•I am a newbie here and may not know just the right words for some of the parts in this player piano mechanism. The problem is I have a Beckwith Recordo grand, from the late 'twenties, I believe. The piano is in excellent condition, always having been maintained other than the player. A few years ag...

•Hi there, This will be short, as I'm camping on a remote lake in Maine, running e-mail on our cell 'phone setup (at 2400 bps modem speed). (I just "do" standard e-mail when on the road ... while avoiding URLs and/or URL-mail (Hotmail, WebMail etc.) due to the air time costs and slowness of the syst...

•[ Mike Walter wrote in 110627 MMDigest: > The later Recordo systems did accommodate more possible combinations > than the earlier system, but if you examine a roll or two, you will > find a couple of things that are apparent. > > Almost all of the time there is one dominant expression hole > perfor...

•Craig Roothoff's H. C. Bay expression system is probably the early additive one I whimsically called the "A" type. There were apparently few of these made, or perhaps they just didn't survive, as I have heard of only a few of them. They were designed to play Imperial Automatic Electric rolls that h...

•Instrument Dimensions Needed for new Reblitz-Bowers book on American Coin-Operated Pianos and Orchestrions Our massive new book on coin-operated pianos and orchestrions made or sold in America is nearing completion. Together with a description of every style of instrument made by each company, we'r...

•Like many others here, no doubt, I have spent the best part of a day avidly reading the English text of 'Im Aufnahmesalon Hupfeld', which Albert Petrak has so public-spiritedly had printed. For new readers, this is a magnificent book, put out jointly by Leipzig University and Verlag Janos Stekovics...

•Karl Ellison muses on choosing rolls at a distance and says he tries to divine them. He should take the course I do on dowsing, which is the finding of things, or the finding out of things, using the intuitive sense and, usually, some kind of tool such as a pendulum. This is a big subject so I'll s...

•When purchasing new rolls from a music dealer, I know the *style* of music I'm looking for, and try to divine whether the arrangement will live up to my expectations based on the titles and short descriptions that you find in the publisher's catalogs. Sometimes I make bad purchases based on the cat...

•Salon music is definable by it's capacity to sound high-brow whilst requiring only a modest effort on the part of the performer. In the hands of a master it can sound divine (think of Robert Armbruster and Erno Rapee), but even in the hands of a reasonable amateur all is not lost. Picture the late ...

•My Marshall & Wendell Ampico upright had a squeak when I first got it. After lots of listening with my head in the bottom of the piano I finally located the squeak. It was from the wire rod that runs from the "diving board" to the spring pneumatic where the rod passes through a guide on the bottom ...

•Long term MMD readers may recall that I am a much-demonized enthusiast of silicone adhesives and sealants, having had extensive experience of them in the diving industry and experimented with and used them on player pianos over the years. However, I have not -- so far -- found any silicone compound...

-- [ From: James J. Cullen, Ph.D. * EMC.Ver #2.10P ] -- Hi There! You have a new member in the group -- me! My name is Jim Cullen. My wife Carolyn and I live in Las Vegas, NV. By profession, I'm a retired geology professor and chemical engineer. Now, I trade stocks for a living. My hobbies include e...

•Ein mehr Bier, Bitte! -- Featured on an early Peerless roll: "Down Where the Wurzburger Flows" Words by Vincent P. Bryan; music by Harry Von Tilzer (c) 1902 Harry Von Tilzer Music Pub. Co. Verse: Now pets may sing of the dear Father land and the soft flowing dreamy old Rhine; Beside the Blue Danube...

•Stuttering in Music I quote from one of my favorite piano rolls: Oh, Hell, Oh Hell, Oh Helen, I love you... and the next verse: Your Feet, Your Feet, Your Features are divine.... D. L. Bullock Piano World St. Louis [ Also the song, "She looks like hell in brown ("Helen Brown") ! [ [ Thanks to D. L...

•Interesting theme, this! Some ten years ago a party was held in Cape Town, and for the occasion the rich owner of the estate had purchased a player piano with a couple of Sing-Along rolls from a shop I was associated with. The piano was put on the balcony beneath which there was a huge swimming poo...

•While moving some recent MMD issues on to an external drive, I read your comments about "Bombs", in relation to German World War II music about England. Over thirty-five years ago, I read an interview with Norbert Schultze, who composed "Lilli Marlene", and he said that there was postwar trouble be...

•I have been lurking here in deepest Suffolk UK for sometime now, and I cannot include a entry without introducing my self first, so here goes. I am 37, married with two sons (11 and 14), a self-employed electronics engineer working mainly on industrial control and power electronics (CNC machines, D...

•H. C. Bay players were indeed cheaply made. I never figured out if those valves were made of hard rubber, or early Bakelite. We had a lot of problems with porous wood in those H. C. Bay player units. The pianos were indeed cheaply made, and many parts were not carefully aligned. I remember the late...

•Hi again, Just a quick update -- National Public radio (NPR) has rescheduled my "Anthem" interview (about recording and preserving 19th century and early 20th century American mechanical music) to be broadcast _next_ weekend, due to the fact that they wanted to play a longer segment than they had s...

•I am somewhat concerned about the reaction to the postings about the Duo-Art cross valves. I have viewed the MMD as an _active_ forum. If we taboo everything that is in the Archives, then frankly there is not much left to discuss. Every now and then, a subject does come up that has been discussed b...