Daisy-wheel Printer for Lyrics
By Colin Hinz
Craig Brougher wrote in Digest 961219:
> The old-fashioned way of putting words on rolls [by stencil] seems to
> be, so far, the only way that anybody can do it. ... as a result, all
> the great old popular music of the teens, twenties, and thirties is
> still lost -- that is, if the words are lost.
Craig, I hear you. Fortunately, the lyrics to many songs are _not_ lost forever, thanks to continuing efforts to preserve 78-rpm recordings. However, your point still stands: a roll without the words is incomplete.
(Similarly, phono recordings of automatic musical instruments playing word rolls without a vocalist are also missing something important. Thus, my otherwise enjoyable Biograph LP's of famous old rolls are lacking in this regard.)
A few years ago I got a rubber-stamp set as a gift, which to me was a solution in search of a problem. I thought of making a king-sized daisy- wheel printer using the stamps, but I had nothing to _use_ it for, hence, no progress. Now I realize that it could be possible to print words on piano rolls, with the addition of a roll feed mechanism and a means of synchronizing the roll with the printing operation (a shaft encoder on the take-up spool, presumably).
However, this talk of waxed paper rolls is troubling. Yes, it is true, I've never seen such a thing. I guess that means I'm rather out of touch. Oh well, so it goes. Still, it sounds like a project worth working on, when working on the Karn reaches a lull.
Colin Hinz
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(Message sent Fri 20 Dec 1996, 20:53:55 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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