Here I am, pleased that I have a much better database than I had previously. I’ve removed a load of silly guesswork on where records should be. I’ve fixed a plain wrong pair from Mike’s Collection. I still need to add all the new ones I’ve found, assuming they are real, to really get all the juice out of the 1985 catalogue scan, but I have another issue. There are still quite a lot of entries which have no name. I got most of them from Mike’s Collection – thanks Mike! – and yet there are still gaps, especially where I added them by just throwing in the catalogue numbers quickly, leaving that job to future me. Thanks past me!
The sfx discs usually have a name or title on each side. To begin with though I just want a something close to the actual title for the front side. It’s a minimum level of completeness I can achieve until I can add the real text from the actual records. So, let’s fill these known records with the unknown names!
Taking my scan of the 1985 BBC Sound Effects Catalogue I can find all the records I have in the database with no title. The scan is a mess remember, so I have to manually search the actual catalogue pages near where the numbers are found. And that’s what I did. It’s a bit tedious but I only had, erm 150+ to do. Hmm. Well, I started with the mono EC catalogue numbers and that’s more like 40.
Alright, it’s not that exciting to do, but I found some interesting examples. The twelve inch records design as stage props (EC 81E and 81D) are not in my collection. One of those is for playing at 78RPM. EC 81A is just ‘shellac disc noise‘. Yes, a record with a record of a record’s surface noise. I found EC 45P which is a Post Office Computer playing noughts and crosses, in 1971 (stitch that WOPR!), and EC 46E, which is the bell of Cologne cathedral, as used on Death & Horror Sound Effects (REC 269, 1977).
Then I had a couple of missing ones. Well, one. I originally thought there were a few, but in the previous part I realised 195M and N were not actually in reality in my actual collection. Grrr. So, a single record, not in the 1985 catalogue. Which is interesting for its absence. But where to find its title without a faff about in a cold garage?
I started by Googling the catalogue number EC 60A and whaddya know? There it was on the Pro-Sounds Effects Library website. Now, that was a reminder of something I found a year ago. You can get all* the BBC Sound Effects from Pro-Sound, much like the BBC Rewind’s own SFX website https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk. The nice thing for me about the Pro Sounds website though was that you can download a list of all the sounds. Very handy! Even nicer is that a large number of the effects have a catalogue number in the description! So, using the Pro Sounds catalogue is another possible source of finding the names catalogue number, or indeed, of hitherto unknown records!
I opened the spreadsheet of their database which I’d made for easier handling and quickly located the untitled record. EC 60C German Crowd Exterior.
In all, 9659 effects in the Pro Sounds catalogue have EC catalogue references, although many are really stereo ECS numbers. From the mono EC numbers there are 7344 effects. Anyway, what’s in there is a for another time, but I will say this is a kind of Rosetta stone for mapping effects to records.
Now, EC 60C is not in the 1985 catalogue at all. Once I knew what it was I could go and check for German crowds. It definitely isn’t there though. But I did go and find it in my collection.
And, what about that matrix number? Ah, yes, it must be after 1985. Surely. It is not! The matrix number of 118638 (on the front side) means it’s circa 1966. You’ll never guess what though! That is the year which the Pro Sounds database claims it is from. Cor!
The other EC 60 records are in the catalogue. A, B and D are other German scenes. A gasthof, more crowds and traffic. I guess it just didn’t work out for EC 60C.
That nailed all the unnamed mono discs. Next for the over one hundred stereo discs. Now though, I don’t necessarily need to go through the 1985 catalogue manually as I have remembered the Pro Sounds database. I just need to match my list up with entries in that list. If they were in there. Using the Conditional formatting option in Excel I found that following catalogue numbers were not in the Pro Sounds database.
2T10, 2T17, 2T18, 2T20, 2T21, 2T22
So, maybe, just maybe, these are not in the digital sound effects libraries. Or perhaps they simply don’t exist and I’ve added them to my list in error. Ugh.
Yes, only 2T10 is really in my collection. Trains: Diesel Multiple Unit
The other untitled ECS discs were effectively duplicates of other records due to typos. They should have been S not T. Looking through box I had S17, S21 and then the Ts, but then they went back to S’s. So S17,18,20,21,22 are all now back in order and I had an additional 2S17 and 2S21.
In the end I did get the names of 60 untitled ECS records. All the named discs are now waiting to be added to my database and appear on bbcrecords.co.uk/sfx/sfx.php. I’ve added EC 60C and ECS 2T10 already though. Next: Those supposedly new catalogue numbers.