Clint Holley with one of his mastering lathes.
Clint Holley has two studios in Bristol, Virginia: Well Made Music and The Earnest Tube.
“My studio is called Well Made Music. We produce master recordings for the vinyl record industry. I started collecting vinyl records around the age of 10. I used money made from odd jobs to buy records people were getting rid of in the 1980s. I started reading the album jackets and learned words like ‘engineer’ and ‘producer.’ I was fascinated.
“My first studio was put together to record my own music in Cleveland, Ohio. I recorded some friends also. By the year 2010, it was clear that it was a hard way to make money. I was working in a music club called The Beachland Ballroom and somebody posted a flyer about a record pressing plant opening in Cleveland. I contacted them and while they did not hire me, I went and saw a piece of gear with the owner called a mastering lathe. They are used to make the ‘master’ for a vinyl record. That piece of gear tied together my love of music and vinyl records, and my wife encouraged me to find one and buy it. I did and today I own four mastering lathes made by the Neumann Company.
“The Earnest Tube is a recording studio in the same fashion as the 1927 Bristol Sessions. It’s a living history studio. We used the knowledge from Well Made to create The Earnest Tube,” Holley says.
The Earnest Tube also has a relationship with The Birthplace of Country Music Museum. Groups, such as bus tours, can (for an additional fee) bring their group to The Earnest Tube and see a session. Holley brings in an artist, they view the recording session, he explains how it works and then they listen to the recording.
“High school kids to octogenarians come to The Earnest Tube. It’s a cool experience, and they share a love of vinyl records. I think vinyl has come back for a couple of reasons. People like to collect things and buying a record gives them a feeling of ownership. It’s also a tactile thing. You get the record, the album cover and liner notes. These are things you don’t get on your phone. It’s also interactive, putting the record on, flipping it over. It’s just more fun,” he says.
Well Made Music is vinyl centric and does one job. They create masters for the vinyl record industry. When Holley started, there was only 30 to 40 people in the country who do what he does. “Today the number is a bit higher, but we are still a rare breed. We stay in close contact with our colleagues and monitor advancements in digital to analog conversion and software that has the ability to streamline our work. Disc cutting is over 100 years old, so it really is an odd blend of very old and very new technology,” he says.
He and his crew have worked on many Grammy-winning projects by people like Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle and Bela Fleck. They have also cut masters for up- and-comers like 49 Winchester and Amythyst Kiah.
Recording studio engineers can work closely with musicians to bring their creative vision to life. “It’s always good to have another person give input into your project and vision. Often times, people get so down a wormhole with their projects they cannot make unbiased decisions anymore because they have so much personally invested into the project.
“Musicians have a hard time making ends meet due to low paying gigs and poor payouts from streaming. Therefore, they don’t have budgets for their projects meaning they often don’t want to pay for our services. We continue to work harder to find labels and clients with good budgets and hope that the everyday musician finds a better way to sustainable creativity.
“We try to offer unbiased feedback at all levels of production and try to offer solutions that make sense from a technical and budgetary perspective
“The gear we use (mastering lathes - specifically Neumann VMS70) has not been replaced by home studio gear yet. Home recording does impact us in other ways. Often time the music created at home by artists needs extra guidance to sound good on a record. We spend a lot of time educating people about the vinyl format and what the ‘rules’ are. A lot of home recordings are artists making a record for the first time, and we try to be a sounding board for their ideas and concerns.
“We hope that the vinyl format sees a sustained, long-term resurgence, and that artists can leverage the sales of a physical product into a more sustainable path forward for artists,” Holley says.
For more information, visit www.wellmademusic.net.
