Homemade 78 RPM Records

It's 1939... there's nothing to do. Sit with your pipe and listen to Jack Benny? Bah, we do that every Friday. Say! That new Capra movie is playing, and if we get there early enough they're raffling a new ice box! Sounds, all right, but I'm down to my last five dollars.... So then what? Oh I KNOW!!! Mr. and Mrs. Jones down the block just got a new Wilcox-Gay home audio recorder, let's visit them and see how it works.

In the 1930's and 1940's, many people jumped on the bandwagon of purchasing home recording machines that, in the days before magnetic tape for home use, recorded onto a blank record. Machines were made by a variety of companies, but the Wilcox-Gay Recordio machines were by far the most popular, and can still be found on eBay from time to time. These homemade 78 rpm records replaced the early 1900 Cylinder reproducing machines, which were harder to keep, crude in recording sound, and were primarily used as dictaphones in offices. These homemade records were known as acetates.

Acetates are records, usually recorded at 78 RPM, usually 10 inches in size, recorded on primitive home disc recorders, which were on the market during the 1940's. They have an aluminum metal base, coated with black lacquer, which the recording stylus etches (cuts) the groove into while recording. Most recorders had a constant-pitch feedscrew which moved the arm containing the recording-stylus across the record at a constant rate.

Since the 1930s, most blank acetate discs have been manufactured with a base, usually aluminum (although glass was used during the war years and cardboard for inexpensive home recordings), that was coated with nitrocellulose lacquer plasticized with castor oil. Because of the lacquer's inherent properties, acetate discs are the least stable type of sound recording.

The quality of home recordings (of the 1940s-1960s) is usually horrendous, as the machines themselves had many sonic limitations, and people usually had limited experience using them.

Acetate records for amateur home recording have blank labels, which are there for people to mark the title, artist (or "recorder"), date, speed, and whether the disc plays "outside in" or "inside out". "Outside In" means you put the needle on the outside like most records (and the needle works its way to the center while it plays -- the groove moves the needle along). "Inside Out", or "Center-Start", means you must put the needle on the innermost groove, and the groove will push the needle toward the outside while it plays. "Inside Out" records are quite rare, I have one back in Los Angeles, and when I get it back, I'll post it here.

Acetates are interesting to collect, however, since you never know what you're gonna get it can be a big gamble buying them. I once turned down buying five acetates of someones home recording of "Heartbreak Hotel" because they wanted $10 each and wanted to sell them all in one lot. They rarely have identifiable information written on the labels, and are usually impossible to identify the source -- who recorded them, whose voice(s) is (are) recorded on them.

I offer three home made discs today. If you're a fan of the music in the movie Crumb, you'll really enjoy these. They're very ragtime-parloresque music. The first two are instrumental, and came from a $100 lot I bought from a customer at work, and the third one was sent to me from my friend Jackie for my birthday and included as a bonus. The first two are piano instrumentals, and the final one is a band recording on a single-sided 78 cardboard record. The sound is crude on all three and the final recording being vocal was a little hard to make out, but after some work, I found out it was a cover of a Peggy Lee song, "I Don't Know Enough About You" recorded in 1946.



Here's the lyrics, see if you can make them out on the record:

I know a little bit
About a lot of things
But I don't know enough about you
Just when I think you're mine
You try a different line and
Baby, what can I do?

I read the latest news
No buttons on my shoes
Baby, I'm confused about you
You've got me in a spin and
What a spin I'm in
Cause I don't know enough about you

Jack-of-all-trades, master of none
And isn't it a shame
I'm so sure that you'd be good for me
If you'd only play my game

You know I went to school and
I'm nobody's fool
That is to say until I met you
You've got me in a spin and
What a spin I'm in
Cause I don't know enough about you

I know a bit about biology
A little more about psychology
I'm a little gem in geology
But I don't know enough about you.

The records are as follows:
Audiodisc
1. First Dance
2. Second Dance
-recorded by a woman named Mrs. Tennyson on April 2, 1950

RecOton
1. Naughty Angeline
2. Ragtime Cowboy Joe
-Also recorded by Mrs. Tennyson, but with no date. I can only assume recorded the same year. Both of these are popular songs from the ragtime era.

Wilcox-Gay
1. I Don't know Enough About You
-I have no clue who recorded this but its fantastic! I had another record recorded by the same mysterious person, but it was destroyed by our cat. The song was recorded originally in 1946, and the record that was destroyed was a rendition of "The Gypsy" on accordion. "The Gypsy" was made famous in 1946, which leads me to believe that this record is circa. 1946-47


Download these primitive crackly home recordings here

and now you have something do on your Friday night.