Third Man Pressing

[JonnyH]

https://www.facebook.com/niagaradetroit ... 6429969999

Oh wild! I'm not familiar with that band at all, but that's not a very good look.

[chaptertwentyone]

I can't seem to follow what the issue is though, what's going on?

[Jamie]

I think, but I'm not 100%, that the band claim they kicked out one of their founding members who then went on to release this record using their name without permission.

[Grimtale]

So any guesses on how many of these 'limited' records were made?
Grim

[Stl_ben]

So any guesses on how many of these 'limited' records were made?
Grim

Tons and tons. The plant ran all day Saturday pressingmore and those never even went to the sales floor.

[Grimtale]

So any guesses on how many of these 'limited' records were made?
Grim

Tons and tons. The plant ran all day Saturday pressingmore and those never even went to the sales floor.

So what part was supposed to be 'limited'? the silkscreen covers? the red vinyl? Sadly work put me in another part of the country this weekend...
The Stooges, MC5 and Stripes S/T are of interest to me, will wait until flipper tsunami calms down
Grim

[arewhyehen]

So any guesses on how many of these 'limited' records were made?
Grim

Tons and tons. The plant ran all day Saturday pressingmore and those never even went to the sales floor.

So what part was supposed to be 'limited'? the silkscreen covers? the red vinyl? Sadly work put me in another part of the country this weekend...
The Stooges, MC5 and Stripes S/T are of interest to me, will wait until flipper tsunami calms down
Grim

The only part about it being limited is that it was only sold yesterday at the Detroit storefront. I think that with the stacks they had in the pressing plant, this will be in the vault store the first Monday of March. There were a ton, even at the end of the day

[rsimms3]

I went to the opening yesterday, some observations.

The Good
1. Well organized. I"ve been to enough TMR events, sales, openings to know just how chaotic it can be but this ran very smoothly. Arrived 8am, 2 hours before opening and bought my merch at 12pm. I'm not sure when, but after the initial line died down a bit they opened a second line in the back of the building for purchasing just vinyl and only with a credit card. That line only took about 15 minutes to cycle through.
2. Purchases were super easy. 1 person took your order, 3 people filled it behind the register, and they had 3 registers to pay for your items. Not sure how you would have bought regular stuff in the store since the line was for the special releases but paying for the special releases went great. If you bought all the vinyl in a bundle you saved $30 (or got one of the WS records for "free")
3. I saw Swank, Blackwell, and a couple other TMR staff mingling quite a bit when I was in the store. Too busy for me to ask a few geeky questions but nice to see.
4. Plenty of staff on hand. I've been to TMR stuff before when it felt like they were understaffed, not this time.

The Bad (some of this is purely nitpicky)
1. They waited too long to let folks know if you just wanted to browse the store or just view the pressing plant you didn't need to wait in line. They didn't come out and tell folks in line that until 11:30am
2. No Jack. I didn't see him while I was in the store, watching the pressing, or during the tour. Not sure if he came later after a long night of celebration but was a bit disappointed to not catch a glimpse.
3. Plant tour too short. Literally 10 minutes with 10 people per tour. It was nice to be on the plant floor and close to the machines. I know quite a bit about the process so for me it was old hat. Learned more from the Analog Planet video (linked below) than the tour. Again, me being nitpicky knowing too much about that particular process. Would like to have heard more about the modernization of the machines, etc. than the actual process of creating a record. I wanted to ask more questions such as the decision for manual vs. automatic presses (probably better quality control if I had to guess) as well as some other questions. The bag of "goodies" was a single "goody" of a slip mat. A dinked center from a rejected record would have been nice.

The Ugly
1. I can't say any thing was ugly. Very slick, well prepared this date. No disappointments. I haven't listened to the records yet. The LPs are solid. I noticed some dimpling in one of the records but nothing like you might see from URP or even from GZ sometimes (for the pressing plant nerds).

As for the records, I am guessing they will be selling the WS color versions somewhere else. They pressed the hell out of those all day. Although they only ran 1 press with each record, they ran those presses for days or even weeks before the opening for practice and to build stock. Around 2:30pm they were close to running out of the Stooges release because they were running out of labels.

Rob Jones Posters, sold out by 12:45. Numbered out of 100. There were apparently some variants sold to the first Vault members who presented their challenge coin at the Vault Membership table. One appeared to be printed on green or glow in the dark paper, the other I saw appeared to be on metal or some other wavy color paper. They had more tubes behind the table but I didn't take my coin so I didn't bother asking.

Swirl Slipmats - They still had these, similar to the ones from the Christmas set. The only difference was they were coated on the bottom with some sort of black rubbery substance. Several of the ones I looked at had it on the tops too like it had rubbed off or something when they were stacked.

Something sort of buried in the articles and information is that Third Man will be providing cutting services. They have a Neumann VMS70 set up in a mastering room off of the plant floor (from what I understand). They have a feed from the front of the house into that room so they should be able to do Live to Acetate cuts in Detroit as well. They have a camera pointed at the stage they can watch on a monitor above the mixing board in the cutting room (see Analog Planet video). They won't have plating onsite based on the information the tour guide gave when I asked. It's a lot of chemicals involved and they already had to go through a lot of hoops it sounds like to install the pressing plant. I listened in to Swank talking to another fella that TMR received the first new Newbuilt presses in North America and Welcome To 1979 in Nashville received the first Newbilt plating systems in North America so there might be a collaboration there as well. They already offer recording, mastering, and cutting services so it's the next logical step to go straight from cut to plating.

VMS70


Rolling Stone Article -
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/featu ... se-w468376

Rolling Stone Behind the Scenes Pictures
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pictu ... ts-w468605

Detroit Curbed Picture Gallery
http://detroit.curbed.com/2017/2/24/147 ... ing-photos

Raw Interview with Jack from WXYZ Detroit


Analog Planet video (good video from industry opening)


Mary Sestok from the industry opening - Robert Sestok is the artist who painted the large mural on the back wall



Sad cake, screen printing

[Aquamarine]

^^ Bad 2: He was on the balcony during both Oblivians and Mummies. Not mingling, though

The person in front of me got the last RJ poster. I was very lucky to end up with one, thanks to fellow Swirlers.

[rsimms3]

^^ Bad 2: He was on the balcony during both Oblivians and Mummies. Not mingling, though

The person in front of me got the last RJ poster. I was very lucky to end up with one, thanks to fellow Swirlers.

Okay, maybe he was sitting far back or hadn't come in when I was in the store. Cool.

I was just able to check De Stijl vs the previous remaster/pressing, these are new cuts. Same TMR catalog number and etching but different cut. Previous ones had only the TMR catalog, the short runout message, and a U in a circle on side A. New ones have TMR catalog, same runout message, TMP in a circle, a number identification (probably catalog number from the plating company), and WG/NRP. Haven't listened to the new one, may sound a little bit different with a new cut but probably not by much since they were likely both cut at NRP on the same lathe.

[love_islander]

Thanks for the review Adam. Wish I could have taken the trip

[Kali Durga]

Great re-cap, Adam. Since I missed the chaotic store grand opening, I'm happy to be able to say I've yet to have a bad experience at a Cass Corridor event. This was certainly the most crowded one so far, but still absolutely excellent and fun and exciting. My one disappointment was the tour. It was the thing that I was most excited about, but I don't think ours was even 10 minutes, it was more like 5. We were taken to an area just between the window from the shop and the first set of presses, where the guide showed samples and explained, "This is an acetate, this is a stamper, this is PVC, this is a puck, this is an untrimmed record", told us the temperature of the water flowing into the presses, and that was about it. I was really hoping to learn more about the innovations of these presses and the plant design, and to see the Sestok mural up close. Hopefully they'll flesh the tours out a bit when they begin doing them monthly, because there's so much more they could talk about and let people see more closely.

And the records themselves are beautiful. If TMP maintain this sort of quality control, I think warping is one thing we will not see very many, if any at all, complaints about from this plant.

[woodisgood]

So any guesses on how many of these 'limited' records were made?
Grim

Tons and tons. The plant ran all day Saturday pressing more and those never even went to the sales floor.

Curious: Did these include the Stooges and MC5? The press release seemed to make explicit those two would only be sold at the Cass location.

[rsimms3]

That is a bit misleading. Records off the press had to cool at least 2 hours before being sleeved. Once sleeved they were boxed up and as needed boxes of each release were taken to the counter for sale. None of the special releases were put in the racks because they had a line just to buy the special releases all day. Today might be different but based on Grand opening process, none of the records from Saturday will be sold on the floor.

[Stl_ben]

Yeah from people that went on Sunday, none of the screen printed ones were being sold in store still on Sunday. The Stooges record sold out mid-day in store, but they took our names and said they would mail them to us, which I assume would be the ones that were cooling. That I would think would be the rarest of all the records as they didn't get the plates for it till late friday night.

But overall I completely agree with Simms review. Great day overall, really pretty crap tour was the only sore thumb to me. The lady that was doing our tour even after getting a couple questions admitted she didn't work for TMR so didn't know much and was basically just a for the day tour guide.