I think all sorts of strange stuff took place with cutting guys in the 60's, 70's and at th end of the LP era. Stan Ricker had some quite original stuff in his Mobile Fidelity cuts of the 70's. In earlier times, too much fanciful stuff was frowned on but every cutter had his "maker's mark" that he would inscribe. At Fine Sound in the 50's, most cuts would just have the catalog number stamped in the dead wax like early Mercury MG series. Same for Verve, Kapp and Grand Award cut there. This might have been a practice my father picked up at Reeves in the late 40's or Majestic before that. When Fine Recording opened up, George Piros was dealing with more lathes and more cutter heads -- certain combinations preferred by certain producers -- so he started a code of "PXX" with XX being a number representing a lathe and cutter head. He would hand-scribe his mark plus the catalog number and side a or b into the dead wax. John Johnson would scribe JJ. Once dedicated mastering houses sprung up, you'd see a stamp imprint of, for instance, "Mastered by MasterDisc". I'm not sure if guys at the pressing plant would further scribe the dead wax to indicate a replacement part or later replacement master. I would imagine a major label's mastering department, like Columbia, would some pretty complex codes to follow in the interest of uniformity.
Bob, how many cutters were there at Motown and what was your system?
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message ----- From: "Frank Wylie" <sfwylie@xxxxxxxxxx> To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2007 6:53 PM Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] LP pressing question