Julian Dyer asked what companies made pianos with themodist-type actions.

I have an interesting themodist built by Story & Clark of Chicago.  It
has two theme regulators on the lower action, but they are only connected
to push-buttons on the key slip.  There are no theme holes in the tracker
bar.  Apparently the pianolist was supposed to manipulate these buttons
in time with the theme notes, which is quite a challenge!

The Vestal Press used to have a reprint of a 1924 Story & Clark service
manual which described this as a "Two-way Repro-Phraso" system.  I
suspect it was really a sales gimmick to move potential customers up to
the "Three-way Repro-Phraso", which had an electric motor and played
"under automatic control of a music roll".

I fitted mine with a Themodist tracker bar from a colleague's junk box,
but the results have never been very satisfactory.  This is a big player
-- big sound, big 3-tier stack, huge reservoirs -- and very difficult to
get any sort of decent expression, themodist or not.

Incidentally, the "-Phraso" part of the Repro-Phraso is another pair of
buttons on the key slip which bleed either full vacuum or atmosphere into
the wind motor supply line, thus giving accelerandos and ritards without
touching the tempo lever.  Nice idea, but almost impossible to control,
especially when the rest of your brain is doing the manual themodising!

So why do I keep it?  Well, in spite of all the gimmickry, I like the
style and the sound of it.  But most of all, I like to get visitors to
thump out a few marches or whatever on the Story & Clark, and them show
them how it should be done on the pedal Duo-Art!

John Wolff
Melbourne, Australia