Hello John, hello all -- John Wolff want to know about my Triola
arrangements, and how they are punched.

First, John, thanks very much for the precise numbers you measured.
They explain why our customer was not so happy.  We punched them with
55 mm/sec and without "spiral compensation", i.e. without making the
slots longer at the end.

I have one question, though, for clarification; you write, "The roll
speed is thus 42 mm/sec, or 8.2 feet per minute."

You then explain the necessary spiral compensation, but that means that
42 mm/sec is the _average_ speed, not the _initial_ speed.  Am I right
here?  (My punching program requires input of the _initial_ speed, so
then I'd have to do a little bit of math ...)

Regarding the arrangements: A Triola owner here in Germany found Rudolf
Klomfar's Homepage (http://www.notenlochband.de) and wanted some of the
pieces to be arranged for Triola.  I wrote the punching program for
Rudolf's punching machine.  I also arrange quite a lot for him for
crank organs.  (Although the music on his web site has, with one
exception, _not_ been arranged by me; I'd like to stress this.  For my
arrangements, see http://www.haraldmmueller.de (shameless advertising
...)).

Thus, Rudolf came to me and asked whether I could and would arrange for
the Triola.  I found that a nice challenge and I did, up to now, the
following arrangements:

  "International"; Just A Gigolo; Florentine March (Fucik, very nice
   to arrange on the Triola); Strangers in the Night; Que Sera Sera

German hits from the 1940s-1980s (some are "ok"; but most are trash
music -- absolute trash, I have to say ...): Caprifischer, Babylon,
Schneewalzer, Taiga Song, Oberkrainer-Medley, Pferdehalfter,
Griechischer Wein, Golf von Biskaya, Einmal noch nach Bombay

Folk Songs: Santa Lucia, Glueckauf (an old Saxonian miners' song)

I hasten to say that quite a few of these pieces are not at all my
taste of music, but I am a "contract arranger", so I do what I'm
ordered to do.  :-)

Anyway, the Triola has five features that distinguish it musically from
a small crank organ and make quite it interesting, I think:

1.  It has two fully chromatic octaves -- ah, you can do any sort of
chord there!  No tricks needed, e.g., for a tritonus ...

2.  The repetition of the notes in the treble is much lower than for
an organ.  Interestingly, this is not such a big problem after all:
Very high repetition rates are mainly used for trills in organ
arrangements, but the sound of a Triola is created by a star wheel
which repeatedly strikes the chords, so you get "trills" all the time
anyway.  In some cases, when a high repetition in the melody is
required, one has to work around the repetition problem...

3.  On the other hand, the Triola notes must be punched as continuous
slots, i.e., the paper is really split.  This limits the maximum length
of a note; currently, we limit it to around 60 mm.  Musically, this
means that very long notes must somehow be split.  Essentially, there
are three ways to do this:

(a) "technical splitting" -- split after 60 mm.  Sounds bad.

(b) "Musical splitting" -- rewrite the arrangement so that the note
can be split "logically".

(c) "Choral breathing" -- this is a technique used by choirs to hold
long notes: The singers breathe at different times, so that the sung
note sounds continuously.

I usually try (b); if it does not work out, I resort to (c), using
multiple overlapping notes.

4.  The Triola has 6 fixed major bass chords (struck manually), so
it is hard to do anything which is either minor or requires more
"interesting" bass chord sequences.

5.  Because the bass chords are struck manually, (a) you must take
care that they are not following each other too quickly - this makes,
e.g., a "walking bass" in most cases impossible; (b) you should take
care that the bass follows a very very regular pattern; (c) you should
have "synchronization notes" in the melody or accompaniment so that the
player can _hear_ when he/she should strike the bass chord (eye-ear
synchronization is much harder than "ear-ear-synchronization"); this
is sometimes a problem with jazzy arrangements when you do _not_ want
to put notes on the main beat...

I have to say that, unfortunately, up to now I have never heard an
arrangement of mine on a real Triola -- only a test strip which I made
at the very beginning.  (We should have found out the speed problem then,
but somehow the Triola owner either cranked too fast, or whatever...)

Technically, we punch the strips into a strong paper which has a PVC
core, because of the mechanical tripping.  The machine punches with
a 4 mm punch, with an overlap of about 2 mm.  We do not punch the
(3 mm or so) index holes on the margin; rather, when I stamp the
numbers (using a set of 18 stamps), I stamp a small circle for each
"index hole", using a ballpoint pen with retracted tip.  :-)  The
punching program I wrote can do "spiral compensation", making holes
longer at the end, which we also neglected; we have to switch this
on now!

Regards

Harald M. Mueller
Grafing b. Muenchen
Germany