•I don't have my USGS map at the moment to tell me whether the fault is a vertical thrust fault or a slip fault, etc., so the following information will have to be general. I am assuming that the entire weight of the carousel is placed on the center pole bearing. As I understand the posting the cent...

•I have often heard that some pianists do not like the feel of the extended keys on a Duo-Art grand and I have heard the action described as "lumbering." The touch of my Duo-Art grand certainly feels a little heavier or slower than that of my Ampico. Whether this is due to the key length or other th...

•A few points about Duo-Art regulation that I think should be stressed. The knife valve bushings in the Duo-Art expression box -- both internal and external -- must have no slop, otherwise the smallest increments of the accordions will not move the knife valve. The knife valve itself must seal its p...

•-- non-subscriber, please reply to sender and MMDigest -- [ Ref. 080210 MMDigest "New Music Roll Perforator", by Wagner Mello Hello MMD, I also built some perforators of this kind, and developed the related software as well. This software is "all in one", like Bob Essex's system (and, by the way, i...

•I really appreciated all your suggestions for different methods to reduce the sound from a player piano (and some of the funny comments) but in the end I came up with a solution which no one had thought of. As most of you piano aficionados already know, the lower and upper expression pedals dampen ...

•Gordon Stelter has responded to my comments and tactfully posed some good questions that I may not be able to answer except in a speculative manner. I think that most of us are fascinated by the designs of these mechanical machines. Indeed, they did represent some of the best engineering of their p...

•I am not interested in taking on another money losing project, but... If there are enough people interested who have MIDster punches, it would be possible to bring them up to date. There are several ways I can think of but the two most practical would be driving the machinery with either an Arduino...

•The music roll makers of the past determined the Tempo (in my opinion) not by the tune itself but mainly on how fast they set the paper speed across the tracker bar. If the bars in the music are, say, 1.5 inches long then, for example, that tune will sound "good" at Tempo 40 (4 feet per minute). If...

•I am not an expert on the history or roll perforators but I think that commercial roll perforation did not use the simple method of matching a take up spool in the perforator with the one in the target piano. This is because multiple sheets were punched and a simple take up spool would not work. I ...

•There have been many different designs for piano roll scanners but none seem to easy to build or to duplicate. I've also noticed flaws, the main one being that the scanner typically works like a normal player piano spool box and just winds the roll up as it scans. That makes the take-up spool accel...

•Regarding Steffen Just's request for details [230322 MMDigest]: The Hershell Carrousel Museum in North Tonawanda, New York, owns and operates the Wurlitzer organ-roll perforators, still operating from original stencils. It's a superb installation. Its setup works much as any piano-roll operation wo...

Welcome, Mr. Bruno Repp. You said in Digest 95.11.21 that you have performed analyses of expressive timing of piano performances from acoustic records and Midi files. Is there an efficient method available now by which can one can gather the statistics of the near-term performance timing from a phon...

My brother John is an industrial designer and manufacturing engineer at Hewlett-Packard in Vancouver, Wash. He reports here about his own experience with genetic evolution. -- Robbie Rhodes attachment: > From: "John D. Rhodes" > To: rhodes@foxtail.com (Robbie Rhodes) > Date: Sun, 5 Nov 1995 09:43:02...

John, I'm glad you enjoyed the translation of the article: Juergen Hocker, Horst Mohr, Walter Tenten: "Computer Control and Synchronization of two Ampico Self-playing Grand-pianos", in "The Mechanical Music-instrument", Nr. 63 (August 1995) p. 42-48, published by the Society for Self-playing Music I...

Hi Robbie, Thanks for your detailed response to my previous message. I have interspersed some comments below: On Sat, 30 Dec 95 14:11:27 PST Robbie Rhodes wrote: > to: ir004161@pop3.interramp.com (John R. Grant) > cc: rolls@foxtail.com (Automatic Music Instrument digest) > de: rrhodes@foxtail.com (R...

Hi Robbie (and List), On Fri, 22 Mar 96 01:05:39 PST Automatic Music Mailing List 96.03.21, Robbie Rhodes wrote: > > Subject: Force versus distance of a pneumatic > > Has anybody any numerical data on how the force of a simple "board" > pneumatic varies with the opening? I'm a bit confused here, cou...

John Grant, thanks for your reply. I think it was 30 years ago (!) I glued a nipple into a scrap DuoArt action pneumatic and performed some simple experiments. I mounted the pneumatic so the moving board would push upward, just as in a piano, and I hung a string from it upon which I had a stack of s...

On Fri, 22 Mar 96 16:24:12 PST Robbie Rhodes wrote: [Snip] > Now consider how lifting the hammer rest rail alters things. The > Soft Pedal moves the rest rail so that the hammer travel distance is > reduced to one-half. We assume that the travel of the key and action > pneumatic is also halved, and ...

David Wasson asked, "Why didn't Ampico, with precision automatic perforators, compensate the tempo?" Well, they did and they didn't! All rolls recorded before 1926 (when Dr. Hickman modified the process) were not compensated; after that date all classical music rolls and some of pop rolls _were_ com...

David Wasson continues the subject introduced in Digest.96.12.06. It's true, David -- the music tempo of Ampico rolls played on the Ampico piano slowly but surely increases. Certainly the clever technicians and musicians working at Ampico knew ways to correct the problem; my belief is that Mr. Stodd...