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MMD > Archives > April 2010 > 2010.04.22 > 04Prev  Next


Strange Piano Roll Term: "Full Compass"
By Julian Dyer

This is a British roll from the Perforated Music Roll Company in
London.  "Accentist" was their term for theme accenting, and is found
stamped on the back of all such rolls they produced, regardless of the
brand name the roll was sold under.  Why they bothered to do this is
quite another matter, given that snakebite perforations in the roll are
rather more obvious than a rubber stamp on the reverse of the paper.

"Full Compass" is just a way of saying 88-note, a fact which mattered
quite a lot to a company also selling 65-note rolls.  Aeolian (in the
UK at least) used "full scale" for this; hence PMRCo chose to adopt a
different term.  If you think of "full compass" as "all-encompassing"
in terms of playing every note on the piano, and hence every note in
the music, it seems a pretty good description, and something an
advertising copywriter would come up with.  By comparison, "full scale"
or "88-note" are much more piano-technical terms that presumably came
from those who actually made the rolls.

Julian Dyer


(Message sent Thu 22 Apr 2010, 18:10:43 GMT, from time zone GMT+0100.)

Key Words in Subject:  Compass, Full, Piano, Roll, Strange, Term

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