Plans for Piano Restoration and Orchestration
By Damon Atchison
I was thinking of many plans to build an orchestrion to my player piano and I'd be very grateful to anyone who has a Seeburg or some other well known orchestrion to tell me how theirs works.
THE OBJECTIVE: To run 3 or more instruments off a vacuum signal from your player stack.
THE SNAGS: The vacuum power can't power all three instruments off the stack.
THE IDEAS: What if you could take your vacuum signal from your player's stack and convert it into an atmospheric signal. Why? Because if you had an atmospheric signal, you could have a double valve system where you would be assured enough vacuum power for each instrument.
THE DIN of so much noise: You'd want each instrument to have a lock and cancel to each vacuum supply, so that all 4 instruments, piano, xylophone, flute pipes, other, wouldn't all constantly play at the same time. You'd also need to have an Ampico type valve system where the selected valves can be operated at what time so your OFF instruments wouldn't be trying to play when your ON instrument was playing.
THE ADVANTAGES of working this out, or, the bottom line: is that your 3 instruments, plus the constant piano, could all turn on and off at the control of the roll, but not be dependent on the weak vacuum signal provided by the piano stack to play. What you get is three independently powerful instruments to play the top or middle 24 notes with the piano.
PIANO RESTORATION I thank the people who gave their advice on restoration, but I'm now confused. There were 2 different opinions. Has anyone ever restored a piano having NO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE with doing so? If yes, how did it work out?
Could anyone tell me where I could get plans for building a Lock and Cancel valve?
Damon Atchison
Damon66@aol.com |
(Message sent Fri 6 Dec 1996, 23:46:49 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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