Lacquer Cutting at Gotta Groove Records

At Gotta Groove Records, we truly care about making our customers' records sound absolutely great.  Therefore, we take a lot of extra steps during the initial lacquer mastering step in creating records.

For those who are unfamiliar with the steps involved in pressing records, there are basically three steps (with a lot of details to complete in between)-- 1. Lacquer Cutting; 2. Plating & Stamper Creation; and 3. Pressing.  "Lacquer Cutting" refers to the process of actually cutting grooves into a soft 14" lacquer disc which resembles a record.  These grooves ultimately determine your pressed records' sound.  The grooves are cut by a lathe, often using a diamond cutting head.  The cuts are made based upon vibrations created via the playback of the audio tracks you provide to us in your master.  Ultimately, this lacquer disc is plated and used in making the stampers which press your records.

After submitting your audio in an analog or digital format to Gotta Groove Records, (whether via physical CD, DVD, or tape; or .wav upload), our master audio engineers listen to each of your tracks in detail, making notes along the way.  If the audio is mastered in a way that lends itself to superb vinyl record playback, we recommend cutting the lacquer "flat".  “Flat” cutting refers to the cutting of a lacquer without performing any EQ or adjustments to the master audio before transferring the sound to the lacquer disc.  At Gotta Groove Records, we ONLY cut flat if our audio engineers feel that the master is perfectly suited for translation to vinyl; or if our customer specifically requests us to cut “flat”.

In many cases, our audio engineers recommend that certain changes be made to the audio before cutting into the lacquer disc.  We are unique in that we communicate all such recommendations with our customers prior to cutting their lacquers.  We are also unique in that we often perform such audio adjustments, after discussing them with our customers, at no additional fee.

These few extra steps early in the process have a dramatic impact upon the records we ultimately press.  You can feel assured that each time you order records to be pressed by Gotta Groove, we execute these extra steps with care-- so your records will sound their absolute best!