Introduction and Special Areas of Interest
By Bill Wolverton
Dear Jody Kravitz and mail list subscribers:
In the way of a formal-informal introduction the best way to start is to tell you all who I am and what I am interested in.
My name is William Wolverton (Bill). I live in a small town adjacent to Flint, Michigan in a Metro area with a population of 360k. I am 48 years old, married with three children ages 2-14.
I am an educator and business consultant in the applications of computers in education. I additionally recycle used computers and computer parts and support equipment. So if any of the subscribers needs some special computers parts, etc. please feel free to contact me.
Educational background.
I have two under graduate degrees, and two masters degrees. My under graduate degrees are in business administration, and psychology (and teaching), my masters degrees are in Education Administration of Community Education programs and Administration of Athletic programs. I have been working on a post masters program in the field of educational systems development, with in the speciality area of applications of computers in education.
My interest in player pianos dates back to my first introduction with one as a young child. The unit belonged to my mother's cousin. I used to watch the adults play the instrument with great enjoyment.
As time passed I have always wanted to have a player of my own. I began collecting them about 7 years ago. I have owned a woodward, Cable, a Kimbal, a Steck, and a Farrand.
The Steck and the Farrand I still have. By the way, the Farrand is the instrument that was owned by mother's cousin who got it as a child in 1928 and I acquired it only last year.
I have a collection of 1000-1200 rolls. The exact number I have not got yet. I try to grade each one by a set of evaluation items (condition and my personal enjoyment of the roll). Half of my collection are before 1930 and the majority of the rest are after 1960 to the early 1980's. I believe that 86% are playable. Most are stock rolls and a dozen are auto-reproducing rolls. The majority of the rolls are made by QRS.
I am not much of a wood worker as repairs goes on the piano or player mechanism goes. But in the area of electronics I feel at home.
Over the last seven years my hobby has been to seek out a method to convert a roll into a MIDI computer file. I have been watching over the years the development of variety of MIDI keyboard sensors and new era computer based servo controlled player pianos. Each year I try to get a little closer to my goal of retrofitting one of my pianos. I want to develop a dual function electronic & classic instrument capable of playing both rolls and computer disks from an on board PC device or from an external PC system.
Another pet project is the development of a black box type of roll reader. This reader will be able to read rolls and output a MIDI signal to a PC for use with such software as cakewalk and encore. My goal is to make the device completely independent of any piano player mechanism.
I do not want to reinvent the wheel, so I am looking for inputs from subscribers who may have a similar projects to the ones listed above. I welcome all subscriber inputs on this matter.
Additionally, I am looking for any subscribers that my have technical information about the design-drawings and maintenance info on my Farrand and my Steck pianos. I also would like to get more historical information about the instruments. Additionally I would like to gather information on what rolls are the most collectible classics and any collector ranking-catalog system for rolls that may exist.
I look forward to any and all inputs from you all. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Bill Wolverton
[ Editor's Note: There are several readers here who have
[ built roll readers which deposit their data directly
[ into a PC (without a piano player mechanism involved).
[ Several of these systems record the data in a proprietary
[ "raster scan" form (to facilitate specialized post-processing
[ but MIDI files can be derived from these systems in all cases.
[ I invite readers who have built readers or are contemplating
[ building one to to remind me in which digests they have talked
[ about their systems. Or... write about them again. This is always
[ an interesting topic. Those wishing to write to Bill directly
[ should try this address:
[
[ test19@ally.ios.com (Bill Wolverton)
[
[ Jody
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(Message sent Sun 5 May 1996, 02:13:25 GMT, from time zone GMT-0400.) |
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