Hello to everyone at MMD. I'm Mark Forer, a member of MBSI and AMICA
since 1980 and frequent visitor to MMD.  As a few of you know I have a
Seeburg E with violin pipes (now being restored) an original Wurlitzur
1015 Juke and an original KT Special.  Along with this I have an
extensive collection of "Hot Dance" '78s from the '20s and early '30s
and consider myself sort of an amateur musicologist.  My A and G-roll
collection is faily good, although not in the league of many of you
heavyweights out there.  My "thing" is to listen to the A and G rolls,
record them, and then look for the tunes on '78, and tape those too.

Along with a fairly extensive collection of early talkie musicals which
I also collect, I have amassed quite a collection of sounds. For instance,
if you really want to hear them, you can hear , say, "Tiptoe thru the
Tulips" on both the Clark 4X roll and the Capitol G roll, plus on Clark
and Capitol A-roll, as well as the original renditions off the Vitaphone
sound track of the '29 Warner Bros. film "Golddiggers of Broadway" plus
numerous recordings of it from various artists of the era. This goes for
a lot of song titles.

One thing I have found out over the years:  some of the best tunes on
10-tune rolls never turn up on '78, and vice-versa, and lots of times,
the g-roll version of a tune like "Fate" sound awful at most, primitive
at best, on acoustic '78s, while the g-roll version sounds definitely
great. The crossover value on all these tunes and all their respective
versions makes for an interesting variation on our musical hobby.

Many times (seems like too frequently) I meet individual collectors who
play one tired march roll on their machines and seem to care not one
iota for the rich musical heritage these time machines are capable of
producing.  I only wish I could afford to have a few more machines,
just so I could hear an even more far reaching variety of songs.  My
constant plea over the years, to know avail, is to exchange cassettes
of automatic music.  I really want to hear some good stuff recorded by
you collectors out there on Coinola, Cremona, Seeburg, and Wurlitzur
nickle-grabbers.  It's easy: buy two fairly good microphones and stands,
have a deck with two mike jacks, position the mikes at the sweet spots
on your machines with the doors CLOSED and record.  Then dub them off
on a double-deck dubbing cassette machine.  You'll have a fun record of
your machine you will constantly listen to in your car, and you can
share your machine with others.  I like this music so much I never get
tired of it, and if I sell my machine, I'll still be able to hear and
enjoy it.

Hope to hear from many of you soon, Mark.

 [ Mark,  Welcome to the group.  I hope if you get some of our
 [ subscribers talked into making tapes, that they'll send copies
 [ to Robbie and me too!     --Jody