Loud Duo-Art
By Dan Wilson
I think Darrell Clarke has put his finger on the problem. A "loud" Duo-Art is being accurate. Wasn't there something in the Barden interviews in the 1960s, where Milton Delcamp was saying something about Ampico: the first time Ampico got the spark chronograph to go properly -- so that the playback piano was generating the same powers as the pianist -- it was far too loud. It was only then they all realised that from the first years that Ampico had been making rolls, they were a "background Muzak" version of the real thing, and they could never sell rolls if they weren't!
I remember in 1979 I went to stay with my step-mother in Wales, straight from being at a Duo-Art meet in London. She had a straight Weber grand which was identical to the ones I'd been listening to the night before, and had a concert pianist named Peter Brooks staying with her. He played a number of pieces on the Weber (which was well kept and in tune) and I realised that to do a proper replication of what he was doing, you'd have to separate the accompaniment and theme powers on a Duo-Art to a drastic degree and jack up the suction. A real pianist commands attention by his presence, where a machine can't.
[ Ed Note: Dan, are you saying that Mr. Brooks played with greater
[ separation between the musicial theme and the background
[ accompaniment? Why can't a reproducing piano replicate this?
[ Or are you simply saying that Mr. Brooks doesn't sound like a
[ Duo-Art?
The Player-Piano Group and Pianola Institute (Rex Lawson, Denis Hall & Peter Davis plus different back-up crews) both do regular Duo-Art recitals in London concert halls, mostly using a converted Pianola push- up player on the halls' own nine-foot Steinways, and it's surprising how the size of the hall demands a different setting of the pump each time. When the push-up is then taken to a salon situation with something like a six-foot Bechstein, it's turned down to half speed. The pre-1931 Aeolian Company was well aware of this, and the Aeolian Hall demonstra- tor, a man called Knightley, was always brought in to tweak up the power if rolls were being played in their concert hall. This process was eventually called "Knightleyizing", after him.
With what we know now about piano music, I think anyone starting a new system would enable pianos to play all the rolls, or disks, for (a) concert performance, (b) undemanding salon listening, and (c) mere background ambiance.
Dan Wilson
[ Ed Note: The Duo-Art adjustment process which Craig Brougher
[ describes is a far cry from "tweaking". It's hard to believe
[ that the pump speed was the only item that was adjusted. Surely,
[ if the only difference were to be the absolute volume of the piano,
[ it would have taken a considerable amount of adjusting in order to
[ preserve proper dynamic gradation.
|
|
|
Mechanical
Music Digest™ Archives
