Making Records: Blue Sprocket Pressing Plant Tour

Harrisonburg, Virginia, is a city of 52,000 in the Shenandoah Valley, about two hours from Washington, DC. Roughly an hour from Charlottesville, Virginia, where you can visit Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, and another Jeffersonian attraction, the University of Virginia, Harrisonburg itself is home to two well-established colleges: James Madison University and Eastern Mennonite University. James Madison is a public university of over 21,000 students, while EMU is private and has about 1200 students.

Harrisonburg is also where you’ll find Blue Sprocket Pressing, which has been making LPs since 2018. Blue Sprocket’s name is derived from the Blue Ridge Mountains, which border the Shenandoah Valley and the region’s enthusiastic and sizable bicycling community. The company’s website says its owners and staff are “musicians, technicians, record producers (literally), and vinyl collectors.” Chris Jackson and Logan Stoltzfus had a recording studio, also named Blue Sprocket, in Harrisonburg, and their clients “experienced long lead-times, and often missed deadlines when trying to get their music on vinyl.” And they often “weren’t thrilled” with the end product.

Stoltzfus and Jackson started researching how to build and run a pressing plant in 2017. “We were working on the process before we started building it out,” Stoltzfus told me. “As we were talking to people and getting started in the process, everybody you know tells you it’s going to take longer than you think.” Jackson added: “It took the better part of a year from concept to first record off the press.”

In only four years, Blue Sprocket Pressing has developed a strong enough reputation for quality work that it has pressed LPs by John Prine, Alanis Morissette, The Lemonheads, and Edie Brickell. It has done work for the indie jazz label Mack Avenue Records, including some Record Store Day titles. One notable recent pressing was a blue-and-black swirl release of Sturgill Simpson’s Cuttin’ Grass, Vol. 2: The Cowboy Arms Sessions for the Vinyl Me, Please record club.

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