This Thursday in the studio was an exciting one as I had finally gotten the phono record player adaptor that Amandine had ordered. Originally, Tony and I had planned to use a bunch of vinyl samples for our Computer Music II EP and base our songs around those. We follow several artists who heavily sample older songs and repurpose them into really interesting beats, and wanted to give it a shot ourselves. We had a couple old vinyls that were kept in the radio studio (not entirely sure why they were there or how old they were) and tried to get some samples from those just to test the concept, signal chain, and recording quality. After trying various different types of cables, DI boxes with ground lifts, and different levels, we weren’t able to eliminate the hum that came from the turntable. After speaking with Amandine and doing some more research, I discovered that I needed a specific type of adaptor to get a better signal out of the turntable.

I was very excited when it arrived and immediately began messing with cables and getting a signal into Ableton. The signal was definitely cleaner but not by much, and in reality I like the aesthetic of the lesser sound quality, especially when using something as a sample in this context. Ultimately Tony and I abandoned this idea for our EP as we ended up making decent progress on other songs with other samples, but this has definitely taught us a few things about doing it in the future. Now the turntable sits next to the Synthi and is available for any student to use, should they be interested in attempting the same thing.