Joining the list - Dan Wilson - who says:
I've been in player-pianos since... well, I was taken as a child to the Harrods, London, roll sale at Christmas 1938 to choose something for myself. On the basis of the village idiot who, offered a range of coins, is careful not to spoil the game by taking anything of high value, I chose Beethoven rather than ragtime and ended up with quite a stack of sonatas that 30 years later when I inherited the piano, started my roll collection, now around 12,000 strong and still growing. I have that Ibach 88n upright still, a Steinway Model O pedal-electric Duo-Art (badly restored, will have to come back to it) and a classic black 6'6" Bechstein grand of 1905 which I play with one of the 65/88n Aeolian pushups of around 1912 that only seem to have surfaced in any number in England.
The player has taught me all the music I know and my ear at long last can tell me just what needs to be done to make a pumper sound like hand-playing. (You need a skillfully-cut roll with Themodist "snakebites" and a properly-adjusted theme piano or player, plus a whole lot of power which you only let through to a few of the notes. A long story. It's an obsession in England - has been since Edwardian times.) I have a Clavinova which is used with the pushup for public demos - so I know what a digital player would sound like (not at all bad, in fact). I do my own tuning, but not all that well.
About other things I'm not so intense, so I get on with a lot of piano folk (not especially easy) and so have a global knowledge of not very much about a great many aspects of the player and reproducer - a selection of cherries off other people's cakes. I know where there are good working examples of the "green Welte" Bechstein, the DEA and the Artrio-Angelus, rare beasts all. Using an intuitive faculty I have had to develop for a late-in-life "natural-health" practice in Sussex, I can usually date a piano to within a month or two, with the help of a glance at the case, the playing of a few chords and a sniff inside.
On and off I have been Editor of the Player Piano Group Bulletin, a post now much more illustriously held by Julian Dyer, and am currently committee secretary for the Friends of the Pianola Institute, the supporters' group for Rex Lawson's charity set up 11 years ago to educate the musical world in the worth of the player. Rex has a PC, but is currently more concerned with the Apple IIe (given away free by schools) on which he is developing his roll-copying, editing, electronic-pianola and MIDI-to-Duo-Art conversion programs, so for the time being I will serve as his contact with this list.
So this is what the Internet is for ? I see the idea. Wonderful !
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