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Replicating Roll Labels
By John Phillips

As has Dean Randall, I've put in a lot of time making replacement piano
roll labels.  At present I can reproduce:

* Four different sizes of Universal Roll labels, the ones with a border
of alternate square flowers and rectangular bundles of some sort of
vegetation (woven reeds?).  Black print on green paper

* Four different sizes of Aeolian Themodist-Metrostyle labels.  Well,
actually there are eight choices here, because in the UK some labels had
the Orchestrelle Co. label on them and some had the Aeolian Co. logo.  The
Themodist-Metrostyle rolls made in the US had a different, rather more
florid Aeolian Co. logo and I haven't attempted to copy that yet, as most
of my rolls originated in the UK.  Black and red print on green paper.

* Several sizes of Full Scale Accentuated labels.  These are easy, just
a few black lines and some printing on green paper.

* World's Music labels, both for the top and ends of the box.  Cleaning
up scanned copies of these took forever.  They have one intentional
modification from the originals; Tasmania is now on their world maps, all
three pixels of it!  As far as I know there is only one size of these --
I hope.  Black print on bright yellow paper.

* A couple of sizes of Broadwood labels.  These were actually cut by
Aeolian in the UK, but were sold by Broadwoods as their own rolls.
Black print on blue paper.

* An only half-satisfactory attempt at a Hupfeld label.  These labels
originally were printed on glossy pale yellow paper with an extremely
faint engraving as background.  I've never been able to make out what it
was.  I think it's someone playing a small harp but I'm very unsure.
Does anybody know?  I've ignored the picture and done a label with
black print on cream paper.

* One size (the largest I think) of an Angelus Artistyle label.  On
looking closely at my roll collection, I've discovered that there are
many different Artistyle label types, as has Dean with his Ampicos.
This is a never-ending project.  Black and green print on grey paper.

These labels were all constructed on a Macintosh computer using the
Canvas graphics program.  Although they look pretty convincing I don't
claim that they are exact replicas.  Deciding what fonts to use was
indeed a problem.  In the end I used New Century Schoolbook where the
original had a serif font and Helvetica where a sans-serif font was
called for.  I too would be glad to know what the original fonts were
and whether computer equivalents exist.

About 18 months ago I bought a floppy disk full of scanned roll labels
from a company in the US.  When I looked at them I was disappointed.
They were just scanned in black and white and no attempt had been made
to clean them up.  I guess one could regard them as a set of starting
points.

I'm willing to share my label designs.

John Phillips



(Message sent Wed, 19 Feb 1997 10:51:18 +1100 , from time zone +1100.)

Key Words in Subject:  Labels, Replicating, Roll