[78-L] MAJOR RECORDS

[Michael Biel]

  On 8/13/2010 5:37 PM, Royal Pemberton wrote:
> Major records: Sound effects producer Thomas J Valentino Inc of New York.
> Often used for such things as dramatic productions.

Valentino had been the NY studio manager for Gennett which is how he got 
into sound effects.  They also developed an extensive music library and 
it is thru that they they still sorta in business as Valentino Music.  I 
can only get a home page now at www.tvmusic.com but if you plug that 
address into the waybackmachne at  archive.org  you can find their CD 
catalogs and even sound samples.  I used to talk to the old man at the 
NAB conventions and he invited me up to his office to interview him, and 
he also let me pick out a whole lot of stuff from the 78 stock room. I 
found some very interesting styles of test pressings. I do need to put 
an article together from that interview.  His two sons continued to run 
the company, and they told me that their first CD had come out when 
their dad was dying and he got to see it.

One of their specialties was putting together discs of music and sound 
cues for live productions of shows, and the first Major records I was 
exposed to was the cues for The Diary of Anne Frank when I was in high 
school.  THEY WERE LOUSY.  They had a mantle clock for the Westertern 
church clock tower carillon, and a hurdy gurdy for a Dutch street barrel 
organ.  I was forced to use that crap then -- even though I had real 
recordings of the tower and barrel organs even then -- but I used real 
recordings when I did sound for a local production of it in the 1990s.  
If you look at that home page they have now, THIS is the one show they 
mention, and they say they have a disc of cues for bot the original 
version and the new one.  I wonder if they are still using the old crap!

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 10:09 PM, Margaret G. Still
> <mgstill at bellsouth.net>wrote:
>
>> I recently bought several boxes of 78's at a library sale, including about
>> 3 dozen sound effects records on the Major Records label.
>>
>> My apologies if this has already been discussed to death here, but can
>> anyone tell me whom these records were produced for, and how they were
>> used?
>> What about Major Records - any interesting characters associated with them,
>> did they produce only sound effects records, how were the sound effects
>> collected, etc.?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Margaret G. Still