In yesterday's MMD Marc Elbasani mentions a technical problem he is
encountering in trying to make quality recordings from heretofore
unplayed rolls: the organ tracker clogs up with paper dust before the
roll is played through.

I know that to be the case with virgin rolls, even though Play-Rite
"vacuum cleans" its rolls as they come off the perforator.  It does
take a good dozen play-throughs before you can be sure a roll will play
from beginning to end without enough dust accumulating on the tracker
screen to block any of the holes.

I assume that the rolls Marc has access to are Malone's master set.  If
that is so and if they have not been played enough to clean the rolls,
what happens when Jeanne Malone uses one of those "master" rolls to
produce a new run?  Does she pre-play the roll enough times to clean it
or does she take the chance of punching copies showing the effect of
the blocked holes?

The Seabreeze Park set of 165 rolls (my old set) has been played clean
and moreover it has been perfected in ways both small and large that no
other set has been.  For example, tune 1 on roll 6615, "Carolina In The
Morning," is missing on all Play-Rite copies, but it is now present on
the Seabreeze Park copy, thanks to Art Curtze and Mike Kitner, who
produced a copy of the original from nobody-remembers-where.  This
would be an ideal set for Marc to use, but for being a continent away
from him.

Matthew Caulfield