How are records made?
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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from curious kids just like you, and we find answers. Do you like listening to music? Most people do. But when you want to hear music, what kind of technology do you use? Some folks have smart speakers in their home, and they just say, Hey, smart speaker, could you please play my favorite song? Thank you.

Or maybe your adults help you play music on their phone. Or they pop a CD into a CD player or turn on the radio in your home or car. Or maybe they pull out a big vinyl record and put it on a turntable. Thomas Edison was the person who first figured out how to capture, record, sound, and play it back later. He did this by creating a device called the phonograph in 1877.

Ten years later, Emil Berliner built on that invention to make the gramophone. Unlike the earlier phonograph, which used circular tubes or cylinders to hold recordings, the gramophone used flat discs, much more like what we're familiar with now. That made it much easier to make lots of recordings, to mass-produce them. And so, the record was created.

Records became a popular way to listen to music around the middle of the 20th century, so that means in the mid-1900s. For a long time, they were the main way people were able to buy their own music and listen back whenever they wanted. Some of your parents, and probably your grandparents, grew up listening to records. While new technology like cassette tapes, CDs, and now digital recording devices have been invented, records never really went away, unlike the cassette tape.

And for the last few decades, they've been making a strong comeback. So we aren't surprised that you've sent us some questions about this important technology. We wanted to go to a place where records are made to get some answers to your questions. And an opportunity presented itself when I was recently visiting Austin, Texas, a city known for its colorful music scene.

I'm Karen Kelleher. I'm the founder and CEO of Gold Rush Vinyl. One of the few record pressing plants in the United States. It's about 8,600 square feet, and this is where we physically make records that people buy. We have four pressing machines. Since opening, we've done over a million records. I have one of the coolest jobs in the world because I get to make music for a living, but not performing it, just making it so other people can listen to it and share it.

Do you think of it that way, that you are making music? Yeah, I'm kind of a record producer in a sense, but one of the best parts about my job is that every single day is different. We get to listen to new music coming out and help put it into a physical form so people can hold it, can read about the album and have it for as long as they're collecting records.

Karen and I were standing in the doorway of her company's building as we talked. It's basically one huge open room with lots of loud machinery, big bags of different colored plastic, and boxes and boxes of records. Before we got into how records get played, I wanted to understand how they get made.

Can you show me around Gold Rush Vinyl and I'll ask you some of the questions that kids have sent us while we're getting the tour? Very happy to. Let's go for a walk. Okay. Hi, my name is Mabel. I'm seven years old. I live in Tampa, Florida. And my question is, how were vinyl records made?

Right now we're walking through our plastic area. So vinyl records are made with something called PVC, polyvinyl chloride. It looks like beads of plastic, which is really fun and they come in different colors. So the beads of plastic are what we're going to put into our machines. We're going to melt that plastic down into something that looks almost like a hockey puck or a biscuit. And then our machines are going to physically press the grooves of a record into the plastic

We heat it, cool it, kind of like a waffle maker is a good way to think about it. And after about 30 seconds, that melted plastic becomes a vinyl record you can put on your turntable. If you've never seen a record or held one, it kind of looks like a very flat frisbee or a flat plastic plate. The most common size of a record is 12 inches in diameter, so a foot across.

But the record starts as just a bunch of tiny plastic pellets. The specific type of plastic, vinyl, is also used in flooring or pipes. If you've ever heard of PVC pipes, those are vinyl. It's even used to make shower curtains, umbrellas, and raincoats. Vinyl became popular for making records more than 75 years ago, and it's still what is usually used to make them today.

So a record starts out with these tiny vinyl pellets, and they used to always be black.

But at Gold Rush, they're different. One of the cool things that I'm noticing is that you have all kinds of colors of these little plastic pellets. So you can make records in all kinds of colors, not just black. Any colors. And in fact, that's now the majority of what we do is specialty mixes. And it's really fun for our team. They can come up with new names for the colors. Today we're pressing one that's kind of like a tie dye, yellow and blue.

Last week they came up with one called Berries and Cream, another one called Mermaid that has like a shimmer to it. And so it's really fun when musicians come to us and say, "Can you make our record?" We can work with them to make their own colors.

Can we see the pellets being put in? We're going to get up close to our machines. These are called pressing machines and they are very dangerous. Our operators are trained in them because they use a ton of pressure to flatten out the plastic. So we're going to go get up close and maybe Robbie, even our press operator, will tell us what he's doing. And I won't put my fingers anywhere near it. No, don't. It's a very easy way to lose a finger and those are very precious. I walked closer

closer to the pressing machine and I could see that on one side of it the press operator was taking cupfuls of these colored vinyl pellets and pouring them down a big funnel that went into the machine. There were dark blue and light blue pellets, bright orangey pellets, and sparkly purple ones. He was pouring them in a very specific order. My name's Robbie, Robbie Carroll. Right now I'm doing what's called a hand pour.

one color after another in a sequence that the customer or we determine. And yeah, the results are a little bit more dramatic on the final end. My favorite color is easily green. But you don't have any green in this record. Well, the good news is blue and yellow kind of make green.

What's the name of this color that you're creating for the record? Oh boy, I actually don't know if we have a name for this one. Can we ask the kids maybe to take a look at it and give us their ideas? I love that idea. So we have a picture of the record Robbie was making. You can find it on the episode page for this episode at butwhykids.org. It's also on our Instagram page. You can have an adult help you navigate the internet to see it.

Tell us what you think this special record color should be named. You can tell us in the comments on our social media or write to questions at butwhykids.org with your name for this record color. Hi, my name is Callie. I live in San Antonio, Texas. I'm seven years old. My question is how do recorded things like videos and songs work? Thank you.

I'm Finley. I'm nine years old and I live in Minnesota. And my question is, how does music get put onto a record? My name is Maya. I'm eight years old. I live in South Orange, New Jersey. And my question is, how do people get songs into records?

The way I wrap my head around this is to start by thinking about it this way. In order to make a record, you have to take a sound and turn it into something physical that you can hold. And then when you play it, you're turning that physical thing back into something you can hear.

Let's start with sound. Sound travels through the air as a wave of vibrating air molecules. You can't see it, but your ears turn those vibrations into electrical signals that your brain can interpret. A waveform is the graph of how the sound moves. When you make a recording, you're capturing that sound wave and turning it into an electrical signal, and then capturing that electrical signal so it can be recreated again and again.

Sound was first recorded by dragging a vibrating needle through wax to draw the waveform. Then you could play back that recording on the wax cylinder that you had drawn the waveform into. Once you have a recording of that live sound, you want to be able to reproduce it so everyone can have their own record of the same music. To do that, these days, instead of using wax, a master disc is made out of enamel-coated metal.

the enamel isn't as hard as the metal. Think kind of like sticky paste. And we use a machine that's called a lathe to cut grooves into the records. So we carve through that enamel.

That gives us what's called the master and we then make metal plates off of that. So the metal plates are the opposite. So what was a groove on your lacquer is a peak on this metal plate and the metal plates are what get put in our machine so that we can press the record over and over and over again. That's why it's called a pressing plant. So our pressing machines, what they do is we put in these metal plates, they're called stampers, and those two stampers get put in this machine and we press the plastic into the record shape.

Now these records are coming off our machine really hot. We cook them really high temperature. So we have to put them between metal plates to cool them down so that they don't end up all floppy. So in this one machine, these vinyl pebbles get melted down into something that looks like a hockey puck and then pressed under tons of pressure. And while they're getting pressed down into that flat disc, the shape of the music is pressed into each side of the record. And what comes out is what we call a record.

Karen described it to me a little like how a waffle maker takes batter and turns it into a solid waffle with a very distinct shape. Now, just like I was saying with a waffle maker, sometimes the batter spills over. We have that happen with our records, so we trim it, and that's what's called flash. It's little ribbons of vinyl records that kind of get cut off the record before it goes into a cooling plate. At Gold Rush, they actually use that flash to make vinyl flowers that people can buy.

They're trying not to waste anything in their process. Once the record is cooled, it gets inspected to make sure it looks and plays right. Then it gets put into a protective sleeve or jacket and packaged up and shipped out.

So as we're pressing the records, we're also testing them for sound to make sure that the right music is on the right record and that there aren't any skips or pops or things that can go wrong with the record. So we have a record player out on the floor that the operators use and then one in our listening room, which is a little quieter. Let's go in there. When we come back, we'll explore how we actually hear those grooves that have been pressed into the record.

I'm Jane Lindholm, and today we're learning about an old technology that revolutionized our ability to share music and sounds, and is still popular today. We're learning about vinyl records at Gold Rush Vinyl in Austin, Texas, with the company's CEO, Karen Kelleher. After showing me around the manufacturing area where they make the records, Karen took me into their listening room, which was much, much cooler.

This is where they listen to the records they've made. Not all of them, but enough to make sure the sound is good before they ship their boxes out. Karen has a couple of really cool record players in this room, and I asked her to describe how a basic record player works. Because after all, a record is made to be played, isn't it?

You know, a lot of people who even collect records don't have record players. They're just collecting the records to have them permanently or on a shelf or something to look at, or maybe they're saving money to buy a record player. But a record player has a couple key components. One is what's called the turntable. That's what makes the record spin round and round, and that's connected to a belt underneath the table that allows it to spin.

We also have, obviously, the record needle, and it's connected to what's called a tonearm. And the tonearm allows the needle to kind of move across the record as we're listening. The needle is probably the most important part of the turntable. And connected to the needle is a tiny, tiny microphone that the wires run through the record player and into your speakers.

The way a record works is, if you think about like a bus going by you real quick, the whooshing sound, that's air movement, right? So a needle is going to go across the grooves of the record and as it hits it, it's making sound, but it's very quiet sound, which is why the tone arm and the needle are connected to a little microphone to amplify that sound. So I'll even play you a record without the speakers on and you can kind of start to hear a little bit of the noise and the difference when we put a record fully on.

So you're taking a record out now. I'm taking it out. This is a soundtrack called Bee and Puppy Cat, which we really like a lot. And this is a really pretty color. It's called Coke Bottle. It looks like old Coca-Cola bottles.

glass bottles. It's kind of like a greenish clear color. So I'm going to turn the record player on and one thing that's interesting about records is they can spin at different speeds. So this is at 33rd and 1/3rd RPM which means rotations per minute. That means it's going to go around 33 and a third times in a minute. Sometimes records are cut at what's called 45 and that's faster. It's going to be 45 times per minute. So I'm going to make sure that the setting is correct on this.

Okay, so now the turntable is spinning and I'm going to get ready to settle the needle on the record. Once the music starts playing, it's because the record needle is hitting the grooves of the record and the vibrations that are happening are creating sound. And we're going to do that first without the speaker on so we can just hear what it actually sounds like with the needle moving on the record.

I don't know if you could hear that. It sounded like somebody had music on in their headphones and you were hearing what was leaking out of the headphones. It's so quiet. But this is what it sounds like when you put the speaker on and you can actually hear the music. Let's recap. A record player is designed to play music or sound recordings because the record, even though it has all of those grooves that represent the sound waves, can't play itself.

So you put the record on a turntable, which spins it around at a set speed, and then an arm with a needle on it is placed on the surface of the record. That needle moves through the grooves. Fun fact: the tip of that needle, also sometimes called a stylus, is usually made out of industrial diamond. That's because diamonds are really hard, so the needle can withstand being moved along grooves of records for hours and hours and hours and hours.

And even though it's made out of diamond, it's a very, very tiny diamond and not the sparkly one you might see on jewelry, so it doesn't cost as much as you might think to replace it. Anyway, that needle moves along the grooves of the record, and the vibrations of the needle are picked up by a cartridge that converts those vibrations into an electrical signal.

That electrical signal then gets boosted by an amplifier and sent out through speakers, which actually convert those electrical signals back into sound waves that go to your ears. And then your ears convert them back to electrical signals to send to your brain, which then interprets those electrical signals as beautiful music.

I don't know about you, but my brain feels like it's going to explode with how complicated this all is. How in the world did people manage to come up with this technology? It's amazing. I told Karen Kelleher that I feel like I just barely understand how this all works. I make them for a living and I don't even really understand how it works. It's a little bit of magic, honestly, but that's, I think, what makes vinyl so special is that...

It's really bizarre that somebody figured out how to put music into a piece of wax and now plastic. What's also cool is when you look at a record, they all look kind of the same. I mean, maybe different colors, but they look kind of the same. You can see that there are ridges, but you can't see that there's music on there. They just look like

a record with ridges. If we took a microscope to this, and this is what we do when we make the master, you can see it almost looks like a canyon. So when music has what's called heavy bass, it's really deep, you know, like a bass drum or a cello or something like that, the grooves will be really deep. It'll look like a really deep cannon. And when it's quiet, it'll be really shallow. So almost if we were to shrink ourselves down and put ourselves in the groove of a record and go through it, it

It's almost like, yeah, going through a cavern or with crazy mountains around it and a river. It's just very bizarre that this is how it works. But again, when that needle hits the sides of the grooves is how the sound is manipulated.

It's really cool to visualize it that way because there are things called sound waves, but when you put them on a record, it almost looks like a landscape. So you're seeing the different ways different music sounds is like the difference between a landscape with just a couple of hills or a really sort of mostly flat landscape versus a landscape that's really mountainous and big ups and downs, and the music is different, so the landscape is different. That's exactly right. You can come work here.

That would actually be really fun. I think I'd want to do the job Robbie was doing over on the manufacturing floor, choosing the different colored vinyl pellets to create an amazing looking record.

But at Gold Rush, it's more than just making a physical record that's important to them. Here at Gold Rush, we work with artists that are trying to make a living from their music but might not have the big backing of a huge record label. And so they'll come to us and ask us to really help guide their careers a little bit so that they can make some money to keep making art.

We've become known now for a lot of the crazy colors that you heard us describing out on the floor, as well as real 24 karat gold records that you can kind of see on studio walls and things like that. We have a machine that's even crazier than the one that presses the records that can turn a record into gold. How much does a record like that cost?

If it's framed, it's very expensive. It can cost $500 or more. But the normal records we make for artists typically will cost them maybe $5 to make.

So a place like Gold Rush is partly special because you might have an artist who's not famous and doesn't need a million records made, but they might need 500 records made. And you can do that for them so that they can afford to have records that they can sell at shows and to fans. That's exactly what we do here. And especially because with the way musicians are paid for their music, you might have to have 2 million people watch a YouTube video to make the same money that if you sold 100 vinyl records.

So you don't have to have as many fans, but some that really want to own your music to make a big impact in your career. And that money helps the musicians strive to the next tour stop or put the next album out or just to feed their families. What did you think you wanted to be when you were a kid?

when I was a kid I wanted to be a you know like own a record label. I loved there was a tv show when I was growing up called Jem and the Holograms. Ah loved that show. And it was all about the music industry and I was more concerned like how does Jem get to the top of the charts and also be a good person as a musician and use her influence and so I always wanted to be in the music industry um

but I didn't have any talent myself really for music as much as I tried to practice. So this has been a good place for me to be in the music industry without having to be on stage. So even as a kid, you were what we might call an entrepreneur or a business person. You had a business person's mind. I did. And you know what? I had parents that were really encouraging of me. I used to have some really crazy ideas for things I wanted to start. And rather than say, that's silly or you can't do that, my parents would say, huh, why don't you spend an afternoon writing out what you would do? Come up with...

what we call a business plan or draw the restaurant you want to open and I think their encouragement of that creativity and letting me explore things led me down a path where I felt safe to open a factory like this.

Karen, I feel like you're dangerously close to telling us that it really is important to learn math and to pay attention in school. It is. I was really good in school, but you know what? Nobody challenged me to think about engineering and chemistry. And now I have to deal with that a lot in this job, and I'm really good at it, as it turns out. But I also get to work with musicians to come up with the names of their records. And, you know, I loved painting in school, and every time we make a new record and come up with a new color, it's like...

It's just like being in art class again. So pay attention to school. Then you have all kinds of opportunities like this to do things that are even different than your dreams. Thanks to Karen Kelleher, the CEO and founder of Gold Rush Vinyl in Austin, Texas, for showing us around her factory and helping us understand the mind-blowing science and technology behind records and record players. We've got pictures and videos on our social media pages and our website if you want to see more of what this all looks like.

And while you're over on our website, your adults can sign up for our newsletter. We send one out every time there's a new episode. And if you like our show, we'd love it if you and your adults would write us a review or tell a friend about But Why. If you have a question for us, you can always have an adult help you record it and send it to questions at butwhykids.org. We love hearing what you're interested in knowing about.

Our show is produced by Sarah Baik, Melody Beaudet, and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public. We are distributed by PRX. Our But Why Bites series producer over on YouTube is Joey Palumbo. And our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious. From PRX.