Friday, April 5, 2013

Interview with Tyler from Audio Geography + Tragwag



Tyler from That Really Awesome Guy with A Guitar put out a split single with Gnarly Whales a few years ago and since then has started his own lathe cut business, Audio Geography.
From my experience it seems that lathe cutting operations spring up for a few months and then disappear, overwhelmed with orders or technical problems. Aside from Peter King in New Zealand and only more recently Mike from PIAPTK, there was really no one consistently cutting records for any length of time. It's understandable, the equipment is fussy and the trial and error it takes to successfully cut records individually one at a time with any clarity is daunting. Tyler has taken on the challenge and with the help of a master cutting mentor (and the lathe trolls forum), purchased a few machines and setup shop in CT. Having someone with years of experience to guide him, not only do the records sound incredible for the usual lathe cut, but Tyler is sticking around making this his full time pursuit.
But cutting records isn't the only thing Audio Geography does, Tyler just finished school at UMass for audio recording and runs a studio and mastering operation in addition to playing around live as TRAGWAG. In fact he's off on a tour early this month all over the northeast, check his schedule here.

We talked on the phone a few weeks ago about the technical considerations of lathe cutting, how, for the second side of his own lathe single he could record a personalized cover as the B-Side. He been cutting lathe vocal tracks to bounce back into his recordings and how we should build a record player with a huge spindle that can play 4 lathe cut singles stacked on top of each other like a 4-track cassette.

I play excerpts from a couple tracks on his bandcamp page which you can check out here. Expect a full length coming soon from Tyler, check out his site for more details.

Download the episode here

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