Release Time! Ep 05: Vinyl
The holy grail for many musicians! Here’s the basics of releasing music on vinyl.
First off, releasing on vinyl is expensive (like easily over $1000), and physical production can take a long time (at least a few months). So, be prepared for that.
You could also potentially charge more for a premium vinyl product. So, if you can move a large order, you might be able to fund your next album in one go!
Because this is an investment, you really want to make sure you have a good grasp of the process, and a good team in place to nail the quality.
And I really would treat this like an investment, personally, and try to make a high quality product that you can charge a premium price for. Making junky vinyl and trying to sell it at $5/pop is a great way to waste a bunch of money. Though, short run vinyl producers are getting much better, so there’s options!
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Assuming you’ve done a really great job recording and mixing your music, the first step in vinyl release is getting a great digital master done.
Do please tell your mastering engineer that you’re planning on doing vinyl! They will want to do a separate vinyl premaster for you, if budget allows.
Doing a separate vinyl master is well worth the money; trying to use a streaming master for vinyl will lead to noticeably worse sound quality on your record!
A vinyl master will have lower overall loudness than most digital streaming masters, and will avoid digital peak limiting. High loudness and digital peak limiting, in particular, don’t play well with the physical production requirements necessary to reproduce your record.
Once you’ve mastered the album, and the finished product sounds like you want, we move on to the next step in the process: the cutting engineer!
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A cutting engineer is a niche within the niche of mastering: these are the specialized guys who own vinyl cutting lathes, and cut the physical masters that will be used to reproduce your records. It’s pretty cool stuff, those old lathes are insane, and each one behaves slightly differently-like a musical instrument.
There’s not that many of these cutting specialists-many different online vinyl services all use the same few cutting guys. Carl Saff is one of them, and he’s great. Scott Hull at Masterdisk is another, also fantastic.
If you’ve got a strong digital master that isn’t super loud, you shouldn’t notice many huge differences between the digital and vinyl products, besides the usual things we all like when listening to vinyl. Especially if there’s the budget to do a dedicated vinyl master-money well spent!
Some things that can get in the way of the cutting process: music with very high levels of phasey spread bass, an extremely wide stereo spread in general, excess loudness, use of peak limiting, or excess sibilance.
In these cases, some adjustments might need to be made, but a lot is doable!
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You are also constrained by timing on vinyl.
For best quality, a good rule of thumb is to try to keep each side of the record to no more than 20 minutes. The optimum side length depends on the exact program material, but that’s a safe place to start. If you go beyond that guideline, you can start to sacrifice the quality of the top end, on the songs that are closest to the inner edge of the disc.
This also changes depending on if you’re cutting at 33 vs. 45 RPM. Lots of nuance here!
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Sometimes the mastering engineer you use for your digital masters will also be your vinyl cutting engineer, if they own a lathe. Sometimes, the cutting engineer works in the background under contract from your vinyl production service, and you won’t interact with them. Just depends, but either way you want to know your cutting engineer is competent, so ask your provider and/or hire this out special.
Please always pay more to get the test pressings, and listen to them carefully! If there are issues, you want to catch them before you’ve got 500 copies.
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Here’s a few great vinyl producers to look into, of many options. My top two choices would probably be United and Precision:
There’s many more technical items to consider when doing vinyl: check out this great FAQ by Precision Pressing that provides some excellent additional information.
And, don’t forget to support us on Patreon, if you’re into stuff like this! Member support is what makes this free resource possible for all musicians!
