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Hi All:
Just picked up a Victor Record from 1904, The Boy and the Cheese by Burt Shepard.. It is Victor (7) on the label
Can someone explain about early Victor numbering and why just Victor 7 and not 07. What the term matrix vs pre matrix. Still fuzzy on this.
Early Victor Numbering
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bfinan11
- Victor I
- Posts: 192
- Joined: Mon Nov 21, 2016 10:49 pm
Re: Early Victor Numbering
I don't know the entire, complete answer here, but as far as I know, American Victor issues never had numbers beginning with a leading zero.
The main series of popular music (black label) records were:
1-Z to 3000+ Berliner Gramophone block numbers (1894-1899) which were numbered by artist and type of music, not strictly chronologically.
01 to 01305: Berliner zero series (1899-1900)
Then when Eldridge Johnson took over the operation, the Berliner recordings and numbering system was scrapped
A-1 to A-700 or so were the original 7-inch series (1900-1901)
3000-3205 were used once for the first Monarch 10-Inch records (1901)
By 1902, 7, 10 and the eventual 8 inch records were numbered together, from 1 to eventually reaching just over 6000 (1909). Generally, the same song and artist would retain the same number, even if it were re-recorded through these years, including overlapping the A-numbers.
Matrix numbers were assigned, separately from the released record numbers, one to each song/artist combination PER RECORDING SESSION, and were given out, for the most part, strictly sequentially. These are the numbers that you often see handwritten in the lead-out grooves or occasionally etched under the label.
The main series of popular music (black label) records were:
1-Z to 3000+ Berliner Gramophone block numbers (1894-1899) which were numbered by artist and type of music, not strictly chronologically.
01 to 01305: Berliner zero series (1899-1900)
Then when Eldridge Johnson took over the operation, the Berliner recordings and numbering system was scrapped
A-1 to A-700 or so were the original 7-inch series (1900-1901)
3000-3205 were used once for the first Monarch 10-Inch records (1901)
By 1902, 7, 10 and the eventual 8 inch records were numbered together, from 1 to eventually reaching just over 6000 (1909). Generally, the same song and artist would retain the same number, even if it were re-recorded through these years, including overlapping the A-numbers.
Matrix numbers were assigned, separately from the released record numbers, one to each song/artist combination PER RECORDING SESSION, and were given out, for the most part, strictly sequentially. These are the numbers that you often see handwritten in the lead-out grooves or occasionally etched under the label.