June 2007

Family Fun Parade (con't) / Seeburg Music Box

Much as with the previous page most other photos on the top half of this page were taken one handed as I was using my other hand to wave my flag in time to the music.

After the Family Fun Day parade ended I knew it wouldn't be long until the Flag retreat ceremony (I had recorded both in December without leaving Town Square in the interim), while waiting, I decided I'd go ahead and check out the train station, I like the trains and I knew there was something else I wanted to check out in the train station, the Seeburg music box. I have a little piece of audio of it i used on an earlier episode of my podcast, it was recorded during the Steam Trains tour I took in 2002, one of the very first things I recorded, but in that case it was just one song, and I still have never identified the song in that piece. Now even though I lost the audio from the MD from this part of the day you can still hear three full songs, as I had gottten a bit better with the video (mostly just by keeping fresh batteries in the camera), and I got three full songs in Video! Each of the three videos shows something a little different:

Video one - Rewinds at end

This Seeburg music box works on the same principal as a player piano, but with xylyophone, castanets, triangle, amd Mandolin in addition to the traditional Piano. In this vid you can see something at the end of the video that I missed at the time, the roll used here is a very long roll and does not have to be rewound all that often, but as I am digging for a coin to play another tune the roll does reach the point where it does rewind.

Video 2 - includes coin Drop before song

This Seeburg music box works on the same principal as a player piano, but with xylyophone, castanets, triangle, amd Mandolin in addition to the traditional Piano. In this vid you can see how the coin drop actually starts the machine.

Video three - includes pan around the station before the song

This video of the Seeburg has a short view of the station at the beggining of the movie to help put it into context. Like the other videos I took of the Seeburg the song played is one for which I do not know the title.

I have a theory about why I don't know any of the song titles. I'm wondering if perhaps this roll was a sort of demonstration roll to show off the Seeburg and was loded with songs that the Seeburg company picked to avoid having to pay royalties, and so were not well known, it's also possible that I just don't know enough of these older songs, there are actually a few places where there are passages in the songs that sound sort of familliar so it's possible that they are popular songs of that era after all.

Ironically although I took videos of the Seeburg at work the only stills I took were extreme close ups of a few of the details.