- I get to talk to customers, I get to joke with the crew, sometimes I'm running presses, sometimes I'm working with a client to help design their custom records.

It's a lot of work, it's really busy, I love it though, I do.

This is definitely the best company I've ever worked for.

Everybody's got a heart of gold.

(upbeat music) Hi, my name is Heath Gmucs, I am the production manager at Gotta Groove Records.

Gotta Groove Records got started in 2009; I started here in 2010.

I was playing in a band and a label that we were on had a record pressed here.

What I started doing here is packaging, and then moved over to pressing, just makin' records and showing up smiling every day.

(laughs) In a day, we're on average 7,000 or better records.

At this point, we have eight pressers running, basically 24 hours a day, like five days a week.

(laughs) It's pretty intense.

- Hi, my name is Ren Harcar and I work in quality assurance at Gotta Groove Records.

My job is to listen to the records that we make, to sort through them, pass and fail, and to communicate with our press ops on how to press the best records.

(upbeat music) The lifecycle of a record.

- What we're doing is basically plastic mold injection.

- [Ren] They start out as little vinyl pellets that we have out on the floor there, the pellets go into the hopper of the machine.

They get melted and formed into this little like hockey puck looking thing called a biscuit.

- Probably about 275 degrees.

This one happens to be blue.

Looks like we're running translucent blue material in here today.

Put onto the plates with the labels and then it smashes at about 1,500 PSI.

This is the most satisfying part of the whole pressing; I could watch this all day long.

It takes about 30 seconds for that record to be formed, heated, and then cooled, and then dropped on the trimming table.

- And then it gets trimmed and back on the trim pad, and then it gets dropped into a stack.

- And that record, you could pull off the stack and listen to it right then.

So about every 40 seconds or so, there's a record dropping on a stack from one of those machines.

After the records get pulled from the press, they go to quality assurance.

- And then where my job starts is to go out to the press, get those records off the stack, bring them back into my room, flip through them, you know, visually inspect all of them, listen to the most recent one off the press, and then I tell the press ops what's wrong with them.

(laughs) - Our biggest year was a million records; it was a few years ago.

We're getting close to that every year, since then.

You know, we have customers in Tokyo, we have customers in Australia, we have customers in the UK, like we have customers three blocks from here.

So, it's like anybody who wants a record, we'll make it.

The smallest run that we do is about a hundred records.

One of the largest runs we had was like a 30,000-record run.

- That's one of my, honestly, my favorite parts about working here, is we're doing these really innovative designs that like no other plant in the world really is doing, and you know, a lot of places are trying to emulate, so.

I knew that Gotta Groove was local, you know, "Hey, that's in Cleveland."

That's a cool thing to be able to say that, you know, this is local to us.

- You get to show up at the plant, pick up your record, and meet the people that manufactured your record.

A lot of the crew here are musicians, are currently in bands.

It just kind of brings everybody together even more.

It's just like another piece of the puzzle that pulls the art scene together.

- [Narrator] Ideastream Public Media received support from PNC Bank, which has made a home in the heart of Cleveland by investing in businesses, communities, and people, focusing on giving back as part of an ongoing commitment to the communities that PNC serves.

PNC Bank, national association, member FDIC.