Published on June 1, 1998       Email this to a friend

Web music played in 1890s way

 * Instrument maker uses air-pressure technology to hear
   arrangements from around the world

INFORMATION

Ken Caulkins' Web site is www.ragtimewest.com.

By Doug Willis
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ceres, CA -- Tinkerer extraordinaire Ken Caulkins hooked up one of his
player pianos with its 1890s air-pressure technology to a computer.
Then he logged onto the Internet, and amazing things started to
happen.

Caulkins' player pianos still have hundreds of feet of air hoses
connected to the piano keys, drums, cymbals, tambourines, triangles
and other instruments. But now they play an infinitely expanded array
of musical arrangements from around the world.

And that was only the beginning.

"At first it felt like a compromise to combine pneumatics and
electronics. But what it does is let you play the music (from the Web)
on real instruments instead of on a synthesizer. There is a tremendous
difference," Caulkins says.

Now Caulkins is building automated "orchestrions" of 23 to 42
instruments that combine modern computer technology and Internet
musical resources with the pneumatic technology of player pianos and
other automatic musical instruments of 100 years ago.

"Anything that can be played by hand can be played by air," Caulkins
says, either with direct air pressure or suction valve activators.
"The air drives everything you see here."

And there is a lot to see in Caulkins' factory, which sits just past
a wine grape orchard, across the road from a silo of hog feed and a
birdseed company warehouse south of Modesto.

Inside, there's a cabinet-making shop, fabrication shop for making
valves, levers and other specialized parts and a showroom filled with
complicated and beautifully crafted automated instruments.

Caulkins, 46, has been fascinated with player pianos since he first
saw one at age 16. He quickly figured out how to repair them. By age
19, he had started a business that has built or restored more than
8,000 player pianos in the past 27 years.

Soon, he was building band organs, calliopes, carousel organs and
musical popcorn wagons, and restoring old fire trucks and other
turn-of-the-century vehicles as parade bank wagons.

He built a player piano for the television show Cheers, a calliope for
the 1996 Democratic National Convention and band wagons or stands for
Busch Gardens, Opryland, Marine World, the Euro-Disney park and dozens
of other amusement parks.

But always, everything ran on air and used the original punched-hole
technology of piano and nickelodeon rolls. People like the nostalgia
of the piano rolls, and so did he, Caulkins said.

He had computer equipment to produce his catalogs and maintenance
manuals, but he never mixed the old and new technologies until an
amusement park executive asked him 19 years ago if he could
synchronize several player pianos to play the exact same notes at the
same time.

By the time Caulkins had perfected an electronic valve to synchronize
the air-powered pianos, the executive who wanted it had left the
amusement park, and his successor wasn't interested.

But Caulkins had found a way to increase the diversity of his
automated musical systems through the use of a Musical Instrument
Digital Interface, known as "MIDI," that captures and decodes musical
files from the Internet.

"I really hadn't thought about the Internet before. I wasn't familiar
with the Web until a year ago," Caulkins said.

"The piano roll has 88 holes. MIDI has 128 positions, and you can
link up to 60 together to get 2,048 separate simultaneous actions,"
he said.

Caulkins said that was enough notes to have an entire orchestra play
from what amounted to an electronic piano roll.

As a bonus, Caulkins said, anyone can scan the Internet for musical
arrangements they like, download the file, and adapt it to their piano
or whatever combination of instruments they have.

"The Internet brings virtual reality into your home. We can convert it
back to actual reality, with actual instruments, not a synthesizer,
performing the music," he said.

"It doesn't require musical proficiency," he said. "Anyone who can
cut and paste in word processing can easily sort out the lead and
accompaniment tracks and adapt them to their instruments."

About two dozen arrangements conveniently fit on a 39-inch floppy
disk. A hard drive can hold 20,000, Caulkins said. He said anyone can
scan the world for polka arrangements from Poland and Germany, for
example, or authentic Latin or Asian music from Web pages in Jamaica
or Japan.

"The search engine found a great 'Margaritaville' as background music
on a used car lot Web site. There's great Dixieland in Japan. There
are university music students, thousands of collectors who want to
share," he said.

His pianos run from $6,500 to about $20,000. New creations intended
for amusement parks, casinos and other businesses include a tropical
band stand with a steel drum, bongos, flute pipes and a dozen other
drums, bells and cymbals in a 10-foot diameter bamboo hut and other
custom projects costing $100,000 or more.

For a recent demonstration, Caulkins had his newest creation -- an
"orchestrion" with an accordion, piano, glockenspiel, flute and
clarinet pipes and 37 rhythm instruments hooked together with a Latin
drum unit and three pianos.

"Pick a song. We'll find it on the Internet," he said.

About two minutes later, "Rhapsody in Blue," as requested, was
playing. Then "Copacabana," to showcase the Latin drums.

Caulkins still has a warehouse filled with old pianos that he and
eight employees restore and automate. But now, most buyers pick MIDI
technology over piano rolls.

"I took a roll piano and a MIDI piano to an antique show, and I sold
the MIDI, not the roll piano," Caulkins said. "We're selling MIDI
pianos to people in their 70s and 80s. They search the Internet for
the old songs they love, collect them on floppy discs and play them on
their pianos."

Edition: WCT,  Section: A,  Page: 7
(c) 1998 Contra Costa Times

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