Why Practice at All?

[noelekal]

Hmmmph...snort!!!

I'd rather do it the hard, old fashioned way. I mean ... I have my pride.

 

[JerryPH]

Hmmmph...snort!!!

I'd rather do it the hard, old fashioned way. I mean ... I have my pride.

… and dignity and skill!

 

[Zevy]

…and the biggest loser is yourself.

 

[stickista]

someone apparently figured out a way to improve a chinese made box
actually making it sound like a quality Italian instrument with error correcting
software (similar to the thing they use to correct the Vocalists pitch) so
no matter which note you play it autocorrects to the note that you should have played

kewl

a similar design buttonbox has been on CList in Virginia,
some madman gutted it then installed an auto-type cassette deck/radio
and speakers with a 12 volt power supply

Kinda like the “smart instruments” in Garageband.

 

[Alan Sharkis]

The photo isn't one of them, but this post reminded me of a friend (now departed) who built 'orchestrian' pianolas. They were fascinating - as well as having holes for all the notes, the paper rolls had holes for "violin on", "violin off" etc, and the whole thing was like an Edwardian MIDI system.

I know some of the instruments were fake - e.g. one had a violin on top, but the "violin" sound came from pipes, and the violin was just for show. But she also built pianolas with accordions. The bellow movement was definitely fake, but I can't remember whether the accordion reeds were actually hooked up to the pianola vacuum system. Sadly, she's passed away now so I can't check.

For a while, I had an intense interest in mechanical musical instruments, but except for the few more common ones, that interest never went beyond reading books about them. Occasionally, when my kids were young, I’d take them to an indoor amusement park where, more often than not, a man was restoring old band organs.

In those days, I worked as a teacher of homebound kids. They couldn’t go to school because of a temporary illness or orthopedic problem. One of my students had a magnificent Chickering baby grand piano. I asked him if anyone in his family played it, and he told me that his mother used to sing opera and she played it, but it stopped working when she plugged it in. It turned out that this piano was a reproducing piano.

For those who don’t know, reproducing piano differed from player pianos in several respects. The most obvious one is that they had electric motors running the exhausters rather than foot pedals. But they went way beyond that. A famous concert artist would sit at a very special piano that would create a paper roll, similar to the one that created master rolls for player pianos. The difference was that changes in dynamics were also coded and cut into the master roll to represent the stages of dynamic changes in the original performance. Also, since the master roll ran at a specific speed, changes in the artist’s tempo were recorded as differences in the vertical spacing of the holes cut in the master roll. When the rolls were duplicated for sale, they went into boxes that were labeled with the title of the selection, but also with the name of the artist who recorded it. At the customer’s home, the reproducing piano would then play the roll at the same speed at which the master roll was cut, and with the same tempo and changes in tempo and changes in dynamics as the original artist.

In the era of both player pianos and reproducing pianos, the medium was a paper roll, and the motive power was vacuum. Today, the medium is a CD-like disk and the motive power consists of solenoids. But the general idea hasn’t changed.

 

[Rosie C]

The instrument I owned was a very basic 65-note Obermeir player piano. It was from the era when rolls were made by draughtsmen and had a mechanical sound like the pianolas in western movies. It was a novelty but it wasn't difficult for a human to play better.

However, my friend's pride-of-joy was an Aeolian Duo-Art upright which was a reproducing piano - I recall the edge of the paper roll looked like a little bird had walked along it leaving footprints.

 

[Alan Sharkis]

The instrument I owned was a very basic 65-note Obermeir player piano. It was from the era when rolls were made by draughtsmen and had a mechanical sound like the pianolas in western movies. It was a novelty but it wasn't difficult for a human to play better.

However, my friend's pride-of-joy was an Aeolian Duo-Art upright which was a reproducing piano - I recall the edge of the paper roll looked like a little bird had walked along it leaving footprints.

DuoArt was one of three major manufacturers of reproducer mechabisms popular in the USA. The other two were Ampico (The American Piano Cbompany) and an import, the Welte. DuoArt turned out to be the most popular, since they were installed not only in the many brands of pianos that Aeolian manufactured, bur also in Stteinways. Welte mechaisms were considered to have the most nuanced control, but because they were imported, relatively few survived. Ampico made two models. The Ampico A was an earlier design, and the B, which came along later, was probably the one in my student’s hiome.

But getting back to accordions, many were featured in dabce hall organs, but few actually sounded. The accordion bellows opened and closed in time to the music, but the sound was usually made by organ pipes.

 

[dak]

Incidentally, there are mechanized instruments under the Tanzbär moniker that use solenoids (I think, there may have been punchtape versions at one point of time) for opening the pallets, relying on the "player" for bellows pressure. Since they use normal reeds for tone production (and the player for bellows pressure), they may be pretty convincing. But they probably cannot faithfully reproduce the proper tuning and detailed sound quality of diatonic accordions since it seems like a true bisonoric instrument (requiring the player to push and pull at the correct points of time) would be a non-seller.