Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to show dedicated to weeklybeats.com artists, their songs and stories from the 2024 season and beyond. I'm your host, SQF.
Speaker: Today's episode is all about Q-Rosh, and it's brought to you in a slightly different format, so let me explain. As you all know, I'm always on the hunt for guests, and I've mentioned several times how helpful Discord has been in connecting me with people.
Speaker: But when someone's not on Discord, it can be a little challenging to get in touch. QRosh was one of these guys that I've mentioned in previous shows that I've been trying to track down, while I was finally able to earlier last month.
Speaker: He mentioned he's a huge fan of the show and he was interested in sharing his story, but he didn't think his English was good enough to get through the interview. So I asked if he would be okay exchanging emails so I could learn a little bit more about his story, and he agreed.
Speaker: So we began exchanging emails like pen pals back and forth. At this point, I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do with this material and how I was going to put it together.
Speaker: But I still had questions that I wanted answers to. Q-Rosh had no shortage of stories and wisdom. And let's just say this dude has found more music gear in the trash than you could ever even believe.
Speaker: So what I decided I would do is narrate Q. Rush's story and then add some commentary of my own. I recorded the first chapter and sent it to Q. Rush to see what he thought.
Speaker: He ended up sharing the first chapter with his family and an American friend that happened to be visiting. Everyone had nice things to say and enjoyed the first chapter. This was a nice little confidence boost and some inspiration that I needed to push this across the finish line.
Speaker: And if you're not a huge fan of this format, you can rest assured that it is unlikely to reappear. To put it in weekly beats terms, this is not a workflow conducive to repetition.
Speaker: I was looking for a little break from interviews, and now I have some good perspective about how much easier the interviews are compared. But this has been a fun experiment and way where I can help get Q Roche's story and his music out to people that have maybe never heard it before, because I think it's worth hearing.
Speaker: And he's just a great asset to the Weekly Beats community and a super nice guy. So thank you, Q Roche, for going along with this pen pal scheme. And hopefully I do your story justice.
Speaker: Chapter 1 is a Q. Roche history lesson that covers early musical influences and how he got into home recording that eventually led him on the path to weekly beats.
Speaker: Now we enter the audiobook realm, and I'll be back with some comments after chapter 1.
Speaker: Similar to Cosmic Cairns, my journey in music started with the violin. The violin was the only instrument I learned with notes and a teacher. I played in orchestras, but it wasn't music I was actually listening to in my childhood.
Speaker: I have a brother who's four years older, so I was four years ahead in musical taste compared to my classmates. Very early I knew all kinds of rock music like Zappa, early Genesis, Deep Purple, everything that was out there in the 70s and 80s.
Speaker: I loved to listen to albums as a whole song, either on a Sony cassette Walkman or on a stereo in my bedroom. I had a fable for long and complex songs that I could sink into and be carried away.
Speaker: The longer the song, the better it was for me. When I finished high school, I had enough of the violin and wanted to learn guitar, because some of my friends had a band and covered songs that I loved.
Speaker: I never thought it could be possible to sound as good as the original band, because there was some kind of mystery about rock stars at that time. So I bought my first guitar in a second-hand guitar shop called We Buy Guitars while I was on a trip to New York with my father in 1988.
Speaker: There I also went to see Bob Dylan in concert and saw him using a huge Fender Super 6 reverb amp. This was a good time to get into guitar and music because I started to listen to alternative and grunge music and it was very cool to keep the punk spirit alive.
Speaker: I like to play simple and play loud. A little later, I was in a garage punk rock band called Cosmic Cells and played a new guitar. A 1966 Fender Jazzmaster into Fender Super 6 reverb just like the one that Bob Dylan and Josh Klinghofer from the Red Hot Chili Peppers used.
Speaker: That was the time from 1988 to 1994 when I did the Zewildienst, a social service at the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. Later, I studied medicine at Heidelberg, but made too much punk rock to finish that degree.
Speaker: When Kurt Cobain died tragically, my indie rock world was without its profit. Instead of getting depressed, I was living in the center of a new revolutionary music scene in Heidelberg.
Speaker: There, I was lucky to get to know the originators of mind-blowing electronic music and their parties. I have to mention the label Source Records. One of the guys in this cosmos brought me to Weekly Beats in 2014.
Speaker: It is my friend Marionette Kidd, my premium Weekly Beat hero. He also produced my first record on vinyl, Tula Sound System Kazatin Classics in 1998.
Speaker: The record contains the first five songs I ever did on a cheap four-track multi-track recorder, an Amstead Studio 100. Guitar, Selena organ, sequential circuits drum tracks with E-Proms I burnt myself using an Oberheim Promer, through a Morley Fraser and a Mezzy guitar amp with Tape Echo.
Speaker: Everything was recorded live with a microphone. The later production was focused on reducing the noise and mastering as a dynamic mix. The Macintosh computer we used needed several hours for a single track, so the five songs took us weeks to denoise.
Speaker: The sound quality was not affected, and it was a whole new world of technology to explore. In those days, many of my friends recorded at home and produced cassettes and records and collected cool vinyl music.
Speaker: We were DJs too, presenting the newest findings in jazz, dub, krautrock, hip-hop, soul, funk, ethno, electronic minimalism, and all kinds of styles in nice bars and locations all around Heidelberg and Mannheim.
Speaker: We also collaborated and formed the band Bergheim 34, which started with a tape recording that found its way to New York and was released on the label First Love. We were invited for a tour in 1999 around the US, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and Boston.
Speaker: And after the tour, we got a record contract with a label from Frankfurt. It was the Klang label, a very good and solid label, and we got introduced to other musicians who made remixes of our songs, and we made remixes of theirs.
Speaker: I was still recording for myself, using an 8-track Fostex reel-to-reel tape machine, and I released two cassettes with my stuff, and a CD with no label.
Speaker: Most of the self-produced cassettes I gave away for free. Later, I upgraded to a Roland VS-880 and a VS-1880. In fact, I still have a terabyte of recordings from this period, which I had to convert later to a WAV format with a program I found called VS2WAV.
Speaker: This was a great way to get rid of the backups I had on jazz drives, dat tapes, and CD-ROMs in a format that was useless for any sort of production in a computer. I did recordings, but I could never finish them because it took hours to reload the backups.
Speaker: And in the year 2000, I got married, i had two children to care for, and music making was secondary. I became a nurse on an ICU and had to work hard since then.
Speaker: My first computer came in 2004, an iMac that I rescued from a garbage can, and I called it Oscar. I was using Logic, but I hated working with this DAW because of the latency, bad sound quality, and shitty CPU.
Speaker: It didn't get better with an iBook and even a PowerBook I bought. That's the reason there aren't a lot of songs from this era. In 2014 2016, I still had no usable computer performance when I started Weekly Beats.
Speaker: I think in 2018 I could finally benefit from an iMac in 2011 and I started to develop greater arrangements. Especially i profited when I switched to Ableton as the perfect production tool.
Speaker: Over the years, I collected a lot of equipment. It took me years to understand how certain musicians created their personal signature sounds. And it had a lot to do with the gear and the way the pedal chain was built.
Speaker: Even the guitar with the pickups, the wiring, the wood, the cables, it all has an impact on the sound. I studied and reproduced and explored the secrets behind the sounds of many of my favorite guitar heroes like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Mudhoney, Nirvana, The Cure, John Frusciante, Neil Young, My Bloody Valentine, Spaceman 3, and many, many more.
Speaker: Technically, I couldn't reach their skills, but found their secret code and how they made their guitar sing and sound. The most iconic sound was the guitar on my all-time favorite albums from Talk Talk, The Spirit of Eden and The Laughing Stock.
Speaker: In 2022, I found a dobro guitar, and voila, I could come very close to the sound I was looking for. But to make it clear, it wasn't Mark Hollis alone who was responsible for the divine guitars.
Speaker: His co-producer and hidden band member, Tim Freese Green, was a mastermind in songwriting. You can hear this in his solo work, Heligoland. I was very interested in the production of Spirit of Eden and how to reduce the music to room ambience and the feeling of experimenting with non-perfect perfection.
Speaker: However, it helped that I use the brass, sax, clarinet, flutes, instruments I got in 2024 with no clue how to play them. Only the rare vintage AKG BX20 Spring Reverb, which I also found in a trash can in 2000, replaced the room micing that TalkTalk did.
Speaker: On the other hand, I have to notice that the usage of an EHX 45000 looper when it came out helped me to create a lot of my own workflow. I record mainly dry guitars or other stuff and send them through a ton of pedals to spread them into a larger stereo image and delay them into time and space.
Speaker: That means I come with a single track and multiply it until I have 12 stereo tracks with completely different effects. The result I mix down to one stereo track again, always being careful not to have phasing problems.
Speaker: This gets a 4-5 dimensional sound experience, I guess. To be able to still collaborate with friends and have their faith to do what I want with the material gave me a lot of inspiration too.
Speaker: Shout out to my friend M2K7 who made a whole SD card with loops for my EHX 45000 and he also repaired nearly all of my gear for the last three decades.
Speaker: In my mind, he's a member of Weekly Beats Hall of Fame. Another friend is an incredible jazz piano player, Gunther Hornung, now 86 years old, still playing the Rhodes piano like Joe Zawinol in the peak of the 70s.
Speaker: He gave me that jazz vibe in several tracks I made for Weekly Beats. I use several old school samplers and drum machines, and I don't think I'm very good at doing beats, but I love the vibe of J Dilla and my old school hip hop records.
Speaker: So to close this chapter, I use the knowledge of my different genres I love to combine them into endless possibilities. Imagine Miles Davis jamming to Black Sabbath, or Apex Twin with Radiohead, or Mark Hollis with J Dilla, or Harvey Mandel with The Orb.
Speaker: This works good sometimes, and sometimes not. But for me, it has the musical context and content I've had in my brain for so long.
Speaker: Isn't that insane? He found a vintage spring reverb but and a computer in the trash. And I love the computer's name, Oscar. I also enjoyed hearing about his journey in home recording and all these different tools he's used throughout the years, found in the trash or not.
Speaker: I also really like the technique using the looper, taking that loop signal through a bunch of different pedals and recording a bunch of different takes with like the same guitar lick.
Speaker: That's a really interesting process and how you can smash it all together and make these like four to five dimensional sounds. I'm also inspired to do a deep dive on TalkTalk because I haven't really listened to a lot of their stuff.
Speaker: Well, onward we go to chapter two, which is a little bit more focused on the weekly beats experience and just the process of making music.
Speaker: What I learned between 2014 and 2024. Well, i believe I've learned the discipline to make use of the little time I had left between working and taking care of my family.
Speaker: Unfortunately, I had to drastically reduce my social contacts and hanging out elsewhere. The basic actions after work were going for a walk with my dog, keeping my fridge full, cooking some meals, and checking the news to see what was going on in the world.
Speaker: Another part of my routine was Monday and Tuesday I listened to fresh weekly beats from all the other members. This was fun, but I probably have missed a lot of good music because it's just impossible to go through all the tracks, especially at the beginning of the year.
Speaker: To make things a little more manageable, I excluded certain genres or sounds which didn't really resonate with me. Surprisingly, sometimes I changed my mind and got interested in new stuff, little breakbeats, classical compositions, and totally wired stuff.
Speaker: Mostly, I wanted to find edgy stuff, people that explore and are courageous, but my favorite artists I wanted to visit every week. There are about 20 of them, and most of them have already been on Chasing the Beat.
Speaker: After a few days of listening, it's time to start making a track. The earlier I started to develop ideas for a new song, the more I could achieve before Sunday. Sometimes I had multiple ideas and worked on all of them simultaneously and glued them together to see what would happen.
Speaker: I never knew how a track would sound in the end. I never had a vision I was working towards, but I always had faith in the music gods that they would help me. I drew inspiration from actual miseries that happened privately or at work, or from new gear that I found in the streets or at a flea market or bought secondhand.
Speaker: I also spent a fortune at Thaumann too. Sometimes I had certain phases like ECM, Zappa, Brian Eno, Jay Dilla, sinking into a rabbit hole, and periods of maniacal record buying.
Speaker: You see, researching everything is the rule. It's my deepest desire to know as much as I can about the artist, the time, the circumstances, and the materials.
Speaker: It isn't enough to just buy the same guitar. Because you know, every guitar is a unique individual and every drumstick sounds different. Every capo or potentiometer, silicon or germanium transistors, the kind of wood, the plexum itself, or the brand of strings has an impact on the sound and the performance.
Speaker: It's fun, but also a rabbit hole. Then I come back out of that phase with lots of inspiration. I think the more my musical cosmos expanded with new gear, technical upgrades, and mind-blowing new music that I listened to, the more I did develop too.
Speaker: It's not that the quality of my recordings or sound quality got better, or that my skills got better to play any instrument. It was the quantity of different instruments and influences that made my music richer.
Speaker: I'm so grateful that now I have a 27-inch iMac and I can afford several terabyte hard drives. It was a big problem in the old days to make backups or arrange music without losing time and money.
Speaker: But one good thing about the old recording process and production was the need to trust your ears and not the monitor. This is something that I miss. The concentration with a four-track tape recorder is so much stronger There's no way to cut mistakes out.
Speaker: You see, I always did music. That did not change a lot. But the joy of doing it together with other nerds kept me releasing every week with confidence.
Speaker: Any musician who knows the rules about mixing and mastering would cry out loud when they see my workflow, how I master my tracks. Over the years, good friends gave me some good hints, that's for sure.
Speaker: i would be too baroque in my playing and needed to learn less is more. This is just one of the lessons that I learned from them. I also owe my family a lot to give me the space to practice this hobby.
Speaker: I take it as a gift that I can transform moods and feelings into music so that other people can decode it and enjoy it as I did when I was developing it. Having a specific person on my mind helped me a lot to keep it going.
Speaker: I think doing so imparts kind of holy information into the music that the beloved one should discover, even if they're already dead.
Speaker: I mean, that right there is a really good motivational tip from Q Roche. Keeping a certain person in mind when you're making a song as kind of a way to communicate with that person, even if they're dead, that's pretty motivating or can be.
Speaker: I too am a fan of deep diving down rabbit holes and researching all sorts of stuff. ah So I totally get that. And it is inspiring to go see how other people do things or get a new piece of gear and be able to just change how you're experimenting and, ah you know, disrupt your workflow a little bit to find those unexpected moments.
Speaker: And there's also something I miss about the days recording on a four track. And maybe it's kind of everything about those days. You know, there was no texting on phones and we were a whole lot less connected to the internet and like the world was just different. and the concentration around making music was way different.
Speaker: And that could be part of the reason why I gravitate towards the M8 a lot is because I can't check my email on it and I can't receive a message from anyone else. I have to be focused on that screen and making whatever I'm making.
Speaker: Up next is chapter three. Q-Rosh picked six songs from across all of his weekly beats years, and I've got a little narration section to intro each song.
Speaker: And after each song, I'll kind of do a little bit of a reaction take and move on to the next one. As some of you already know, my music is more or less a meditative experience, and people should get in a peaceful and relaxed mindset while listening.
Speaker: As Tone Matrix wrote in the comments, every week i look forward to your tracks as my weekly audio meditation Horatio Romantic and added a little something extra. resonate with my music?
Speaker: they said the entrance to this song was only possible in the right mindset this was a plausible explanation for me since i often ask myself how come some people don't really resonate with my music In my description of this first song, I mentioned that I was a beginner in the earliest stages of playing the fretless bass, as well as the saxophone I got my hands on in 2024.
Speaker: I did not know what sound would come out of the instruments, as I noticed they are very delicate to play. Not having the control and ability to foresee the next tone or the right place to put my fingers made me handle it very carefully, to produce timidly broken and shy music results.
Speaker: As Mini Mari added in the comments correctly, there's a certain kind of charm to the gentle tones when playing it at a beginner level, like kind of searching, and that nails it perfectly.
Speaker: This track is the result of a typical week of mine where I was working seven on, seven off, and found the right mood to get away from the unpleasant stress from the clinic and bathe in the sounds and atmosphere I created for my own mindfulness that I needed so strongly.
Speaker: So there was no way to cut the length of the track to a 3-4 minute format, because it wouldn't have the same healing effect on me. The song I'm talking about is from Week 38, 2024, called Dynadub.
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Speaker: Hopefully you were in a place where you could let this song kind of take you away. it is almost like a film score at times. I think the mixing is amazing. Like the sound is just kind of all around you.
Speaker: And when the drums first come in, It just like adds that extra groove to it that sounds amazing and just like really pulls things together.
Speaker: and ah it's nice to just kind of let go and let yourself float along with all these sounds and textures and get lost in it much in the same way that I'm sure q Rosh got lost in this when he made it.
Speaker: All right, moving on. The next song was a result of a collaboration and a nice jam with my good friend Gunther Hornung, a brilliant jazz keyboard player.
Speaker: He's the generation of my father, and he was a member and founder of the very, very cool jazz rock band Zyma in the 70s. In those days, he used to play with a Fender Rhodes, Hammond organ, and a Minimoog.
Speaker: This was the standard for every keyboard player in those days. Unfortunately, he got rid of his equipment over the passing years, now using a modern e-piano. When he comes around for a cup of coffee and some conversations, we usually go in the basement and have a musical session for an hour more.
Speaker: The point is, and this is what I was trying to document in this track, that he's still able to play my Little Rhodes 54 piano in that unique way that great piano players only know how to do.
Speaker: The keys are so wobbly and sensitive, the bell-like sounds are indescribable when you know how to set them free. Here, I used a guitar through a game-changer pedal with endless sustain and an EHX Harmonic Organ Generator, first generation.
Speaker: At a certain point, I had the idea to bring in the new flute that I just bought as a reference to the Andre 3000 record that I was deeply into at this moment. At the end of this track, I brought in the sound of my sweet little real piano, which is slightly out of tune and always sounds poor and sad. and The song is a journey through moods, sounds, and textures, and a document of a wonderful Tuesday on this world.
Speaker: Thank you.
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Speaker: Wow, what a hell of a Tuesday. ah love how this one has kind of like a breath to it where there's like moments where things are together and you can make out the piano, like you can make out the chords and there's not a whole lot going on in the background. And then it kind of takes another turn where you're not sure exactly where to listen to and those guitar drones are kind of getting louder and it sounds like kind of some reverse guitar at times.
Speaker: And then it like kind of all comes back together again. Just really cool vibe that you were able to kind of capture this natural movement.
Speaker: And that piano just kind of ties everything together throughout the whole thing. And, i what an awesome dude to know, to be able to, you know, stop by and jam for an hour or two, like that's awesome.
Speaker: Alright, we've got more to listen to. Here we go. The next track has a lot to do with my desire to get into the spirit of Eden. I made a long recording using brand new instruments and equipment I was not familiar with yet.
Speaker: Things went wrong and I had to struggle with various problems. The arrangement was absolutely intuitive. This track was recorded in April 2023, week 43, in the living room with cello, harmonium organ, and dobro guitar.
Speaker: Very analog. Paula, our dog, was around and started to complain, getting no attention. On Saturday, I wanted to add the clarinet, flute, and drums, but I made a big mistake, because I forgot to arm the main microphone, and I only recorded the reverb channel on the AKG BX20.
Speaker: It was too much effort to record again, so I worked with the material I had. The drums did not work, so I just used a single loop. The track is long, but I had fun letting everything develop, and I enjoyed the lucky moments.
Speaker: The clarinet here is a different one. I'm using a French model now that was given to me by a nice guy who taught and supported me over the last few weeks with my plan to learn wind instruments.
Speaker: The mix was done 100% with the new DIN Audio monitor speakers I've chosen, after giving the Tanois back. I'm very satisfied because they neutral, precise, and after hours of listening, the ears are still fresh and I don't get tired at all.
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Speaker: This is another one where you gotta just sit back and let the song evolve and take you to all these different places. It's fun to hear all these like drone notes going on from the clarinet and the organ, and then these other sharper notes from the dobro.
Speaker: Just a really cool layering of acoustic instruments. And it really feels like you're in the room, like it's just mixed really well. It's hard to believe that this is just one microphone and a bunch of instruments.
Speaker: JWH commented on this one and said, I could swim around in this track all day. And that's pretty accurate. All right, we're going to keep it moving. Here we go. The following track was my attempt to revitalize the MPC-1000, which I've owned for so long, but I've never used it properly because it was a pain to get into the menu functions and because you either know the submenu options or you're lost completely.
Speaker: i was listening to Jay Dilla and studying the book Dilla Time when the will to make a hip-hop track came up. I wasn't happy that much because I was still just scratching the surface of the possibilities the MPC can offer.
Speaker: But still, the sound of it made me satisfied, and i gave my okay to release it. And to my surprise, my good friend M2K7 informed me that he felt in love with the song, and he was listening to it in heavy rotation.
Speaker: He also picked me up with his car to cruise around and listen to it, while driving extra slowly. Yes, it was fun.
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Speaker: Man, that one is so good, and I think it's just one of my favorites. I still remember when I heard it the first time in 2024, and man, its it's just so good. and What a fucking jam, and that's pretty much the comment I left the first time I heard it.
Speaker: Alright, I gotta go back and listen to that one again, but I'll send you guys on to the next one. This next song, I manifested the process to revitalize a MacBook by using heat therapy on the motherboard.
Speaker: had to go deep into the language of Apple's terminal to save data that would have been lost forever. Week 11 was surprising in good and bad directions. The bad thing was an ugly cold with unpleasant headaches.
Speaker: The baked GPU of my 2011 MacBook Pro died again after a few days. And the heat gun to bake my motherboard again exploded and became unstable.
Speaker: My 2GB SanDisk SSD suddenly got deactivated and I had to go to the OS X terminal and learn the commands to fix it. Then I put the motherboard completely into the oven at 210 degrees Celsius for 4 minutes.
Speaker: After reinstalling it, the MacBook did run again. The new Eros Loop Studio arrived the same day, and I could test it out with the second time reborn MacBook. And this is the result.
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Speaker: the crackly texture and these like kind of like tremolo guitars swirling around, such a cool little environment.
Speaker: and that super filtered, glitchy drumbeat that's going on in the middle. Q-Rosh, man, you really know how to create a vibe. Okay, this next one needs an intro before the intro.
Speaker: If you're unaware, Q-Rosh also has a second Weekly Beach channel called Wilcox Raw Cats. What he does is takes his regular weekly beat songs or a different song and runs them through his record cutting lathe.
Speaker: And it just creates this really cool lo-fi, lots of just surface noise, just takes the environment building that Q Rush does with songs and takes it to another strange world of, you know, just lo-fi old school goodness.
Speaker: And I enjoy hearing the same song on both channels. I like to hear the difference between the regular song and what the record lathe did to it. Alright, now for the actual song intro.
Speaker: And this last song is the record lathe version of the Q-Rosh track from Week 47, which I released as a Wilcox Raw Cats simultaneously during 2024.
Speaker: I tried to optimize the process of cutting a record with my Wilcox Gay Recordio record cutter machine from 1938. The sound quality is poor and very lo-fi, but I found the challenge necessary to get the best result out of this very early technique of recording.
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Speaker: See what I'm talking about? That warbly, out of tune, like the static going on, and especially love the very end where you can hear the motor slow down.
Speaker: like I don't know, it's just super unique and fun to listen to. Q-Rosh does such a good job of creating a whole like musical environment, and then to hear it through the record cutter, it just like takes it to a whole different place.
Speaker: And this is a perfect segue now into the final chapter, chapter 4, where Roche takes us through his record-cutting lathe journey from early experiments into how he acquired the machine that he's got now.
Speaker: Now I'll tell you all I know about record cutting. For anyone who wants more knowledge about this record lathe subject, I highly recommend the website The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls.
Speaker: In the beginning of 2018, I heard about CDs that could be played on a regular phonographic record player. Well, I thought it was a joke until I discovered some clips on YouTube where they definitely did exactly that.
Speaker: And I was fixed on the know-how behind this wonder. These guys had a secret weapon, which they had built in a do-it-yourself style. It was a record lathe, record cutter.
Speaker: They explained the way to construct such a machine and shared their knowledge from experimental trial and error. Some of the results were very impressive. So I made a list of what I would need to build such a DIY machine and started the project.
Speaker: I had a useless record player, some parts of a broken printer, a motor to move the printer arm, and two speakers in a wooden triangle head shell mounted on the printer arm.
Speaker: The first prototype was a disappointing failure. I simplified the machine to a mono speaker system and used a record player tone arm between the speaker and the needle. This was a big step forward.
Speaker: I received some music-like sounds on my record player while testing the results. I used some samples from one of the first Record Cutter trials for a song on Weekly Beats Week 23, 2018, and named it Record Cutter, but I knew this was not the goal, having only 1% music and 99% noise.
Speaker: It would never be like the one I saw on YouTube cutting that CD that blew me away. I had to find another possibility to cut better results. I collected all the information I could about the models of record cutting history.
Speaker: In the 90s there was a legendary Vestax VRX2000 cutter and the Kingston Dubplate cutter, but much too rare and unaffordable. The 80s Japanese cutter, Hara M180, was offered on eBay one day, but still too expensive for me.
Speaker: And the same problem with the Haramatsu Show and the Vanrock Atom A101. They can only cut singles and cost much more than $1,500. The vinyl recorder T560 by Ulrich Saurso is almost a professional machine and much too perfect for my wishlist.
Speaker: I had to look for vintage cutters that were built in the 30s or 40s, which were often sold on eBay between prices $200 $2,000.
Speaker: It could have been a Presto, Speakophone, Airline, MSS, Meissner, or Wilcox Gay Recordette or Ricordio machine. There were many more old vintage cutters for sale, but it was risky buying much older ones because they might not be working, after 80 years, or they could get damaged when they were shipped overseas.
Speaker: After studying the market on eBay worldwide, I was able to find hints in the descriptions and photos to tell if the machine was broken or could probably work. And then there was the Wilcox Gay Recordio that looked fine and wasn't too expensive with shipping.
Speaker: So I took the risk and bought it and had to wait a couple weeks until it arrived. When it arrived I could not resist to switch it on after I opened the box. Thank god that nothing serious happened.
Speaker: Okay, there was a light, but nothing moved. I could have died from an electric hazard shock when touching the metal if the tubes had been broken. I had to inspect the machine with a good friend who knows how to repair everything as long as it's an electronic device.
Speaker: We changed half the tubes, replaced four transistors and capacitors, and did the first regular testing. Even the cutter head worked fine after all of these years. I ordered 50 sheets of polycarbonate, original turtle wax, and all kinds of needles.
Speaker: I even found a replacement cutter head, which I bought, in case the old one didn't work anymore. But I should have never cut anything out. I had to learn to understand that there were big differences between cutting and embossing or imprinting.
Speaker: The thin lines I wanted to create, I thought, should be like mountains and valleys on which the needle goes up and down. But the regular vinyl record works with grooves, where the needle moves from left to right and does not touch the ground.
Speaker: But since my cutterhead uses this term, I might still use the wrong vocabulary from time to time. What I learned from the Secret Society of Lathe Trolls is the importance of lubricating the discs or plastic plates with lighter fluid or wax properly.
Speaker: In fact, the trolls usually use turtle wax. Some people heat the plastic plates up, but I did not get much benefit from this. The best results you can get from plastic is using polycarbonate, which is what CDs are made of.
Speaker: I also had to adjust the weight of the cutter head and optimize the angle and the height of the needle. I tested a sapphire needle, which was way too sharp and started to cut deep grooves and produced unwanted swarf.
Speaker: The tungsten needle was perfect and worked great. The cutter head in this machine is really something special. It has a piezo-like crystal inside that produces the sound, which is transmitted to the needle.
Speaker: It's unbelievable that that thing still works after 80 years. The most common alternative technique is using magnetic cutter heads. Also, the sound of the motor and the driving belt is quite loud and will make its way to the recording.
Speaker: I got used to it, and I think it creates the charm of the old-fashioned sound. Unfortunately, i have to render my songs to a lower speed because of the different hertz adjustment electronic devices have in Europe.
Speaker: That means the cutter runs too fast while recording. But that's not such a big deal, except the playing time is reduced a little bit. Onto my sheets of polycarbonate I can record about 7 minutes of music on each side.
Speaker: I have to find out how to make regular 12 inch plates, that way I can cut more songs onto the record. While playing songs into the good old Wilcox, it's better to make an R-I-A-A-S-E-Q for each track, to achieve better sounding songs in the end.
Speaker: But still, there's only a frequency of 500Hz to 5kHz to hear while playing the song on the stereo. That means you only hear the mids, and that's not too bad because everything sounds warm, and far from being digital anymore.
Speaker: It's like the golden sweet spot to our ears. It's a very individual and personal piece of plastic with self-made music on it. Perfect to offer to friends and connoisseurs.
Speaker: The label stickers for the record lathe are designed on my iPhone with several photo apps and printed on adhesive film. There seems to be a rising market for this kind of material.
Speaker: Many bands have released on record lathe labels. Even the Beastie Boys did this for a limited release. And a little bit more history about my Wilcox Gay Recordio Model 6A10 record cutter.
Speaker: This model was manufactured in the mid 1930s. You may have noticed the gray and green military look of the Wilcox Gay Recordio. It was the model that was produced specially for the US Army.
Speaker: I would love to know what this machine has been through. probably it was offering voicemails to the soldiers back to their families like whatsapp does today or maybe it was just for recording music and playing it back with the extra tone arm on board in times the soldiers didn't have to fight record cutters played an important role in american history allowing average americans their first opportunity to record in the privacy of their homes Since the machines were portable, they were taken into such places as public schools, fraternal lodges, offices, and even bars.
Speaker: It was popular to record special events such as heavyweight fights, World Series games, and important political speeches. The Wilcox Gay Corp., which began in 1910 as a small company creating radios and transcription recorders in Charlotte, Michigan,
Speaker: As their business grew, so did the product line they carried, and in 1939 they launched the Recordio. The Recordio device not only played records, but allowed the user to use a microphone that accompanied the player to record themselves onto a blank record, a Recordio disk.
Speaker: The Recordio machine recorded 78 with decent fidelity. with decent fidelity These machines were marketed to the middle class through such media outlets as Ebony and Life magazine.
Speaker: The player-slash-recorder found its way into the hands of musicians. Johnny Cash and Les Paul were known to have use these devices. In its debut year, the Ricordio device sold 25,000 units, but with the Great Depression underway and the adoption of magnetic tape, the Wilcox Gay Corp sales declined.
Speaker: And in 1961, the company moved to Chicago and lasted two more years before finally declaring bankruptcy ah second time and closing its doors for good 1963.
Speaker: Such a fun project and ah cool piece of equipment to be able to take your songs and run it through and see how they sound on the other side. There's just something even more personal about taking a song that you wrote and scratching it physically into a piece of plastic that someone else can play.
Speaker: And I guess it's because... Making a record is expensive and no one really listens to tapes anymore, but this feels even like a higher level of personal than a tape for some reason.
Speaker: Anyway, it's great to hear more behind the scenes on how that project came to be and all of the trial and error that went into it. I'm going to play one more song on the way out, and it's the song that I started the episode with called Little Space Prince. It's one of my favorites from 2024. And if you've made it this far into the episode, thank you so much for listening.
Speaker: We'll be back to the regular format next week. And if you want to be on the show, you don't have to wait for me to get in touch with you. You can email me chasing the beats at at proton.me.
Speaker: All right, here we go with Little Space Prince.
Speaker: Music
Speaker: So
Speaker: Mmm! Mmm!
Speaker: i
Speaker: um
Speaker: The
Speaker: you
Speaker: Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.
Speaker: you
