Lathe cutting whizz Phil Macy of 3.45RPM in Brighton has been carving out records of all shapes and sizes for over a decade. Phil and Groovy Times exchange cutting remarks

Could you briefly explain the lathe cutting process?
Lathe cutting is the transfer of sound onto a disc. All records start out as lathe cuts, but the majority of discs in people’s collections have been pressed, which requires the initial lathe cut acetate to be turned into stamper plates which in turn can then be used to press hundreds of identical records in a single day. The difference with what I’m doing is that I cut each disc – one by one, in real time – onto a playable, durable disc.

There are both disadvantages and advantages to this, with the obvious disadvantages being that it’s a significantly slower process than pressing records, and as you have to listen to each and every disc while it’s being cut (for the reason of monitoring quality control) it is a hugely repetitive business. It takes a sturdy constitution to listen the the same LP 50 times in a week, however much you may/may not be enjoying the music! The time-intensive nature of it can also make it a relatively expensive business, though having said that in the ten years I’ve been involved with lathe cutting, the price gap between pressed vinyl and lathe cuts has come down considerably. 

The plus sides though are many. With pressed records you’d be hard pushed to find a pressing plant that will touch an order of less than 100 copies, and sometimes they won’t even consider less than 500. For the vast majority of artists this has always made vinyl an unrealistic prospect, as the reality is it’d end up with dusty boxes of unsold product under the bed and a large unrecouped dent in the finances. Most artists just don’t have that sized fanbase to sell to. However, with lathe cutting you can tailor the amount you order to demand, so if you only get pre-orders for a dozen records, you can get a just dozen done. It’ll cost a bit more per unit, but at the same time you have a rarer, more exclusive artefact which by its very nature makes it better value for money.

Do you have a typical client? I’m envisioning young indie bands, who’ve never released a record before
Not as such. There’s certainly a growing market of younger bands who are interested in records as a merch product which has made up a good percentage of business over the years. I’ve cut records of small run early releases for the likes of Kid Kapichi, Hot Wax and Snayx, all bands who at the time would not have been big enough to make it worth investing in a large run of vinyl, but they took the plunge with highly limited lathe cut releases, and the records have gone on to be heavy collector’s items – maybe not a huge payback on the outlay, but of course is superb for publicity.

I’ve also had dealings with a number of acts who’ve been quite open about the fact that they don’t think their fanbase has any particular interest in records, but have wanted a lathe cut available just so they can have copies for themselves… bands coming to me for “just the four copies” is a reasonably common occurrence!

Having said this, it’d be fair to say that I got my initial foothold in the business of lathe cutting thanks to a few ‘established’ names in the world of smaller, properly independent underground labels. My very first cut was for the wonderful Geoff Dolman at Static Caravan, who at that point was already 15 years and 300 releases into things, and then quickly after that came the first Polytechnic Youth cut, via Dom Martin who’s been involved in a fair number of extremely hip indie labels and releases over a couple of decades (Earworm, The Great Pop Supplement, Feral Child to name a few).

I then also had the great fortune to link up with Keith Jones at Fruits de Mer Records to start lathe cutting for his side label Friends Of The Fish, which led to a widening inroad into a very diverse and far-flung psych scene. A year or so after I’d started I was cutting FOTF records for bands from places as distant as Norway, the Philippines, and the US, and it really helped spread the 3.45RPM name far and wide. 

Aside from all this, I do get plenty of requests for one-off’s, birthday present picture discs, old demos from bands people were in years ago, art students wanting a couple of discs for presentations and the like. It’s thankfully quite a varied field I deal with, otherwise it could get a bit dull. I do love the truly odd requests that come in!

Why do you limit the length of the runs you offer? 
In the late 1800’s, pre-universal electrical access and before pressing plants existed, lathe cutting was the only way that records could be manufactured. If a tune became a ‘hit’ record, and sales took off, then it would take hundreds of lathe cutters working all around the clock cutting thousands and thousands of the same record to keep up with demand. There’s a story about how when the famous old music hall track The Laughing Policeman became popular, it was selling so many that lathe cutters were having to work around the clock every day for months on end to satisfy the shops and distributors, cutting the same song over and over and over again, and as a result a number of them went completely mad. For a while in the early 1900’s lathe cutting became the profession with the highest suicide rate in the industrialised world. So, I’ll keep to 100 x 7″ or 50 x 12″ of the same recording, max. Thanks.

How does a lathe cut disc compare to standard vinyl? Is there a difference in sound quality?
My own estimate of the cuts I produce is that they sound maybe 95% as good as standard pressed vinyl. Maybe some cuts will fall a little under that goal, maybe some sound as good as the “real thing”, but on the whole it’s close enough that there shouldn’t be any complaints. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that most people wouldn’t notice a difference on everyday listening. I would never personally claim that my cuts sound completely as good as pressed vinyl, as the maths just don’t add up… if someone has spent a million pounds on setting up a pressing plant, I think it would be disingenuous to pretend that a small home set up in a spare room that costs 2% of the price would be able to fully compete. I tend to make the comparison between racing mini-metro’s against Formula One cars at Brands Hatch, and still finishing in the Top Ten. It’s somewhat remarkable that such a small-time set up can come up with such a relatively high quality product.

Home and DIY lathe cutting has come a long way in the past two decades. The hissy, tinny, low volume etching onto picnic plates and greenhouse panels have on the whole been replaced with a far fuller and more complete sound, and there’s a lot more knowledge available online. Much of the thanks for this is due to sites like The Secret Society Of Lathe Trolls which has become a primary focus for cutters both professional and amateur worldwide to share their experiences, and the also creation the ‘Souri’ Vinylrecorder T560 which has led to a much wider circle of people globally with the facility to cut to a specific standard.

Are they cost-effective?
If used in a considered way, then very much so. It’s just a case of focussing on the pro’s and knowing what cons to avoid. The important thing to grasp about lathe cuts is that at the end of the day there doesn’t have to be any dead stock. You can tailor the order to the exact amount required by using pre-order, get the required amount made and no more, then basically guarantee a sell-out on release, which is not only good for the finances but also looks great on the publicity. 

For any act who know that they can sell over ‘X’ amount of copies (say, 200 x 7″), then I’d usually advise looking at getting a pressing done as it’s much cheaper per unit, so even if you end up with some unsold stock you still ought to be able to recoup the outlay unless you wildly over order. But for anyone who thinks 100 x 7″ may be pushing it for sales, then lathe cuts are undoubtedly the way forward.

It’s also interesting to note the price of some standard 7″s in shops these days. They’re very often £15 for a record that has been pressed in its thousands. At that point, the cost of lathe cuts starts to compare very favourably.

What non-standard sizes do you offer? I think I’ve got a non-standard Irma Vep lathe cut, was that you?
All sizes are available, within sensible limits. The smallest discs I’ve cut were 2″, and though I’ve never personally cut a disc larger than 12″, there are 14″ discs available. In the 1930s and 40s, 16″ transcription discs were often used for radio, but I do not have the facilities to cut one of them, before anyone asks.

In between that, I’ve dealt with pretty much every size going. It’s possible that Irma Vep was an 8″ cut I did for Endless Records back in 2017? I did a few 8″s for Endless as the artists had released were typically non standard in the song length. Sloath was another artist I did an 8″ for on that label. 8″ is a great size for artists whose average song length is above the standard pop size of 3 to 4 mins. Some people aren’t really happy with the awkward nature of 8″s – they really will not fit in nicely to your 7″ collection, but on the plus side you can get a good 7 mins on without having to cram in the grooves or lower the volume too much, which can make it a great budget option rather than going straight up to the slightly more standard 10″. 

 5″ discs are also quite popular. These are nice and cheap, can fit around two mins of audio on comfortably, and as they’re cd sized can be stored and filed reasonably easily.

Shaped discs have also become a bit of a “thing” recently, and with those it really is a case of the only limit is your imagination. And having a cuttable playing area. That’s also a limitation. But apart from that, you can be as creative as you can get away with. I released a ‘Stars Within A Star’ shaped disc a few months ago, for Makoto Kawabata from Acid Mothers Temple – a spectacular 12-pointed star disc that then had tiny five-pointed stars cut into each of the 12 spokes. Not exactly cheap to produce, but once it was housed in appropriate packaging it was one of the most beautiful items I’ve ever had the pleasure to be involved in releasing.

What inspired you in the first instance to get into the lathe cutting business? Where did you get your lathe cutting kit from?
Well, without the legendary Pete King I guess it would have never occurred to me that you could buy lathe unit, set it up in a spare room, and then bang out discs on demand. Pete is a guy in New Zealand who in the early 80s bought some old record decks from a radio station, modified them to manufacture polycarbonate discs with, and before long had basically created a whole scene in NZ and then beyond of weird, out-of-kilter tiny run releases that grew in popularity throughout the 90s, even taking orders from the likes of Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth. I bought my first King lathe in around 1995, which would have been a Handful Of Dust “half” picture disc (music on one side, a picture on the other). By 1997 I’d ordered 38 copies from him of the album that my band at the time Kashmir Twist had recorded, and from then on it was always on my mind about manufacturing my own product, keeping it as independently pure as possible and being able to release whenever I wanted, rather than waiting for a label to pick up on things, or having to wonder if I had enough market to afford an full pressing (I rarely have had!). 

Records have always been my preferred format for both listening and releasing – I didn’t even buy a CD player until around 1998 which was pretty late in the day – and the whole cdr scene never caught my interest in the way that vinyl did. Cdr’s were/are absolutely superb items for the DIY ethic, and I own 100’s of them from cool artists who never would have been able to put their music onto record, but the very nature of the ease of obtaining them always made me feel that they were somehow less ‘dedicated’ than a record. I can’t argue against the fact that that’s a particularly elitist and snobby attitude to have to a format that enabled DIY artists to carry on releasing some beautiful and affordable art, but hopefully people can understand what I mean.

Anyhow, the way I acquired the lathe was that I’d been promoting shows in Brighton for a dozen years or so, but had decided that I wanted to move on and do something different. This tied in with a slightly insane idea I’d developed around my oncoming 45th birthday, namely that on the day of my 45th I’d start the 454545 project – a series of releases consisting of 45 x 7″ discs of music I’d played on that played at 45rpm, and in editions of 45 only, and it’d all have been done by my 46th birthday… so basically releasing a 7″ every 8 days or so for a whole year.

I worked out the finances of getting this done via pressing plants, and it was completely unfeasible… even if I’d been able to find a manufacturer who’d be prepared to take on such a bitty, minor project, and then deliver on time each week for a year, it would have cost in the region of £40k, at a conservative estimate! So, the only way I could possibly achieve what I was planning was to own the means of production, and it was then I started looking into lathe cutting.

There seemed only one person in the world who was making lathes on an off-the-peg basis, a German guy called Souri, who originated the Vinylrecorder T560, or the ‘Souri’ as it commonly known for obvious reasons. The only problem was that he is very cagey about who he sells machines to and it took months to gain his trust, but he finally agreed to let me come over to Germany for him to show me how the lathe worked before selling it to me. So a big part of obtaining the machine was for purely selfish purposes, but once word got around, the business side got popular very quickly and soon took over the majority of my time.

You’ve recently celebrated your 10th birthday as a lathe cutting concern – is it a skill that you get better at with experience? And how has your business/approach changed over that time?
I was completely in the dark about lathe cutting before I travelled to Germany to buy the machine, I knew just about nothing of any value on the subject. Ten years later, I now know “a bit”, but I’m a long way from being anywhere near what I would consider an expert. This is maybe the best part of the whole thing, in that I’m learning new stuff every week, every day even. I’m not a great technical mind. I’ve always generally been happy to plug something in, and if it works then that’s good with me, never being bothered about the physics and workings of it all, but the lathe has definitely changed my outlook, and now I’ll actively search out and consume en masse as much information as I can get. I view it as an ongoing Open University course, but one which I don’t expect to ever complete.

What format do you need to receive the sound files?
In theory, I can cut from pretty much any sound source as long as I can transmit the audio to the cutterhead. As it’s just a case of blasting sound waves at a needle which transposes those vibrations on to physical surface you could, if you had a very, very large and loud megaphone, produce a sound by shouting closely at the needle (this is pretty much how recordings were made up to the 1930’s). However, more practically I tend to work from WAV files as a preferred format.

Having said that, one of the favourite discs I ever cut was a one-off birthday present for the bassist in an old punk band called The Plague 1980, where I was sent an original cassette they’d made back in the day, and was asked to cut the album directly from that tape, thus avoiding any digital involvement in the finished product. Extremely nerve-wracking doing the cut in case the tape buggered up, but the finished sound was actually superb, and I hear the guy was overjoyed with the final product.

Are certain genres of music unsuitable for a lathe cut disc? 
None that I’ve come across. I’ve personally cut everything from ambient to industrial noise, and just about the whole spectrum in between. As long as it’s set up right, then anything ought to be possible to cut with a near-perfect finish.

Maybe difficult to answer, but do you know of any lathe cut collectibles?
This is probably the easiest question you’ve thrown at me here! By their nature lathe cuts are generally speaking all limited edition and rarer than your average shop-bought disc, so it is an inherently collectible format and as such prices can very quickly reach extreme heights.

As far as I know, the Kid Kapichi 7″ I mentioned earlier (Ice Cream – 50 copies only) has never come up for sale, and would probably command a fair price. While the SNAYX 7″ I issued on Gardener’s Delight in 2021 went for £70 a few months back.

Discogs currently has a disc I cut for Polytechnic Youth in 2015 on sale at nearly £700, though it has been up there for around eight years now so I’d say that’s a tad optimistic! However, there are plenty of cuts out there which regularly go for over £100 – I’d guess the signed / hand-screened Silver Apples/Andrew Weatherall 12″ is probably one of the most futureproofed ones in terms of longevity, but there are also releases from the likes of Alison Cotton, the Smote and Kombynat Robotron 12″s on Weird Beard, a few on the Sonic Cathedral label such as Bdrmm and Deary, pretty much all the Friends Of The Fish (Fruits de Mer) label cuts I’ve done, and the ongoing Feral Child film & interview discs, which always sell out right away then often get flipped quickly onto online selling sites.

In all honesty, I’d rather people didn’t do that. I’ve no problems with a record naturally gathering value over a period of time due to an organic Wants vs Availabilty symbiosis, but the flagrant buying of highly limited and desirable items purely for the sake of instantly adding 400% or whatever to its value I think is a bit of a cold way of going about things, not really a true music lovers ideology but just a capitalist scrape. But I understand people need to make money somehow, and it can undoubtedly add kudos to both artist and product, so hey ho.

Could you name some favourite projects you’ve worked on over the years?
The aforementioned Silver Apples/Weatherall 12″ has to be in there, as would a lovely square 8″ picture disc called Mrs Hawkwing’s Space Jam, which was led by the late great Nik Turner’s cosmic sax playing. The Sunday Experience memorial 7″ for the prolific music writer Mark Barton was a bittersweet joy to work on, with all the bands involved giving over some top quality tracks, and a one-off picture discs I cut of it then making a couple of hundred quid for cancer charity. I started a label a couple of years ago called El Ron Del Mundo, and have had the real pleasure of being able to release discs by such long-admired artists such as New Zealand’s Roy Montgomery, and Makoto Kawabata’s Stars Within A Star shaped disc I also mentioned earlier.

There’s too many to list in all honesty, I could go on for paragraphs, and I do consider myself very lucky to be constantly working with such a wide array of fine bands, artists and labels – I’ve fallen on my feet with this line of work. 

However, I think there’s one disc in particular that I always consider to be the very epitome of what is wonderful about owning a lathe cutting machine, where you can be as creative, thoughtful, and one-off as you want as you aren’t trying to please a wider market and garner sales, for when you just want one record on one disc for one person. So a couple of years back I received an order for a 7″ which was intended as a gift that someone wanted to give to their partner. It was a one-sided 7″ with 4 mins of completely silent groove, except for right in the middle a woman’s voice saying softly, just the once… “I love you, Dave”. 

And every time I think of that record, I also think to myself “that’s why I love this job”.

For any lathe cutting needs of your own – you know where to go: www.345rpm.com