The Free Library Music Department and Consonant Collective team up to bring lathe-cut vinyl records to the masses! 

A new program is dropping at Parkway Central Library: DIY Discs: Cut Your Own Vinyl Record workshops. This series of 12 workshops will run through August 2026. These workshops will be held (mostly) on the second Wednesday of each month, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the Music Department at Parkway Central Library. Due to time and material limits, we can only accommodate 20 participants per workshop.

Registration is required.

Each participant will make a seven-inch record, with up to five minutes of audio per side. Due to time constraints, you will likely have one side with content, the other side blank. This record is cut at 33 1/3 rpm. There will also be supplies to design your own album art on a paper sleeve.

Workshop Dates: 

• 2025: October 8, November 5, and December 10
• 2026: January 14, February 11, March 11, April 8, April 22, May 13, June 10, July 8, and August 12

We are currently sold out for our October date and have a waitlist. To get the latest info on availability, sign up for the Music Department's e-newsletter or Library Mixtape's club email list — ideally both! Updates about ticket sales will go out there first.

Find out more about this event series in this interview with Katie and Joe of Consonant Collective below. Haven't heard of Consonant Collective? They're keeping it real in East Falls. You can catch them sometimes at the East Falls Zine Reading Room at our Falls of Schuylkill Library.

Consonant is an arts collective based in Philadelphia that runs a record label and a micro-press. Its founding members are Katie and Joe, a married couple, who frequently collaborate with friends and co-conspirators in the U.S. and abroad. They aim to put out high-quality DIY releases that maintain a feeling of fun and whimsy.

What is a lathe-cut record?

We're borrowing some terminology from Women in Vinyl's Glossary of Terms (a great introductory guide to all sorts of vinyl-related words):

Lathe: A machine used to cut or engrave grooves into a vinyl disc, typically during the mastering process. It carves the audio data into the surface of the disc, creating a master copy from which vinyl records will be pressed.

Lathe-Cut Disc: A playable plastic record cut one at a time using a special rotating machine called a lathe, used mostly for small quantities, collectible sound recordings. 

Hence the name DIY Discs! The alternative route to lathe-cutting is pressing, where hot wax (also called a puck) is stamped into shape between metal plates. The grooves imprint onto the wax and tada! You get a record.

How did you get into vinyl (listening/collecting)?

Katie: I inherited a lot of my parents’ old vinyl records after my dad died. In a lot of ways, he had passed his love of music down to me, so those records were very precious objects to me, and some of them, like The Beatles, were things I had played obsessively just a few years earlier as a teenager. I went and bought myself a turntable of my own so that I could listen to them again, and after that, for several years, I got really into buying records I found at yard sales and thrift stores for about 25 cents, sometimes just because the album art appealed to me. It was a really fun way to find new music to get into, and I loved the warm sound of it coming through my speakers.

Joe: I also inherited my parents’ record collection — including a great old record player and receiver — but was less interested in their records than I was in what I was finding in thrift stores around 2008. It was a great time for secondhand records: the vinyl revival wasn’t quite in full swing yet, so I was finding loads of great records from musicians like The Smiths, Squeeze, Elvis Costello, Devo, Kraftwerk, and more, every time I went to the Goodwill. 

When/how did you make the jump into production?

Joe: Well, I was running a record label for a few years called This & That Tapes. After enough releases, I’d built up enough money to press a record for a split between Murder City Devils’ frontman Spencer Moody and Dead Milkman cofounder Joe Jack Talcum. I liked how great it felt to release a record, but I felt frustrated by the process of not being able to make them myself. Surely there must have been a way? Around the same time, I reconnected with an old pen pal, Mike Dixon, who happened to have pivoted away from running his own label to purchasing and refurbishing old record lathes, machines from the 1930s–1950s that were used to create vinyl records at home. I had to have one. I acquired a ~1936 Presto 6DSP from Mike in September of 2023, and it was getting such heavy usage that it only took a few months before we bought a ~1948 Rek-O-Kut Challenger so Katie could cut records, too.

Do you have a favorite record that you’ve made?

Katie: Once I was trained up on the machines, Joe and I dived into making tons of records, including many niche projects we dreamed up. We have mostly focused on music, but we also put out spoken-word records. I’m very proud of having worked with artists like the poet Ali Liebegott and our old friend and collaborator Spencer Moody, who always has interesting ideas for projects that live in the place where music and poetry meet.

Joe: My favorite release so far is the garage jazz self-titled album from The Blind Seekers. 

What’s your favorite part of the record-making process?

Joe: My favorite part of the process is that first disc that sounds perfect to my ears — there’s still something so magical about taking a record off the lathe and putting it on the record player and actually HEARING the music. 

Katie: I’ve really enjoyed cutting records live at in-person events because showing other people how the process works is magic — the excitement is infectious. 

What’s your favorite vinyl memory?

Katie: I think my dearest memory is of playing my Beach Boys records on my Fisher Price record player as a little kid. It was my first experience of listening to music alone and forming a deep relationship with it. 

Joe: I’m more of a casual collector of vinyl records. I usually hover around 100–150 in my collection. I’m not afraid of letting them go. But when I was younger, it felt important to me to have every record a few of my favorite bands put out. I missed out on getting a copy of Demon Days by Gorillaz when it was first released, and the secondhand market for the record was expensive and competitive. When I got my first full-time job, though, I took that first paycheck, deposited it, and darn it, I went out and bought a copy of Demon Days! 

Thanks, Joe and Katie! We hope to see you at a workshop sometime soon!

This program was made possible through support from the Lydia Eloise Seïbert Fund.