#Between a rock and a dubplate album full
#Between a rock and a dubplate album professional

Some of them-like Dubplates & Mastering, Man Made Mastering or Scape Mastering-also offer cutting services, which means they use a machine called a lathe to carving the music onto an original disc that will be duplicated at a pressing plant.Īlthough it may sound like a technical procedure, optimizing a track can also be a creative pursuit that requires artistic decisions. While German dance music creators in the early ‘90s weren’t aware or didn’t concern themselves with the possibilities of mastering, many studios now specialize in working specifically with club genres and are run by producers or former producers themselves. The process involves balancing a track’s frequencies (bass, mid-range and highs) to make sure it sounds as good as possible across various formats, and an engineer’s job is thus to make sure that the balance of sounds won’t cause the record to skip or sound distorted when played on vinyl. Today, mastering a dance record before it gets released is a given in the course of creating it-and that was not always the case.

#Between a rock and a dubplate album full

The 1995 opening of D&M and, in 1997, R.A.N.D., marked important steps in Germany’s techno community taking full control of the whole process of vinyl manufacturing and laid the groundwork for the independent and highly specialized industry that currently exists. remains one of the few plants to serve a growing number of record labels. The effects have trickled down to underground dance music, where a number of competitors to Dubplates & Mastering have entered the market but R.A.N.D. The boom placed more pressure on the industry’s existing infrastructure-especially pressing plants, which are harder and more expensive to establish than mastering studios. Of course, things look very different today, after a well-documented vinyl renaissance resulted in increased demand for wax. Still, the titans of the mainstream music industry considered vinyl a dying medium. The advent of digital equipment in the ‘80s made analog music production gear affordable, and shortly after that, the CD drove down prices of the machines used to cut and press vinyl. No such figure yet existed in Germany, but the stage was set for ambitious entrepreneurs to change the game. In the US, some highly paid independent mastering engineers evolved from mere technicians to stars in their own right, and their name on a record could move units. In that sense, the people involved acted out of necessity, as mastering and cutting vinyl records was still mostly done by major labels or their affiliated cutting studios, which didn’t cater to the special needs of a house or techno track.

#Between a rock and a dubplate album professional

In this case, DIY doesn’t refer to amateurism, but rather to obtaining and distributing the professional tools necessary to elevate an emerging underground scene. In Germany, the DIY philosophy and ethos fuelled two Berliners’ efforts to start their own mastering and vinyl cutting studio called Dubplates & Mastering in 1995, and the same can be said for the three fresh-faced youngsters who decided to try their hand at cutting and manufacturing vinyl in their home town of Leipzig as R.A.N.D. The different histories of its many sub-genres contain a common thread in the democratization of the means to produce, release and distribute music via technological developments. And electronic dance music is no exception. Do it yourself: three words that have informed music subcultures since the punk explosion in the 1970s.