The rolls have to be 11-1/4 inches wide (285.75 mm), so that rules out
Red Welte and DEA.

Cut from the thinnest plastic you can find (in England the black bags
provided for garbage by some local authorities are fine for this) two
strips just wide enough to cover four tracker-bar holes each and about
four inches long.  I'm no good at doing this accurately so I make mine
slightly tapered and cut them short where they're the right width.

Using sticky tape of a type that doesn't pull paint off anything,
attach one strip each side of the tracker-bar, at the back, so that
they can either be folded back on top of it or hung down over the end
four note holes on each side.  They should be trimmed to have
quarter-inch tails below the note holes when hung down.  Any longer and
they'll get sucked back into the roll on "re-roll".

With them folded back, you can play 88-note rolls.

Hung down and covering the end four holes each side but not the wide
"theme" ports, they allow Duo-Art rolls to be played.  It's usual to
adjust them to an exact fit as you pull the roll leader down and the
roll starts to trap them.

Now, to play Ampico or Welte Licensee (De-Luxe) rolls, you just swing
the two strips one note outwards as you pull the roll down.  The roll
will trap them in place at this angle without trouble.

The green Welte and Animatic-T or Triphonola rolls found in Europe are
true 88-note reproducers and don't need these strips.  They were, in
fact, designed to be usable on ordinary players.

However!  Cheaper 88-note players made after 1918 in the USA and about
1924 in Europe only have 80-note stacks.  These don't need the strips
for any type of reproducing roll.

With practice it's not hard to read the Duo-Art power codes on the
edges of the rolls and get some idea of how loud each bit should be
played.  But I've never graduated to Ampico-reading, never mind Welte,
which makes things worse by having lock-and-cancel sustaining pedal
perforations - little dots ! The others have the loud pedal on the left
where plain pedal rolls have it.

I have several hundred Ampico rolls - and no Ampico instrument.  And
I'm happy.

Dan Wilson, London