Hello All,

I'm Mike Jardin from San Jose, Ca.    Like many of you, my interest in
automatic music began  many years ago with the purchase of an old
player piano.    It was amazingly well preserved for its
age, and to this day continues to play well with only occasional repair.
My piano has the Simplex player mechanism which cannot reproduce
the expression of the artist.    However, I have noticed that many of the
rolls in my collection  have the extra "tracks" cut into the edges of the
paper to control expression pneumatics.

I'm familiar with the Ampico, Welte and Duo-Art type of rolls, but
I've never heard of some of the other formats.   I have several Themo-
dist, and a couple Angelus, Accentuated and Pianostyle rolls.     Does
anyone know if  these formats are  proprietary to one particular piano
maker?   They sound ok on my player, but the music is obviously not
being reproduced as the artist intended it to be.

A few months ago I picked up a 1906 Lyon & Healy non-player  vertical
piano.    It was in very bad condition  and the owner was planning to
trash it if someone didn't buy it.    It's really come back to life over the
past few weeks.   I haven't had the time to totally rebuild it, but after
many hours of  repairs and regulation it sounds pretty good.   I plan
to install a Pianocorder and MIDI upgrade kit into it during the
Summer.    Why not PianoDisc or Pianomation?   Too expensive and
too hard  for the hobbyist to tinker with.

Anybody have any praises/warnings on their past experience with
Pianocorder?

My thanks to Jody and all of you nice people.

Best regards,

Mike