The Vinyl Countdown
- Jon Wheeler
- 26 minutes ago
- 3 min read
A little while back, Jeff and I decided that rather than choosing a new Westingway single to record, we'd try and spend a day in the studio recording some of our existing tunes live, with a view to making a live E.P. and having it made available on vinyl.
I talked about it in this post, which doesn't seem that long ago, but was actually about ten weeks back..... so perhaps you'd better read this first...
So, now that you're all caught up, here's what happened next....
The Upload...
We actually ended up with seven 'usable' tracks. None of them 100% perfect in my mind, but that wasn't really the point of the exercise. The point was to capture what Jeff and I sound like if we go and play a festival or gig, warts and all, and to actually create "a physical thing" people could play. It would be called "Live In Clarksville".... (Clarksville being the nickname of Jeff Studio, a play on Jeff's surname, and geographically speaking, near(ish) to Nashville, but definitely somewhere else.....)
Having never actually gone through this specific process before I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but in all honesty, it wasn't that bad. I uploaded the completed mixed and mastered tracks (thank you Steve Twinley) to my Soundcloud account, and from there sent them on to the vinyl manufacturer, Elastic Stage.
The first problem was that I'd only chosen four tracks. Although we could have two tracks per side, that unfortunately didn't meet the overall minimum playing time threshold that existed. I could have uploaded five, that would have done it, but quite frankly my OCD doesn't allow me to create a record with an uneven number of tracks on each side... so six it was.
All the usual statements and declarations applied, as to who wrote and recorded the music, copyright, whether a publisher existed, etc..... and then I had to sort out some artwork.
The artwork I use for all my releases is A.I. generated by me using Canva and a series of prompts I created a few years ago. Subscriptions to sites like Canva can be expensive of you don't use them all the time, so I'd created myself a bit of a stash. I chose one, my usual combination of a vinyl record and the cross section of a tree, (which form the basis of the majority of my covers) and I started to muck around with it a bit.
The thing I always get stuck with is pixel sizes, and I didn't have any option ultimately than to scale my design up, which has generally worked out okay, but as a possible result, the printing hasn't come out quite as sharply as I might have chosen. Again, it's not perfect, but I did it, at no cost, and I managed to scale a technical hurdle by myself. I'm sure that kind of problem is simplicity itself to many, but I never feel that I fully understand these things.
Anyway. It was done, and the link for me to order my record was created immediately.....
Which then lead me to a problem I hadn't actually fully considered. Do I tell people they can buy it, before I've even listened to it? Answer : No..... I'm going to order myself a copy and see for myself first. Delivery time 6-8 weeks.....
As you might have realised, those 6-8 weeks are up, the vinyl is here, and I'm perfectly happy to share it.
Listen here...
I've never been under any misapprehension that anybody was actually ever going to buy it.... It's £33.90 for six tracks (of which I get approximately 25% if any do sell).... but that's basically £5.65 per track. I mean, I think it's good, but it's not going to change your life or anything, so for the time being you can listen to the final result here...
If that doesn't work for you, you can listen to it on my website here :
Conclusion
So here it is. A six track live E.P. on vinyl. An actual thing I can hold, and spin on a turntable to my heart's desire. The irony is, as special as that sounds, that realistically, anybody can do this. There are almost certainly services available who will perform the same task for less money, but there's no questions or levels you have to achieve to actually get something like this made. You could record yourself on a phone if you wanted.
In all honesty your biggest cost ultimately could be to buy a record player so you can actually listen to it. Fortunately I had a job at Comet when I was 17, and the stereo I bought with my first paycheck some 35 years ago is still going strong!
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