Lester Smith: Mastering in the 1940s

Lester Smith: Mastering in the 1940s

17th January 2019

Abbey Road’s Lester Smith tells us about cutting records at Abbey Road in the 1940s.

‘Mastering Room’ is the modern term for ‘Cutting Room’ where the master vinyl discs are cut before being sent off to the factory for processing.

We have been recently upgrading our Mastering Room Six and rediscovered this ancient stool, shown below. For the last 50 years, it has been in Room Six supporting the ‘Swarf’ jar that collects all the continuous black thread that results from cutting the groove in a vinyl 12-inch record. The swarf is, believe it or not about 0.3 of a mile long removed from each side!
 
 
The photo of the stool above was taken at the back of a ‘cutting room’ in 1940. The piles of round cardboard boxes contain waxes for making 78 RPM (revolutions per minute) 10 and 12 inch records, that was the medium before vinyl came along. They were about 2 inches thick and 14 inches in diameter and very heavy. Each wax would be placed on the stool and carefully removed from its cardboard box. Then they were loaded into special cupboards and kept at about 44 degrees centigrade until they were needed to be placed on the turntable to record the latest orchestra or singer.

Each of our three studios had their cutting rooms in adjacent rooms, so that the recording engineer could physically see the conductor and know when to lower the cutting head to start the recording process. It had to be a ‘one off’ perfect recording as editing was not possible in those days. Fortunately, the resulting shellac records at that time were no longer than four and a half minutes long!
 
 

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