Jane: 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, Emile
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.
Caren Kelleher: I'm Caren Kelleher. I'm the founder and
CEO of Gold Rush Vinyl, one of the few record pressing plants
in the United States, about 8600 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.
Jane: Do you think of it that way, that you are making music?
Caren Kelleher: Yeah, I'm a 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.
Jane: Caren 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?
Caren Kelleher: Very happy to. Let's go for a walk.
Jane: Okay.
Mabel: Hi. My name is Mabel. I'm seven years old. I live in
Tampa, Florida, and my question is, how were vinyl records made?
Caren Kelleher: 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.
Jane: 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 rain coats. 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.
Caren Kelleher: Any colors. And in fact, that's now majority of
what we do is specialty mixes. And it 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.
Jane: Can we see the pellets being put in?
Caren Kelleher: We're gonna 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 gonna go, get
up close, and maybe Robbie, our press operator, will tell us
what he's doing.
Jane: And I won't put my fingers anywhere near it.
Caren Kelleher: No, don't. It's a very easy way to lose a
finger. Those are very precious.
Jane: I walked 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.
Robbie Carroll: My name is 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.
Jane: But you don't have any green in this record!
Robbie Carroll: Well, the good news is blue and yellow kind of
make green.
Jane: What's the name of this color that you're creating for
the record?
Robbie Carroll: Boy, I actually don't know if we have a name for
this one.
Caren Kelleher: Can we ask the kids, maybe, to take a look at
it and give us their ideas?
Jane: 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@butwhykids.org with
your name for this record color.
Callie: 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.
Finley: Hello. 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?
Maya: Hi, 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?
Jane: 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.
Caren Kelleher: 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 get put in our
machines so that we can press a 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.
Jane: 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. Caren 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.
Caren Kelleher: Now, just like I was saying with the waffle
maker, there's 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.
Jane: 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.
Caren Kelleher: 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.
Jane: 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.
BREAK: BREAK
Jane: 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, Caren Kelleher. After showing me
around the manufacturing area where they make the records,
Caren took me into their listening room, which was much,
much quieter. 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?
Caren Kelleher: 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 tone arm, and the tone arm 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 the tone arm and the needle are connected to a little
microphone amplify that sound. So I'll even play you a record
without it, 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.
Jane: So you're taking a record out now.
Caren Kelleher: I'm taking it out. This is a soundtrack called
Bee and Puppycat, which we really like a lot. And this is
really pretty color. It's called Coke bottle. It looks like old
Coca Cola 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 33 and 1/3 rpm, which means rotations per
minute. That means it's going to go around 33 and 1/3 times in a
minute. Sometimes records are cut at what's called 45 and
that's faster, it's going to 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 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.
Jane: 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.
music: MUSIC
Jane: 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 Caren Kelleher that I feel like I just barely
understand how this all works.
Caren Kelleher: 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, it's really bizarre that somebody figured out how to
put music into a piece of wax and now plastic.
Jane: 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't, 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.
Caren Kelleher: 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 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 canyon. And when it's quiet,
it'll be really shallow. So almost, if you're if we were to
to shrink ourselves down and put ourselves in the groove of a
record and go through 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.
Jane: 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.
Caren Kelleher: That's exactly right. You can come work here.
Jane: 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.
Caren Kelleher: 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.
Jane: How much does a record like that cost?
Caren Kelleher: 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.
Jane: 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.
Caren Kelleher: 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 drive to the next tour stop or put the next
album out, or just to feed their families.
Jane: What did you think you wanted to be when you were a
kid?
Caren Kelleher: 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
Jane: Ugh, I loved that show.
Caren Kelleher: 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've always wanted to be in the music
industry, 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.
Jane: So even as a kid, you were what we might call an
entrepreneur or a business person. You had a business
person's mind.
Caren Kelleher: 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.
Jane: Caren, I feel like you're dangerously close to telling us
that it really is important to learn math and to pay attention
in school.
Caren Kelleher: 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 new color, it's
like, it's just like being an 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.
Jane: Thanks to Caren 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
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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@butwhykids.org We love hearing what you're interested
in knowing about. Our show is produced by Sarah Baik, Melody,
Bodette 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.