Ken W. List writes a bit more about his days at Q-R-S:

After I was thinking back on the QRS days (daze) I remembered something
more which you might enjoy, then for some reason in thinking about
"recording instruments" remembered this bit of (well, trivia is not the
right word) curiousnesses from an earlier time, one of which reminds me
that we are not so up-to-date as we like to think we are!

One of the funniest things that happened with the Eubie Blake rolls
(and I am sorry but my memory does not serve to recall its title) was a
sudden and inexplicable stop - absolutely noteless, in the middle of
the recording.  It lasted for just 8 bars - but one would have thought
that perhaps the A.C. plug to the recording piano had been pulled.

Well, they had made a simultaneous tape recording of Eubie's playing
(frankly, it was so full of wrong notes and fluffs - the wonderful old
gent wasn't very accurate any more - he must have been at least 198
years old then, and the sweetest old gent you'd ever want to meet) and
it was discovered that during that hiatus - the 8-bar silence - Eubie
had stopped playing and just sat there snapping his fingers, singing at
the top of his voice, and tapping his feet for the 8 bars - a sort of
"vamp 'til ready" or interlude for "solo snap and tap" or whatever you
would call such a show of exuberance - and that resulted of course in
no pencil marks on the master - hence the long pause.

I left before these rolls were issued, so I don't know how they dealt
with that silence - I would hope that they left it in, but I doubt it.
Customer imagination might not have so charmed with the notion of
supplying your own foot-tapping and finger-snapping as mine would have
been - but isn't that a nifty thing to have happened?

Ken W. List
euphonia@home.com