The SFX 7” adventure has been on hiatus. I was making steady progress on the automatic cropping of the labels, but hit a bit of a wall with the many things I needed to do basically daunting me a bit, whereupon I lost momentum. Then I got busy on other things and I’ve been needing fresh impetus to return to the whole thing.
So, when Brighter Day Records got in touch with a lead on a batch of discs for sale, it felt like a sign to get moving.
I was put in touch with Neil who had around 200 sound effects singles to sell. Although I was initially reluctant to add to the thousands in my garage, he sent me a photo of every record so I could see exactly what was on offer. I reckoned there were only about 13 I didn’t have, there were a a few that I hadn’t logged as existing before though. Somehow I convinced myself to buy the lot. There were significantly more which I only (only!) had one copy of and I’m still hoping for some kind of grand swap with a doppelgänger collector one day, so the more swaps I have the better, right? (Right?) But maybe I was just itching to get back into this project and used this purchase to redirect my attention back to it again.
Neil is in London but a stroke of luck was that his friend from Leeds was coming to visit soon. This friend took the records back home with him and all I had to do was pop over and collect them. I put the address into Google maps and drove over. It wasn’t a house though. In fact it was a mosque! Neil’s friend came out and introduced himself as the Imam! Well, I’ve never bought records like that before!
After logging the records into my spreadsheet it was time to have a big sort out. As well as a couple of hundred new ones on my hands, I’d pulled out a bunch of comedy and electronic sounds out for research purposes; plus Moz had very kindly donated 15 or so discs to the cause (gratis) and they had to be folded in too. Meanwhile, I still had a box of nearly 70 from an older eBay auction which I’d not collated with the main donation yet either.
Till now I was holding back from a full mixing of the various batches. Each has its own history and I was thinking of trying to preserve that. With another big addition coming in though I decided to give up on the idea as it was starting to get a bit confusing and unwieldy out in the garage. I mean, as much as you can wield a few thousand records!
With that decision made, a week or two back I sorted out all these additional batches of SFX 7”s to collate everything I have and make three sets. Set A (keeps), Set B (another big set, swappers) and duplicates (smaller set, 1 or more additional copies).
All this required was the steady filing of the records into each set whilst keeping my spreadsheet updated and the shifting of chunks from box to box as each one became fuller and overflowed.
With that done it was time for the next stage in the creation of a discography; except for one little surprise which I found during the sort out.
