In Praise of Outtakes
The cultural record hidden in the stuff we sweep away
Despite the growth of iTunes, Spotify, and other digital music services, sales of vinyl LPs have been rising for several years now. And behind each LP is a master disc — the original from which all the LPs will be copied.
The process for creating a master disc is like so: A 14-inch aluminum disc coated with nitrocellulose lacquer (a substance similar to nail polish) is mounted on a mastering studio’s lathe, where a ruby- or sapphire-tipped stylus cuts a continuous groove into the lacquer surface. This channel — about two to three thousandths of an inch wide and one to 1.5 thousandths of an inch deep — is the audio groove that a phonograph needle will eventually translate into sound. As the stylus tip does its work, the lacquer that’s being cut out of groove — scrap, essentially — is vacuumed up by a little suction tube and deposited in a waste receptacle, so it won’t clog up the lathe. (There’s a good overview of the whole process in this video.)
That scrap lacquer is called the chip. It looks utterly unremarkable — envision a clump of very fine hair, or maybe steel wool, with a deep-blue tint. But the chip’s nondescript appearance masks its conceptual appeal: It is literally the inverse version of the record’s audio groove, the yin to the groove’s yang. And since a groove is essentially negative space, the chip is the positive version of the recording, the physical manifestation of the audio. There’s something very pleasing about that.
Imagine if you could somehow thread the chip back into the groove. Would it fit perfectly, and then you’d end up with a flat lacquer disc again? Moreover, what if someone had saved the chip from the master disc of, say, Sgt. Pepper, or Nevermind, or whatever your favorite album happens to be — wouldn’t that be a neat collectible, or a cool thing to have on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? If you were a musician, wouldn’t you want to have the chip from your record’s master disc, just as a souvenir of the process?
“Nobody’s ever asked us for that,” says Bob Weston, who co-owns a mastering studio in Chicago and also plays in several indie-rock bands. He says mastering facilities, including his, typically just dispose of the chip. “Personally, I don’t really see the appeal. I’m sure I thought it was pretty neat the first time I saw it, but things become routine when you work with them, you know? I suppose someone might be excited by it, but I don’t know — I mean, what would you do with it?”
Another mastering engineer, John Golden, gave virtually the same response. But despite his and Weston’s lack of enthusiasm, mastering chip is one of the more intriguing examples of a waste product that offers more than might initially meet the eye. These items go by many names: byproducts, leftovers, leavings, swarf. I prefer outtakes, a term that implies a richer sense of storytelling possibilities lurking beneath the surface. Viewed collectively, they comprise an overlooked stealth category of objects and materials.
What qualifies something as an outtake? From my perspective, its creation has to entail extraction and/or transformation, and must also supply an element of narrative surprise, a sense of “Huh — I never thought about that before.”
Some outtakes have an appeal that’s largely notional, like mastering chip or, say, the lint generated in a laundry dryer (which is literally the result of your clothes eroding). Other outtakes have surprising practical utility and economic value, like molasses, which is created during the refining of sugar (and is sometimes mixed back into the refined sugar to create brown sugar, an odd case of an outtake becoming a “put-back”). Here’s a closer look at one example from each camp.
Practical Outtake: Sawdust.
If you’ve ever used a saw on a piece of wood, you’ve produced sawdust. And if you happen to use lots of really big saws on lots of really big pieces of wood, as the American lumber industry does, you produce a lot of sawdust. But how much?
“Over 99 percent of the logs that are utilized when a tree is harvested are made into either lumber or chips used in paper making, leaving less than 1 percent to sawdust,” says Mark Barford, executive director of the National Hardwood Lumber Association, an industry trade group. That may not sound like much, but Barford says it adds up to about 300,000 tons of sawdust per year — the equivalent of about half a million trees — almost all of which is captured and repurposed.
Sawdust has a long history of practical applications. In the days before mechanical refrigeration, it was used as an insulator to keep commercially harvested blocks of ice from melting. Nowadays it’s more typically used to manufacture particle board and charcoal briquettes, and as livestock bedding. Barford says many lumber operations also keep their sawdust in-house and use it as fuel for their boilers.
Conceptual Outtake: Ko-Rec-Type.
If you make a mistake while typing on a computer, you simply hit the delete key and the mistake disappears. But if you’re old enough to have used a typewriter (or stubborn enough to still use one), you probably know about Ko-Rec-Type — little rectangular sheets of white film that are used to cover up typos. For those who’ve never used a typewriter, here’s how Ko-Rec-Type works: You position the sheet of film over the incorrect letter on the page and then type that letter into the Ko-Rec-Type. This creates a white version of the letter that overtypes the original black version and effectively makes it invisible on the page, allowing you to type the proper letter over the white cover-up version.
It’s a tedious process, frankly. But the interesting thing about it is that the Ko-Rec-Type becomes a de facto record of the mistakes that were removed from the page. As the film sheet is used, it fills up with jumbles of letters and words, each of which documents a misspelling, a stray keystroke, or an impulse that the writer thought better of and decided to revise — in short, a collection of outtakes.
I wish I’d saved the Ko-Rec-Type sheets from my typewriter days. They’d make for a fun art project: “All My Typos From 1992,” or whatever. And much like audio mastering chip, Ko-Rec-Type has major potential for collector’s appeal. Imagine a display of Norman Mailer’s Ko-Rec-Type sheets, or Erica Jong’s, or Jimmy Breslin’s. (Okay, Breslin probably couldn’t be bothered with Ko-Rec-Type, but you get the idea.)
Unfortunately, the window for any kind of Ko-Rec-Type creative project may be closing, because the product is no longer manufactured. “They stopped making it about five years ago,” says Jay Schweitzer of the Gramercy Typewriter Co., a typewriter repair firm in New York. “I have a stash that I keep in my desk, so I can give you a couple of sheets if you want. But aside from that, you can’t get it anymore.” Actually, the situation isn’t quite that dire, because there are people selling old Ko-Rec-Type stock (often at gouger’s prices) on eBay and Etsy. Eventually, though, these supplies will be depleted and this outtake will be gone for good.
Do you have additional examples of interesting outtakes that deserve a closer look? If so, please send your nominations here. Thanks.
