptk]

That's what I figured. I've always fantasized about doing that, but I'll probably end up just sticking to doing some lathe cut picture discs, since I can't really see getting up the energy to design 500 individual discs, and I couldn't sell 500 copies anyway.

[mossboss]

Hey all
We have attempted to do digital printing many a time with all brands of digital printers A total waste of time and effort
The PVC at 150 C undoes the inks on the paper that the digital printer cooks at 100 odd C
That has been confirmed by the top engineers at Fuji Xerox as well as Hewllet Packard digital printers
So save yourselves the effort as we have been down that track more than once
Every sales guy of these $120 K machines was knocking down the doors to sell us one promising the world It just does not work Simple as that
We do have one of these expensive printer about $140K by the way
It does wonderful work but not labels and not picture disc artwork either so Forget about it an excersise in futility
It is Offsett or bust
Cheers

[Aussie0zborn]

Forget about it an excersise in futility
It is Offsett or bust

Damn!!

[Curley-Ann]

1921 would be very early for a surviving broadcast!! In fact, no radio recordings are known to exist from this era.

Hey, Steve--
Thou hast bestowed upon me a wonderful concept idea as to HOW this broadcast would have been preserved!
Say this Charles Wentworth fella was the Bill Gates and Donald Trump of his day...he would have had THE LARGEST department store in the region, the fanciest (and largest ) mansion in the city...and a very innovative brain.
So--for him to have put a lavish ballroom up on the topmost floor of his building...AND install the first radio broadcasting facility there...he PROBABLY would also have had access to equipment that ONLY the big recording studios would have had--like Victor and Columbia.
So--enter the story that Mogul Charles Wentworth also owned and operated WENTWORTH RECORDS!
The recording studio was located in the same space as the broadcasting studio...and thus--certain broadcasts would also have been recorded (by the horn system, naturally) onto wax discs for archival purposes!

[Steve E.]

Sounds good to me. I love it.

[motorwolf]

for your information:
just found out about a sympathetic UK pressing plant that so far offers picture discs (and other vinyl products) for very friendly prices:

DMS limited, in plymouth