Hello all.  I am new to the MMD and already I have a question.  By way
of background;  I run the Well-Tempered Disklavier web site, and have
recently had a chance to review some of the conversions to Disklavier
format from reproducing rolls made by Wayne at Live Performance.
Wonderful stuff, by the way...

Well, anyway, in my real life I am an electronics engineer, but I
have always enjoyed old technology, as I feel it is a whole lot more
clever than some of the new stuff.  I am in the process of restoring a
Gulbransen player piano, and between that and the disks mentioned
above, my mind came up with a question:  How did they record the old
reproducing rolls?  I mean, knowing what key has been hit and punching
a roll strikes me as a doable thing for the time.  But measuring hammer
velocity (or some other way to measure loudness of a note) and
translating that to control punches for Ampico rolls (as an example)
strikes me as real rocket science for those days.

I asked a couple of folks who are pretty experienced in the field, and
they say that the information is lost, and no one knows, really, how it
was done.  Is that really the case?  Are there no reproducing recorders
left?  If this is not true, how was it done?  I went searching on the
web and did not find anything, so I am beginning to believe that the
story of lost art is true.  I find the whole thing quite fascinating,
and would like to know the whole story.  Thanks in advance for your
input.

Best Regards,
Jim Hendershot,
The Well-Tempered Disklavier
http://www.radiodesign.com/wtd.htm

  _____________________________________________________________
 |                                                             |_
 |   Jim Hendershot, WA6VQP     |   Radio Design Group, Inc.   | |
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 [ Editor's note:
 [
 [ Welcome to MMD, Jim.  We don't normally print a big "signature line"
 [ in the Digest, but for your introduction, why not!  You are sure
 [ to get a nice response -- there are several hams and ex-hams among
 [ our members [incl. me!).  Scientific American, Nov. 1927, has a
 [ big article about the hammer-velocity recording machine developed
 [ for making Ampico rolls.  This article is reproduced, I believe,
 [ in "Player Piano Treasury", by Harvey Roehl, Vestal Press (long
 [ out of print, I fear).  Browse the MMD Archives, too -- we have
 [ had several discussions in the Digest on this topic.
 [
 [ Robbie Rhodes (ex-W6SDH)