Category Archives: Blogs

The Vinyl Record Guitar

Blogs, gear, Media

I suppose someone was going to do it eventually…and here it is, a detailed look at the creation of a vinyl record electric guitar, as assembled by Tom Bingham. According to his YouTube post this project wound up taking several attempts before he go it right! Looking at the video you’ll see that it’s not a decorative thing–those are working pickups installed there…and it does get stringed up eventually, too. It looks pretty impressive when it’s all assembled, shined up and pretty. Nice work!

–Joe Wallace

Vinyl Blogs To Love: Vinyl Record Architect

Advice, Blogs, , ,

I tend to share about fellow vinyl bloggers based on my discovery of them–the first time I find ’em and get excited about reading them, I wind up passing them along here. Paul Rosenblatt’s excellent Vinyl Record Architect is no exception. I found this blog recently and got hooked right away thanks to his post detailing a visit to Pittsburgh’s Sound Cat Records.

It reads a lot like our own Vinyl Road Rage posts, so I was naturally happy to see someone else detailing their record shop experiences, turning the rest of us on to new-to-use places to dig through the crates.

Rosenblatt’s bio on the site reads (unintentionally) a bit like a superhero About Us page–by day, he works as an architect as the head of Springboard Design. By night he’s a vinyl blogger and definitely in love with LPs and has plenty of good intel on Philly record shops and more.

Without gushing too terribly much, I highly recommend this vinyl blog–my only gripe is that I wish there was 2000% more of it. But it’s a damn fine read, whatever the length. He seems to post a bit more frequently than Dust and Grooves, but the posts are every bit as enjoyable. One to be bookmarked, for sure.

–Joe Wallace

Not Just Another Record Store Day 2012 Report: TheRockFather.Com

Blogs, , , , ,

I ran across this amazing blog post from a new-to-me blog called The Rock Father. This post covers Records Store Day 2012, but also gets into the highs and lows of being a music-loving maverick working in the corporate hells of Wal-Mart, Super K-Mart, and Sam Goody. And when I say “maverick”, I mean it. Here’s a quote found on the blog post–a caption from one of the photographs:

“Nearly 100 feet of releases from Victory Records, Fearless, Hopeless, Epitaph, and local bands? How many Sam Goody mall stores had that? Mine did.”

The idea that a local Sam Goody had a local scene evangelist working to promote the bands is pretty amazing, and just goes to show you that one person CAN make a difference. It’s a pretty inspirational piece that does eventually get round to discussing Record Store Day 2012 (the image to the left is part of that story) and unfortunately has to end on a bit of a downbeat note–apparently there aren’t any true indie record shops near TheRockFather.com central.

RockFather.com founder James Zahn works in a variety of creative disciplines, and is available to bands for hire for music video projects, album trailers and much more. I haven’t had a chance to get acquainted with the rest of his site, but the Record Store Day post was great fun to read and I hope there’s more musing about vinyl, record stores, and indie culture there…

–Joe Wallace

Vinyl Blogs To Love: Bad Record Covers

Blogs, , , , , , , , ,

This totally bewildering album cover (ok, it’s the cover for a SINGLE, not a full-length album, but STILL…) come by way of the absolutely fabulous Bad Record Covers site, which has plenty of visual atrocities on display for your amusement. Behold:

This HAS to be some kind of ironic statement about the futility of war, right? Because otherwise it’s likely some kind of sick nationalistic drum beating exercise designed to whip people into a frenzy of…well, ok, settle down. It’s probably nothing aside from a really awful idea for a record jacket.

I hope.

The real point of all of this is to send you over to Bad Album Covers to get your fill of awfulness for the day. Some vinyl blogs might consider a site like this “the competition” but as far as Turntabling goes, there can NEVER be too many bad album cover detectives working out there. It’s a big, scary world filled with millions of intimidating discount record bins. Who could get through them all? Not me.

–Joe Wallace