This is my recollection of Ron's story: He had been fooling with the lathe and figured out how to stop the screw action that pushes the cutting head from the outside to the inside of the platter. Then cutting a locked groove is a matter of tuning the source matterial to exactly 133 1/3 bpm, dropping the cutting head in the groove and lifting it up again after exactly one rotation.
Jeff came in to cut "The Rings Of Saturn" and as was Ron's method, he set up the cutter with a scratch lacquer, to cut part of a track in order to see how it sounds played back. Without telling Jeff, Ron cut a lock groove out of one of the tracks and put it on the turntable while Jeff wasn't paying close attention. The loop played for a minute or so before Jeff's eyes got big, and he said "wh wh what the hell Ron? H H H How did you do that?!" It's funnier if A) you've heard Jeff talk and B) you hear it from Ron, imitating Jeff. Now the fact is that locked grooves weren't a Ron Murphy invention -- every run-out groove is a lock groove, and the Beatle's "Sargeant Pepper" has a lock groove cut in the run-out groove of the first English pressing. But it may be true that Ron started it in the realm of dance records. Anyway, that's my recollection of Ron's story. He definitely had a million of them, especially about the competetiveness of the early Detroit artists. The fact is this, though: In the late 80s, getting your own lacquers cut and plated, and then pressed locally, was a completely new phenomenon. Ron Murphy was there in Detroit, and his help and encouragement with young artists making their first records was a big part of the development of the techno scene. His experience, going back to the Motown 60s was important as well. He was the uninterrupted institutional memory of Detroit as a center of unique musical creativity. There are plenty of people who can cut records, but absolutely no one that cut all the records that Ron cut. On Jan 13, 2008 3:24 PM, Frank Glazer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "Ron's impression of Jeff > Mills sputtering in reaction to the lock groove on The Rings Of > Saturn." > > i'm not familiar with this story... what happened? > >
