One needs to vacuum the tracker bar once in a while. Chads can mess up an election and clog a note on a player. Chain holes (long notes) cause the roll of paper to rip if not handled well, so little webs are left in newer rolls which the player doesn’t respond to. The live punch was very loud, think dot matrix printer including the stuttering motion of the roll. The punch strikes when the paper isn’t moving, then the paper moves a small amount. Posted in Musical Hacks Tagged documentary, piano roll, player piano, retrotechtacular, video Post navigation Of course, we’ve seen our share of hacks that read piano rolls - here and here and even here - the physical machines, with their pulleys and wheels and wheezy pneumatic systems, are still (retro-)cool enough in their own right. If you like music, or old computers, or both, this video is a gem. Modern four-axis CNC machines, eat your heart out. Indeed, their production setup seems to be sixteen simultaneous punches driven by one Apple. In the mid-80s, the QRS company had computer piano-roll-editor software up and running on its Apple ][s. And of course, rolls could be cut by hand with a hole punch.īut technology has not left the paper piano roll alone. It’s a marvel of turn-of-the-last-century engineering. But another machine lets a technician play through the piece at whatever tempo he (in this case) desires, and has hold levers that leave some notes sustained. Some are made live at a recording piano which scrapes a rolling carbon-copy wheel to make scratches that will later be transferred to punches in production. But did you ever think of how the rolls are made? Player pianos are cool enough, with their “draw bar” pulling air through the holes in the paper roll as it goes by, and pneumatically activating the keys. sent us in this marvelous video (embedded below) that provides a late-80s peek inside the works of QRS Records, and the presenter seems to be loving every minute of it. The technology behind them, both on the player and the recorder side, is simply wonderful. They were mass-produced from 1896 to 2008, and you can still get some made today, although they’re a specialty item. Piano rolls are the world’s longest-lasting recording medium, and its first digital one.
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