VMP Magazine

Now more than ever, vinyl is making a comeback. It hadn’t ever really left, with collectors around the globe keeping the wax alive between plastic sleeves, delicately rotating records across setups curated just as carefully as the vinyl itself. Still, the music format had never quite experienced the kind of explosion it’s experiencing now. While it remained the governing form of music for nearly a century, cassettes and CDs overcame vinyl in sales as we entered the late 1980s. For a while, it seemed as though vinyl was simply at its end – one of the few physical reminders that music wasn’t just an auditory experience, but a tactile one, too.

Graphics by Julia Fletcher

The process of buying a turntable can feel like buying a car. While it’s a vehicle for practical use, you still want to enjoy riding the soundwaves. Perhaps, like moving on from your first car, you want to move on from the basics of your turntable and upgrade its pieces as you become even more invested in the hobby.

Knowing where to start, without a doubt, is an arduous task. Beginning with the basics — knowing the anatomy of your turntable and its functions — can ease you into the process, especially when understanding how the pieces work together to affect your sound quality.

We’ve done a bit of the dirty work and broke down and illustrated the parts of a turntable to give you a head start on figuring out how to elicit the best sound possible from your machine.

Welcome to VMP’s series, Two Turntables and a Mic, where we’ll guide you through the ins and outs of vinyl DJing, or turntablism. Today, we’re taking a short look at its history: where the term came from, the first live DJ event, the role of Jamaica’s sound systems in remixing and how hip-hop came to embody vinyl DJing.

Photos by Elijah Lee Taylor

In Inside Listening, a new series from VMP, we’ll be holding up a lens to the sacred listening spaces of various vinyl collectors from all over, one collection at a time.

In honor of his new album, Quietly Blowing It, which is out June 25, we took a visual tour through the personal listening space of MC Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger), as Taylor gave us a track-by-track breakdown of the new record.