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July 27 Getting the lead outWhile waiting for material and supplies to arrive from Player Piano Company, I have been disassembling the Ampico drawer and sketching the tubing interconnections. As the photos show, the lead tracker bar tubing was corroded through. All tubing has been cleaned off the fanning strips and tracker bar and the lead has been melted down into several ingots. All components have been removed from the drawer and now await restoration. The transmission and play controls are full of cracks in the pot metal, as predicted, and I am thankful for having been advised by Frank Thompson to obtain replacements in a recent eBay auction.
For a brief time, the treble end of the drawer was home to a mouse and she even stocked the pantry with one small sugar cookie. The mouse must have met with an untimely spring loaded fate as she never returned home to eat the cookie and there was very little of the 'evidence' one would expect to find in such circumstances.
Frank has generously provided some scans of past issues of the AMICA bulletin with relevant historical Ampico documentation. I have been able to determine without a doubt, the configuration of this particular Ampico player mechanism fits the description of the type 8 system. A cutout in the left side of the drawer for preventing false triggering of the OFF switch is only found in type 8 systems. The lost motion pneumatics in the stack and the right-side-up secondary valves are also important clues.
I performed one tuning on the Chickering piano and, amazingly, it settled on A440 on the first attempt. After a few days of hand-playing, a couple of strings settled a bit and can be fixed up quickly. The tuning pins seem to be adequately tight. We are very pleased with the overall tone and our daughter has all but abandoned the Milton upright.
Within the next few weeks, I should be making another trip to Bethlehem, PA. to return the most recent batch of scanned rolls. (assuming I do find time to scan them) While there, I will be paying a visit to a well known piano restorer in nearby Allentown, PA. Upon returning from that trip, there should be more news relating to perforating operations at the Keystone Music Roll Company. We should be punching a trial run of the unissued Paderewski roll during that visit.
A new custom built MIDI filer with external synchronization capability for use with a piano roll perforator is being tested. Many thanks to Julie Porter for her outstanding efforts toward making this happen. The device will be able to store large numbers of MIDI punch master files on a Compact Flash memory card. July 13 Chickering Ampico arrivesWhen the phone rang Wednesday and the caller wanted to confirm my address for the Friday 'delivery', I thought he was talking about the dumpster I had ordered for Friday. The dumpster arrived on schedule and I spent the rest of the afternoon commencing to fill it. While relaxing after the days work, there was an unexpected knock at the door. "There's a piano at the front door!" Although I wasn't quite ready making a space for the piano, I was still delighted it had arrived. The movers assured me there was room to fit it into our living room and brought it in. We left it vertical on my dolly until the player mechanism could be removed. As you can see from the photos, no time was wasted getting it disassembled. It's quite remarkable how much of the rubber tubing was still intact since nearly all of it was hard and brittle.
Today, we placed the piano on its legs and it produced music for the first time in many years. In spite of the time spent in storage and the stresses of moving, the keyboard action and tone were quite satisfactory. Naturally, several tunings will be needed but it didn't sound too far out while some of us hand-played it. I've noticed most readers seem to prefer the photos. Enjoy!
July 06 Unissued Ampico Paderewski Etude ready to punchSubstantial progress has occurred in 3 areas. 1, The unissued Paderewski Ampico B cardboard stencil has been converted to a Punch MIDI file and is ready to be cut on the perforator. 2, A new paper feed mechanism for the late Aeolian perforator has been engineered to match the pull-through rate of the original Ampico perforator. 3, A late 1926 Chickering 5'-8" Ampico piano in original unrestored condition has been purchased for use in Hyde Park.
First some history. The Paderewski performance of Chopin's Etude Op. 25 No. 9 was issued as DuoArt catalog No. 6097-6 in 1919 according to the Charles Davis DuoArt book. Among the small handful of surviving Aeolian cardboard stencils in the Richard Groman collection, was this Paderewski master with Ampico expression coding. Curiously, this title was never issued as an Ampico roll. Outside of Richard's small handful of cardboard stencils, no others are known to exist. It is fairly well known that after the merger, most of the late Ampico recordings were mastered on these cardboard stencils and punched on Aeolian machines like the one in last weeks photo album with the chain-driven tractor feed pulling the paper through the die set. Since most of the masters produced after the merger were unavailable in recent times, a special one to one perforator was built (by Harold Powell in the mid to late '70s) to function as a roll copier. It was built upon one of the original Taft Pierce Ampico perforators. It had a roll reader with a special tracker bar which would look ahead at the chaining pattern and, using some digital timers and logic gates, would try and reproduce the chaining as best it could. Many in the scanning community were puzzled as to why some of the Ampico rolls cut within a certain time period did not exactly match the older original rolls. Now you know the story. These rolls were not made from original master stencils, but copied from an actual 1:1 roll. Keystone acquired the 1:1 machine and it was decommissioned a few years ago to be converted for operation with a MIDI interface. Although the parts were not discarded, its not likely they will be pressed into service again. A new die set has now been installed in the MIDI machine and we're ready for production.
Now back to the Paderewski master... An original copy of the DuoArt roll was provided for scannning. Using Warren Trachtman's Scanimage to Punch MIDI converter, a DuoArt punch master was created. An emulated MIDI file was also rendered to give an approximation of what the performance sounded like. Next, using Cakewalk, a copy of the punch MIDI file was made and all control tracks were deleted except for the sustain pedal. Comparing the cardboard stencil with the computer generated Punch MIDI file, I was astounded by the degree of accuracy which has been achieved. Congratulations Warren! I spent the entire day yesterday comparing every single perforation in the cardboard stencil with the Punch MIDI file. It really is punch-for-punch accurate. While checking and comparing the note fields, I also manually added all of the Ampico expression codes. This task was made much easier by setting the snap grid in Cakewalk to 32nd notes. Doing this makes it impossible to place the cursor on locations outside of the grid. All events will start and end on increments of exactly 24 MIDI ticks. Another labor saving device was the measuring stick I made for quickly identifying the control tracks. The coding is definitely for the Ampico B system. Until this master can be punched, I don't have any way of listening to the Ampico version to compare its dynamic expression with the DuoArt roll.
Some observations about this cardboard stencil. This doesn't necessarily apply to all other similar stencils. Most of the note field and sustain track was prepunched. The holes are perfectly aligned, cleanly cut and round. Probably done on a special copying machine reading the DuoArt master. The DuoArt expression tracks were omitted. An editor marked-up the stencil with a blue china marker. A laborer would then manually punch out all of the marked areas. He would use a small round punch and a rectangle punch which was the length of 3 punch rows. You can clearly see the difference between the hand punched holes and the machine punched holes. There were more than a few manually added holes to the note field. Several editing marks were made in error on this stencil and crossed out indicating they should not be punched. I saw one error in which the laborer failed to notice one small blue mark at the start of a note and didn't punch it out. Looking at the DuoArt scan, this hole was punched and I corrected the error on the Ampico version. There is no doubt the Ampico performance is an exact copy of the DuoArt roll. I don't believe this stencil was ever run on a perforating machine because there were still quite a few hanging chads in the rectangular hand punched holes. These stencils were read by a stylus mechanism which would try and poke a row of probes into each punch row. If the probe dropped into a hole in the stencil, the interposer would move and allow a hole to be punched in the roll being cut. These hanging chads would have blocked the probes from moving past the surface of the stencil. The large tractor feed holes on each edge are spaced 1 inch on center and there are 6 punch rows per inch. The stencil is pre-printed with a grid of squares and the musical note scale appears on every sixth row. There are 99 squares per row and for Ampico B coding with 100 tracks, the sub-intensity track would have to be punched within the narrow margin between the left edge tractor feed holes and the last marked square at the left end of the punch row. Sub intensity was not used on this stencil. (Was it ever used for Paderewski?) The amplifier track was used briefly near the end. The left edge is the treble end of the scale. The 'cardboard' is .012" thick and is wound up like a clock spring. You could not unroll it on a flat surface without damaging it. I wouldn't say its extremely fragile or near disintegrating but it is a bit yellow and would crack if folded.
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