Transposing Otto Higel Solodant
By Dan Wilson
At a meeting today of the (London) Player Piano Group I met a piano which has interest in three recent topics: Solodant, theme-equipped transposing trackerbar and Otto Higel.
This was an upright Wiston & Wiston of 1930. In the spoolbox it has switches for Solodant, +/- 4 notes transposing and play/reroll. The player action is a Higel and close in appearance to the Standard action with a 5-unit motor. The trackerbar face is wholly missing over notes 1-4 and 85-88, since it needs to slide into those spaces when being used to transpose. There are no pneumatics for these eight notes, as was common anyway by then.
The keyboard lip has a sustain-pedal level operating rightwards, two subduing buttons, a soft-pedal lever operating leftwards, the tempo lever and a "fast-forward silent" button. The Solodant lever when ON has no effect until you depress either or both of the two subduing buttons, whereupon the piano stops playing in treble, bass or altogether.
Experimentation shows that this is a necessary preliminary to getting you to pump hard enough to make the Solodant work properly. Once you get up a good vacuum, then "theme" rolls play as they should, but there is no graduation as you get with most Aeolian and Hupfeld instruments -- you have to add subsidiary accents by releasing buttons. The tone is generally strident and suitable for playing jazz in a pub, but by using the soft-pedal (hammerlift rail) lever, I was able to make sense of a Noel Coward ballad medley.
The rolls track using four-hole tracking as described recently. Robbie indicates this system is rare, but after about 1926 the Aeolian sub- sidiaries in the UK abandoned the old "finger" systems and used it exclusively, as Standard actions always seemed to have done.
I would describe the Wiston as a remarkably good example of a usually disappointing type. (Yes, OK, I'm biased.)
Dan Wilson
[ Editors comment:
[
[ I wasn't aware that the nice 4-hole Standard tracking mechanism was
[ fitted on players other than built by Standard. I recall that Dr.
[ Hickman hoped to use the design for the Ampico B roll tracker, but
[ evidently Standard refused to grant license for production. Thus
[ was born Hickman's innovative "chopper stabilized" proportional
[ tracking mechanism.
[
[ I wish that the bass and treble softening levers on my Themodist
[ would subdue the accompaniment level a constant amount (in decibels)
[ below the theme level. Then the accents would remain nicely apparent
[ over the full span of my foot-pumping. I imagine a mechanism which
[ would regulate the accomp level at a constant percentage of the
[ theme/resevoir level (less the static zero-level of 4-inches or so).
[ Was there ever anything like this: a "proportional Solodant?"
[
[ Robbie Rhodes
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