One of the Citizen Vinyl production areas. October 21st, 2021
Gar Ragland is a musician, and he shared with us his journey of learning, growth and performing, including his original direction of pre-med, and how signal processing lead into recording and producing.
• Citizen Vinyl is in Ashville, NC.
• Worked at Echo Mountain recording complex.
• Discovered the need for a vinyl pressing business.
o The business model was evolved with the help of the community and commerce partners.
o Located in an old newspaper building.
o Coda is a new/used record shop. Also has album art and posters. Celebrating analog culture.
o Vinyl is played throughout the building,
o Also have a modular designed performance venue.
o 35 employees.
• He then took us on a tour of the building.
• He explained all of the machines that make up the pressing process, as well as their quality control measures.
• An example of mixing drums tracked to tape to the rest of the song from the DAW to get an analog sound.
• How to drop the drum tracks into the DAW.
• How he custom built the computer.
• How tape emulation plugins compare to real tape.
