Welcome to my blog!

Hello there everybody. My name's Ryan, and you may recognize me from my YouTube account as OldMusicOnVinyl1.

Now let's get to my history of collecting vinyl records.

2006

It all started in late 2006 when I pulled out my old Technics P-mount turntable and thought about fixing it. The big problem was the annoying hum sound that overlapped the music when playing a record.

I soon brainstormed a way to fix that problem. I decided to dissasemble the turntable and put some ground wire inside there.

Well, unfortunately, that solution didn't work. It turned out that the audio cables were bad RCA wires. So they had to be replaced, and once that was done, it sounded as good as new!

Most of the vinyls in my then-small collection were property of my mom. She usually used to play them on either her Lloyd's stereo system (I still have both of the speakers, her portable suitcase record changer, or the Technics I just fixed.

2007

Through the first quarter of 2007, my obsession with vinlys slowly started to grow. It soon grew big enough, that, on my birthday, I got the Numark TTUSB turntable as a gift. It was an awesome record player that you could use to digitize your old vinyl record collection. I have used in in succession throughout the year to digitize my records, and I still do that today.

My first hunt for records was at Kops Kollectables in Toronto, an excellent store with a wide range of genres from reggae to soul, and from jazz to dance music and much more. I also went to Second Vinyl... got some more interesting finds there including a Genesis "Trick of the Tail", Oregon - "Roots in the Sky", and more.

The best of all the record stores I have ever visited was Star Records in Oshawa! Over 100 thousand vinyls and counting, including:

-sealed vinyls
-new vinyls
-used vinyls
-7" singles
-coloured vinyls
-picture discs
-die-cut picture discs
-some records that you may never find anywhere else
-and MANY, MANY, MANY, MANY, MANY MORE!

I have come back to Star Records 3 times already (the last time was in 2009) to get LOTS and LOTS of vinyls.

2008

I think this was the best year for finding vinyls. On January of 2008, I went to the Salvation Army hoping to get some vinyls. And guess what... I lucked out with a few great scores, including a Steely Dan album, Al Di Meola "Scenario", and guess what I found along with them? Two Japanese laserdiscs documenting computer animation! I don't currently have a laserdisc player in my hands, so I hope to get one when I have time.

About a week or so later, I went back, and found BOTH the Model 1 and Model 2 Sega Genesis! Retro video gaming is yet another one of my interests... especially chiptune and 16-bit music associated with those great old consoles.

After that, I tried another thrift store for the first time. In this case it was Goodwill. I usually was able to get more at Goodwill back then compared to today (the mega-haul I had two Fridays ago was an exception). Lots of eBay sellers check out these stores daily, making it difficult for us collectors to find great oldies.

I went to good ol' Goodwill and Sally Ann LOTS of times during the years and damn, it surely was an awesome year. But the stock started to get low towards Christmas time with mostly holiday vinyls, and little more than that. Yet, overall, I still got some great hauls throughout 2008!

2009

As I said, things were starting to get more Christmas-y (even after Christmas!), especially in the Sally Ann, which is a Christian charity shop. They're usually closed on Sundays when I shop, which means that Sally Ann usually doesn't often have many great hauls (I only had a few). There are always LOTS of Christian records over there, and sometimes, a rare find jumps out at you and makes the trip worthwhile, like "Back to the Egg" by Paul McCartney and Wings.

But still I got some great finds at Goodwill, including what I consider to be my all-time favourite golden age rap album, "All in a Day's Work" by Mark Dee, even though I'm positive that 90% of the people don't know about him. I think it was a pretty overlooked album that should have been appreciated by many more people. And the possible reason is that it might have been overlooked, is that I don't think it really did sell well compared to the rest of MCA's artist roster in 1990.

I went again TWO TIMES to Star Records in 2009 to get some big hauls, including the awesome Spider-Man 3 picture disc soundtrack, a Be Bop Deluxe album on white vinyl (limited edition copy exclusive to Canada only!), etc.

And I don't have much more to say about this year, except that I (STILL) had many more great vinyl finds. Which would continue on to the next year...

2010

This is the year that I currently live in, and the year that I formed my YouTube account! After looking at videos of people spinning vinyl records for over two years already and hoping to join the vinyl on YouTube trend for such a long time, I finally decided to set aside the time and get down to it! The first video that I uploaded was of the B-side to the Shocking Blue's "Venus", entitled "Hot Sand". I made it a response to Spencer Morasch (known on YouTube as WABCRADIO77)'s video of his copy of "Venus", and in an instant he became my first subscriber! My YouTube account grew REAL popular in a short time, and, to date, has 83 subscribers, and 52 friends!

Don't forget: my record trips still continue to this year, especially with the HUGE haul I had in the last two Fridays. Eventually, I hope to put some records up for trade on my YouTube account. I'm always looking out for great quality duplicate copies of vinyls I already own. I'll be talking more about that in future posts.

Well, that's a long history. Talk to you later!

Ryan AKA OldMusicOnVinyl1