MIDI-Matic Pneumatic Player
By Mike Carey
With all this talk about MIDI and the pneumatic player, I thought I would throw this ringer in! I have just brought into my shop the pneumatic player stack to a MIDI player grand piano! This is *not* a misprint!
The complaint was that the piano was making a hissing noise while it was playing a disk. Huh?! Well, I went to check the piano. Get This:
The unit is called the "Piano MIDI-Matic". It uses a small vacuum pump (like a Lee or Equivac turbine pump) to supply vacuum to a small pneumatic stack. The stack is made of acrylic plastic; the pneumatics are also acrylic plastic, covered in either Bilon or Polylon.
The valves are small 12-volt solenoids, connected to several circuit boards mounted on the bottom of the stack. The sustain pneumatic is a regular wood-type covered in motor-weight cloth, operated by 2 valves.
The circuit boards are connected to a MIDI (yes, MIDI) interface, which decodes the incoming note data, then fans out the appropriate note on/off signals to their respective valves.
Note velocity is not passed - the volume of the entire piano is controlled by the speed of the vacuum pump (fast=loud, slow=soft) which is controlled by an electronic speed control mounted at the front of the keybed.
Has anyone _ever_ seen one of these things? I _think_ it might have been made by the same outfit that made my "Organ-Matic" player unit on my Kimball organ. ("Matic" was the last part of the brand name on both units)
I can repair the unit no problem - the front seal tape has let loose, requiring replacement (which means tearing the stack apart).
If anyone has seen one of these things, or knows about who made it, I would like to know.
Mike Carey
mcarey@usit.net |
(Message sent Mon 10 Mar 1997, 00:26:07 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
|
|
Mechanical
Music Digest™ Archives
