I am a mechanical music enthusiast from Montreal, Canada.  My English
may sound bookish, since I am French speaking.  This site is a gold
mine: congratulations to Robbie and collaborators!

I arrange and manually punch music rolls for organettes (Celestina 20,
Melodia 14), and also for Sankyo 20-notes music boxes which I modified
with some chromatic notes.  I get invaluable help from a software
program created by Piet Paardekam from the Netherlands.  He gave us
(yes: absolutely free!) the Midiboek program for printing mechanical
music roll templates.  Thanks a lot, Piet!

Searching for a box musically more sophisticated than a 20-key, I got
from Piet some information that I summarize here with his permission.

Piet bought his Sankyo 30-key music box, with four folded paper books,
in 1992.  It was the last one sold in a small shop in Utrecht that closed
during the late 'nineties.  The price was (in Guilders) 320 US$, but he
got it for half the money.

It is hard to punch music for it.  With the Sankyo 20-key "plink-plonk",
you can write the music in staff notation on the carton.  This is not
possible on the 30-key: the size of the holes and their distances are
all 20/30 of the size of the 20-key instrument (i.e., you squeeze 30
notes on the same paper width as the 20-noter), so you need to work
very accurately to get the starwheels in the holes when playing.  Piet
thinks that's the reason Sankyo stopped the production and he never saw
another instrument like that.

The mechanical architecture is that of the 20-key.  The main difference
is the 30-note comb with the following scale (MIDI note C48 up to B83):

C D E F G A A# B C C# D E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D E F F# G G# A A# B

Damping is similar; no bearing either, but there is a pair of little
nylon gears so you can turn the crank a lot slower, which allows
spreading the music wider over the paper band, giving more possibilities
for arranging since the band is rolling at greater speed.

Piet plans to use his clever (that word is mine) Midiboek for the 30-key
instrument.  Printing directly on good thin carton and making a 2 mm
hand punch, similar to the 2.5 mm one used with the 20-key, Piet thinks
he has a good chance to get it okay -- with the help of his 11-year-old
son's small fingers and good eyes!

I am interested in finding such a challenging box.  So, any information
will be appreciated, and possibly of interest for other readers too.

Roland Tremblay
Montreal
rolandt@loginnovation.com.geentroep (drop '.geentroep' to reply)