New kid on the block

[Dr. Groove]

Greetings, folks!

Dr. Groove here. I'm not a lathe master, unfortunately but I'm interested in how it works.

As a boy, I was always fascinated by record and tapes. Strange how this black plastic plate with grooves could come to life when the tone arm settle down on it. Or a bit of brownish ribbon could record my voice and play it back for me.

It wasn't the electronics, although I knew they were important. It was all about the disc or the ribbon. Without that, you had a jumble of electronic components that did nothing. But even without the electronics, you still had something encoded on that disc or tape. Something that could be liberated by the right components. I remember as a boy taking one of my mother's sewing needles and holding it in the tracks of a spinning record and being able to hear it. Of course, I was damaging the crap out of the record but nevertheless I thought that was SO cool! I could play records for hours watching the label spin round and round and round. I love those old label logos.

I eventually became a musician and then went to school and became a recording engineer, producer and live sound man and have done everything from ragtime jass to urban blues to folk to rockabilly to metal to avant-gard to big band to chamber groups to solo pianists. I've done them in the studio and onstage and recorded them.

It's all digital now. When I started, it was still analog. We still used the 2" 24-track studio Ampex tape with the Otari recorder and the SSL in-line board (although I preferred the API type). Then we'd mix it to a 2-track stereo, do our final splices if necessary and ship it off to be made into records.

I never got into that aspect and I was always sorry for that although I knew basically how it worked with the lacquer and the master and the mothers and the stampers and the biscuits and labels and the flash. But I never got into it firsthand and I feel I missed out on something I always wanted to experience.

I know next to nothing technical about the lathes. I wouldn't have clue one about how to work one although it would be neat to learn it.

Everything's digital now. Now, I DO like CDs and I DO like digital recording. I have a portable disc drive that I store music on and it has over a thousand albums of everything you can imagine--I don't care what it is, I have it on my disc drive and I can carry it with me and play it from any computer, I can store it on my MP3 player and listen to excellent quality sound while I'm out walking or sitting in a greasy spoon or whatever. I wish I had this stuff when I was in the Navy because I had to lug around a suitcase full of cassettes and I've never liked cassettes (too noisy and they often made weird squealy sounds) much less lugging them around.

But I miss LPs and 45s. I miss messing with reel-to-reels, which was my love. I miss aligning the bias of a big studio tape machine and splicing out parts from the 2-track. Admittedly, digital splicing is far superior as is punching in and overdubbing and you can't beat digital bouncing because you don't lose any audio quality no matter how many times you bounce a track. CDs never wear out and I can hear the music remixed for digital much more clearly than I could with analog but analog does have truer soundwave reproduction.

I miss flipsides and album art and record sleeves and the posters you'd sometimes get inside the cover. I miss the sound of a record when it's coming through the old-style juke boxes like I used to have in my basement when I was a kid--a big ol' Wurlitzer stuffed with 45s from the 50s and 60s. You could watch the record come out of the holder and this spindle would rise up and lift the 45 from the center of the holder and take it up to the tone arm which would play it and it would blast and boom from that juke box speaker the way nothing else ever could match. Then the tone arm would retract and the spindle would lower the record and deposit it back on the holder and the holder would pivot back into the stack of records waiting to be played. Juke boxes nowadays just play 1s and 0s programmed into a chip.

As a result, I still love 50s music. Those were the days of records and juke boxes and 4-track studio tape. I was born in the 50s but am too young to remember them. The 60s were my formative years but I listened to a lot of 50s because of that juke box and my parents' record albums. But the 60s were great too.