How to Keep Vinyl Records Clean

Series Summary

Have you ever found yourself in the club—moving to the music, making eye contact with other young, hip people around you—and wondered how the DJ does it night after night? Entertaining a crowd of music-conscious party animals is not an easy thing to do; just a few false moves and you’re out of favor…and out of a job. A DJ’s job is to keep that beat seamless and uninterrupted all night long. You can tell a master turntable artist not by his highly technical scratching skills, but rather by how well he mixes beats and songs together, creating the perfect playlist for a night out on the town. In order to keep the party going, you have to keep the music flowing. A pop, click or a skip can put a real damper on the proceedings. As the DJ, you will be held responsible for any interruption in the party flow if you are in a nightclub or any jolt to radio listeners if you are playing vinyl for your radio show. The solution is to clean your vinyl before you play any songs off of it. In this free series of record maintenance videos, you will learn how to use commercial record as well as how to make your own record cleaner. Our professional DJ will also tell you how to store your records as well as how to clean the covers.

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Studebaker Hawk, and I'm here for Expert Village to talk to you about cleaning vinyl records. In this segment we're going to go into why we clean the vinyl records, of course, I'm going to explain to you why we want do that and I'm going to show you how, what to use, what mediums to use, explain to you what not to do. I'm going to be giving you tips on how to keep your, how to store them, and there is only a hand full of steps really involved in it, but you really have to make sure you do them correctly as to not damage your records and to get the maximum out of cleaning them. So you can watch these a few times and pay careful attention to the way I'm doing it and if you do it the same way, then you can definitely be sure that you will keep your records cleaner. So, in the next segment I'm going to go into why we really want to clean the vinyl records. So definitely stay tuned for that."