How Shellac Records Are Made - RCA Victor presents: Command Performance 

Doing the same thing right with 78’s and 45’s from my dads family as well 👍🏼

I would like to know if any of these masters still exist. RCA is long gone. Camden is a slum and all the factories of Camden are long gone. RCA is basically a logo and font for rent to the highest bidder.

@@tarstarkusz Hundreds of thousands of RCA’s metal masters are in the Iron Mountain archival storage facility in Pennsylvania. The ledgers and file cards are in the Sony archive in lower Manhattan.

@@mjb784533 How do you know that? Is there publicly available data showing this?

@AustinAspen Network Which Ronnie later performed again on his syndicated "FAVORITE STORY" radio series.

Probably took the place of a 100’ walk.

I'm presuming one of the rooms is dust controlled.

I'm glad you enjoyed it.

I hope not.

When the phonograph first came out, It was an "event". By the time this film was made it was not really a big deal. Broadcast radio was 22 years old already and the phonograph was 65! years old at that point.

it's a question of routine…

@@ralflang5524 ...and HUGE amounts of practice...

Records still get cutted. But the music is recorded on tape first since the late 30s or so and then the master is cutted which is way way better.

@@PassCookie Two points: 1 - Magnetic tape was not good enough to reproduce music until the late 1940s or early 1950s at least. It is possible that the Germans were using magnetic tape as early as the late 30s but nobody else was. Everyone else was using wire recorders. 2 - My original comment was referring to the times when magnetic tape was not widely being used. If you made a musical mistake while cutting the record, there was no choice but to start over and try to play the piece all the way through again.

@@astrosci8864 yes of course. You are right. Erwin Bootz from the comedian harmonists once said that they recorded up to 5 takes of a song, then waited for the test pressings to listen to and then they decided which take they will realese because of course you cant play back the wax Master. With tape you could instatly listen to the recording which was a huge advantage.

Until the 1940s, when materials were changed. Wax was replaced by acetate, copper by aluminum, and shellac by Bakelite or Vinylite resins. Resin pressed records were marketed as "unbreakable". In the 1950s, tape recordings replaced the direct disk cutting presented here. Also, PVC and Polystyrene replaced the resins.

Wax is such a fragile medium I doubt they would've been usable by the time the ability to transfer them to tape came around

@@cryptidproductions3160 Records were not cut on wax but the original masters were cut on lacquer-coated metal discs. Then metal mothers, fathers and stampers were made, starting from those original stampers. For the WWII metal drive, all the metal-core lacquers, and all the metal masters were destroyed. Before that, they pressed multiple shellac records for archives. For those records which still survived, when magnetic tape came around, the remaining records were recorded to magnetic tape. Fortunately, well before WWII, movie sound was optically recorded to film stock. Many of these film sound recordings were recorded multi-track(2 or 3 channels). This is why we have true stereo versions of movies like "The Wizard of Oz".

The wax disc destroyed in early stages.

@@AlbertBenajam-ww1db The wax or lacquer discs were destroyed when they were plated, as with any wax or lacquer discs. They were always discarded or recycled as they could only be plated once. They were never meant for archiving. Anyway, the lacquers to be plated were dubbed from the session acetate. Those were also quickly worn and discarded. They have a short playing life.

The beutifull blue banube wals

No, not just you. Some of us perceive high pitch sounds... It almost cuts through your head, doesn't it?

@@barndancer6149 Like my electric knife cuts through the Thanksgiving turkey!!

They even pressed in Czechoslovakia, more specifically in Northern Bohemia, in a city called Ústí nad Labem (Aussig an der Elbe). The record pressing factory was later uzurpied by the state when communists won the elections in 1948. From then, the pressing moved to Loděnice and the old record factory in Ústí began to fall apart.

@@CZghost Thanks for your reply! Interesting information!

Originally it was the Victor Talking Machine Co. before RCA bought it in 1929.

Barry I. Grauman Yes, for the most part that's true in the U.S., but I have some later ones from 1959 and 1960. Also, in quite a few other countries around the world they were still being made through the early 1970's.

theres a couple company that still make 78, expensive though.

@tin pan alley 1619 Broadway a lot of them were just pressed by smaller the labels here in America...

@@CPorter Dont forget India, they used 78s and wind up players for many years

@@Dante-sx3pc you never really hear much about India. And we're talking about newer recordings. As in not the same order recordings

probably multiple times.

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@Skylar Kylo instablaster :)

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direct to disc that was done in 1977 @ 33 1/3

@@spencercox2684 Some direct to disc recording is done TODAY, but most records made since the late 1940s were made from tape masters. Some tunes would have been impossible without tape, A lot of Beatles songs come to mind. Double tracked vocals, sound effects and a whole host of multitrack magic going on in the studios. Even when me and my buddies "jam" (Hobbyists, not pro musicians at any level, LOL) we record to separate tracks and then mix down to a final stereo track. Being able to edit and correct any flubs is more vital to an actual record label than a few yahoos in a garage in Pittsburgh.

Back when we had Mid-Atlantic class.

Back when people knew how to read. Like… am I the only one who pronounces the first ‘r’ in February?

@@ARCtheCartoonMaster no

CBS/Columbia usually doesn't like to admit this, but the 33 1/3 RPM speed was originally developed in the 1920's by Bell Labs. Prior to "microgroove," using the then-standard groove width, and an 18 inch disc, 33 1/3 was the speed that could accommodate approximately 10 minutes of recording time -- to match the running time of a single reel of motion picture film. The speed was selected to enable one disc of "sound" per reel for the earliest commercially successful sound movies (in a process called Vitaphone). Given 1920's technology, it was decided to start the disc playback from the inside and slowly work outward to the edge -- this was done to compensate for stylus needle wear. The needle would always be a brand-new one for each showing and be very sharp at the beginning of the film reel. The "inches per second" of tracking is far less near the hub of a spinning record -- and this slower speed tested the technology of the 1920's -- but a very sharp needle could handle it with reasonable results. As the needle wore down, it was encountering increasing and increasing "inches per second" passing beneath it and therefore the "less good" results of a poor needle were compensated by the increase in tracking. Once the reel of film ended, a second projector and turntable picked up where that one left off, the needle was replaced with a new one, and the third reel and third disc of the movie was readied for the performance. Of course, within just a very few years, this cumbersome process was replaced in motion pictures with the sound track being placed right on the film itself... BUT... the 33 1/3 speed was picked up by radio broadcasters to record, or pre-record for later playback, radio shows or commercials or other segments. Once the size of the record groove could be made smaller as vinyl was made available in the 1940's to replace the old shellac base material, the 33 1/3 speed enabled "long-play" records at 12 inches in diameter, able to hold 20-25 minutes of material on each side. CBS/Columbia brought 33 1/3 into homes, but the speed had been around for over 20 years already.

@@hmmmmmmmmm2 Vitaphone discs were made of shellac only briefly, the breakage was the reason RCA Victor developed victrolac in the early 30's. Victrolac was PVC with plasticizers, and became known as vinylite in the late 30's and then just vinyl. But vinyl records have been around since the early 30s

@@hmmmmmmmmm2 In fact RCA tried to sell 33 1/3 "program transcription" records in the early 1930s, but those required expensive players for the time, and combined with the recession, the effort was a commercial failure.

Dr. Peter Goldmark perfected the "microgroove" process that enabled Columbia to offer up to 25 minutes of music on each side of a 12 inch "33" LP. Until then, radio transcriptions could only feature about 15 minutes of music- or program- on each side of a 16 inch "33" disc.

@@hyzercreek Vinylite was a vinyl chloride resin, similar to Bakelite. The vinyl used for LPs is the polymer form, poly vinyl chloride. The reason for the move from shellac was a shellac shortage after WWII.

Shellac is made from a secretion from bugs.

Also, it wont be obsolete until we have consumer recording that can beat analog sound.

@@zacotb Thank you. I know. My question was what are the "six secret ingredients"? Shellac is only one of the six.

@hawkturkey that dude is stuck in the past, Digital recording has been shitting all over analog for a long time. Vinyl still sounds good yeah, but digital doesn't degrade.

@@TranceCore3 the 7 year old Kanye CD I own sounds like shit now. My over 40 year old Bob marley vinyl still sounds like a new record.

I want to know how it worked it looks really interesting. My total experience with 78's has been on a gramaphone (furniture type), mums little portable circa 1955 and our old radiogram which had a stack changer circa 65.

Not many unless there was a malfunction in the changing mechanism. When the record drops from the mechanism, an air cushion is created.

That's a Victor V-225, Magic Brain changer. The 78rpm Channel has a video on it. Apparently, it's actually quite gentle on the records, unless they are warped. Then you might see some breakage as the record drops into the rejection chute. Certain vintage records may also get their edges chewed up by the separator blades.

Really? How awful!

That was the major development of Emile Berliner of the company that became Victor Records. Edison's cylinders couldn't be easily duplicated (real engineers will note it was eventually done). By making the record a flat disk, they could use a process already well known for printing called "Electrotyping", which press the set type into a wax bed, then made it conductive (then with graphite), electroplate that, then use that sheet in the printing press. It was a small matter to modify the process to make records. The secret was a flat record.

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The most popular size 10" couldn't hold more than 3 ½ minutes, the larger size for classical music 4 ½ minutes only. Variable grades didn't exist yet and required the use of magnetic tape, but on 78 rpm it could put up to 9 minutes to a 12"

@@robfriedrich2822 I did see that somewhere. I know popular music of the time wasn't really a problem, but some classical music pieces had to increase tempo in order to fit onto a 78. I don't have the patience or stamina to delve into 78rpm records. They are pretty fragile and I wouldn't have the heart to throw away most of what I run across. And most of what I have run across (almost all) NEEDED to be thrown out. It's just too sad.

CMLounsbury Sony Music, presumably

Thats a very good question, I would like to know this as well.

They are mostly owned by collectors, every now and then they appear on E-Bay and go for thousands of dollars

Many of them have been destroyed. When RCA was going to tear down the warehouse that stored these metal masters, they saved the most historically significant ones (at least to RCA), let some private collectors take out as much as they could carry, and the rest that couldn’t be saved were demolished with the building.

@@1987VCRProductions oh well, shit happens. most music then as now sucked so why save those kind of master's ?

Tape wasn't a thing, or at least a widespread one, back in '42, when this video was made.

Only Germany had tape machines at the time. The Army brought back the Nazi tape recorders after the war and Bing Crosby (yes, that Bing Crosby) funded the manufacturing of reel-to-reel tape recorders with the AMPEX corporation in 1947.

New vinyl records sell for about $35 and up, so it would probably cost somewhere around $10-$20 a record.

Many were destroyed during WW2

It's still sort of the same process but using vinyl instead of shellac. Also they use lacquer instead of wax to cut the record and silver nitrate and nickel to plate the disk instead of gold, copper and chromium layers. A Japanese company pre-makes the lacquer disks and the vinyl is made by outside companies instead of from scratch. But even modern record making requires people standing at the press working the machines and other people inspecting the disks and inserting them into sleeves and then into covers. There really isn't really much more automation than they had in the 1940s.

The runout groove was done that way because early record changers detected the end of the record when the tone arm moved back and forth.

@@01chippe Thank you.

Sort of.

Johann Strauss Eugene Ormandy, Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra - The Music Of Johann Strauss.

I think it was a special test record not released to the public. It doesn't have a catalog number on the label, and the title on the label looks like it's printed with a different typeface than standard releases.

RCA trashed all the pre tape masters in the early 1960's

Don’t make me think of the horrors

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For that time it was. Same when the compact disc was introduced.