Mike "Fox" Morrey posted to MMD 001112:

> The song is "Music Box Dancer" by Frank Mills.  (One of my favorite
> songs when I was younger; I bought the roll long before I actually
> got a player.)  The roll label also says "Ampico, Instrumental,
> Played By Walter Erickson, (C) 1979 Play-Rite, Inc."
>
> 1979 is when this song was released.  Now the roll is quite old, but
> I'm not sure how old.  (I'd like to think back to 1979.)  Is there
> any way to tell?

You must be very young.  1909 is old for a piano roll.  1979 is not!
I would hardly consider a roll perforated in 1979 as being particularly
old.  (I refuse to believe that anything that much younger than I am is
"quite old".)

1979 sounds about right for the recording date.  I was at Play-Rite
during the time this and many other of the "Live Performance" rolls
were made.  If the roll is punched on that horrible pumpkin-hued paper,
it was very likely manufactured before the mid 1980s.  If it's on white
paper, it was perforated more recently.

The paper was intended to be tan, about like old original rolls were.
When the truck from the Brown Paper Co. pulled up and unloaded 40,000
pounds of pumpkin colored paper, everyone choked!  But we were stuck
with it.  It was on account of this miscolored paper that the slogan
"Home of the Golden Roll" was adopted at Play-Rite.

Since your copy is Ampico encoded, it was probably punched in the mid
to late 1980s.  "Music Box Dancer" was initially released as an 88-note
roll.

> Regarding punches lining up -- Where all my QRS rolls line up
> perfectly, this one seems a very slight bit off.  It doesn't affect
> playing, it's not off enough to open an adjacent key, that is.

That's because of the way paper was stored (i.e., with little thought
to climate control) at Play-Rite's South Broadway facility.  During the
winter time (and it does get quite cold in Turlock CA) the large spools
of paper would shrink in the unheated warehouse.  If the paper was
punched immediately when the spools were brought to the perforator,
the roll would "grow" after perforation.

The reverse was true with rolls perforated during the 100+ degree
summer days -- they would become narrower when acclimated to the normal
household temperature.  It would take several days for the huge spools
to come to the temperature of the perforator room, and there was rarely
time to allow that to happen.  (It wasn't my decision not to heat the
warehouse.)

> I also noticed that in the playing of the song, the two main harmonies
> will sometime not be 'exact'.  It sounds more like a person playing
> -- it's not precisely exact.  How were these rolls made compared to
> others?

These were actually recorded, at normal tempo, on the Ivers & Pond
upright recording piano at Play-Rite.  This piano was equipped with
sensors by Wayne Stahnke's company to record the notes and pedalling
onto magnetic tape (regular 7-1/2" recording tape) with a perfectly
conventional tape recorder.  The piano was also equipped with a
"Universal" pneumatic stack and so could play back either from the
tape or from a punched roll, as required.

The tape was then taken to the other Play-Rite facility in Turlock,
on North Palm Street, and fed to an ancient Acme perforator which
perforated 5 copies, with tempo compensation for take-up spool build-up
(again through the wonders of Stahnke engineering) which were used for
editing.

In the case of Walter's rolls, most were over-dubbed several times and
had much added with a knife, and/or deleted with Scotch tape.  When
Walter was satisfied with the edited copy, a master roll was made from
that, and it was used for making the production copies.  A few years
later the paper master was replaced by an electronic file, and more
recent production copies are made from that.

Had Walter chosen to even up any chords or counter melodies he could
easily have done that.

> Of course, any other comments about the roll is appreciated.

The roll was issued first as an 88-note roll.  Dynamics were never
recorded.  The Ampico coding was added some time later, but I don't
know for sure who did the coding as I was not at Play-Rite by that
time.  It could also be that some of the "ragged" counter melody lines
were edited "in" at that point for convenience of coding for Ampico.
I own a few of these Live Performance "Ampico-ized" rolls and I'm not
impressed by the coding.

Walter Erickson is/was a rather good pianist in both classical and
popular mode.  Frankly, I always thought he was a bit wasted at
Play-Rite.  I suppose it paid the rent for him and his wife for a
couple of years though.

The only reason we had a recording piano at all was because John Malone
had initially thought that would be a faster way to produce master
rolls than using a drafting table, T-square and knife.  That turned out
to be not necessarily the case.

Once the recording piano was there, Elwood Hansen, who owned the
company at the time, thought it should be used for a "Live Performance"
series, and so it was.  A number of different pianists recorded on it
for Play-Rite, with greater and lesser degrees of musical success.

For various reasons, it was decided that the logic circuitry should be
configured to "bleed" all the notes played with the pedal down, so that
the rolls could be played smoothly on players not equipped with
auto-sustain.  I thought it a bad idea at the time and still think so.
You can't imagine the editing nightmares it caused with recordings by
pianists who were sloppy in the use of the pedal!

That's probably more than you wanted to know about your "Music Box
Dancer" roll.

Dean Randall