As many of you know, John Farrell has done outstanding arrangements
for the player piano (over 600 at last count), and after a bit of
arm-twisting he began doing A-rolls.  These have been quite well
received: four 10-tune A-rolls have been issued, and one more is ready
to issue when I get the perforator changed back to 6/inch.  John has
arranged tunes for about ten more A-rolls, and is mainly waiting on me
to get to punching them.

John recently visited California and, after a bit more arm-twisting
and hearing John Motto-Ros' O-roll machines, has agreed to tackle
O-rolls.  One little problem: he needs an orchestrion emulator to hear
his arrangements, for immediate feedback on his editing.  He has been
using Richard Brandle's Wind program to hear the A-roll arrangements,
but we don't know of an equivalent O-roll emulator.  Does anyone know
of one, or maybe someone who would be interested in creating one?

The process of reading existing rolls is a lot simpler than creating
new files.  With existing rolls the arrangements have already been
done, and it is just a matter of turning the holes into MIDI note
events, then making punch files or emulator outputs from the resulting
files.  Creating new files is an iterative process of editing and
auditioning, and auditioning is where we don't have a good solution
for hearing G-, M- and O-rolls.

What we would like to happen is that John will generate the note parts
as he has always done, then import the file into another program where
he can arrange, edit and audition the additional bells and whistles.
The output would be MIDI, in both a format that will drive a synthesizer
and one that is note-equivalent for creating the punch file.  It would
be less convenient, but acceptable, to have a standalone emulator and
bounce between it and something like Wind for editing.

The output of the arranging/editing program (e.g., Cakewalk) is usually
a MIDI event file.  The noteur calls on the orchestrion control functions
as MIDI note events, which would then be input to the emulator module,
which would call for the appropriate sound card or synthesizer output.
The output of a roll-reading process is (usually) a MIDI event file,
so the emulator could be used to play the roll image.  I suspect such
an emulator would be quite popular.

The emulator should be able to emulate different types of orchestrions.
Ideally it could modify the functions for each type, e.g., the timing
differences between the occurrence of an event and the output of the
emulator, or the relative levels of the sounds.  For instance, the
piano loud pedal, mandolin rail or second instrument delays will
usually need tweaking to get them right.

A-roll machines are relatively easy to emulate because they do not use
lock-and-cancel and only require modifying the piano sound in the upper
range when the mandolin rail is called.  The A-roll machine has only
piano, mandolin rail, and one second instrument, which can be either
a xylophone or pipes.  An O-roll machine, for example, uses not only
lock-and-cancel, but it mutes the upper piano notes in the range of
the pipes and/or xylophone when they are called and has two suction
controls which can be called either independently or together, in
addition to the soft pedal.  This means that all the vacuum operated
functions except the piano have four possible levels, and the piano
has eight.

Once an emulator is created for O-rolls it would be a short hop to
adapt it to G- and M-rolls...

Bob Billings

 [ Both John and Bob use an external synthesizer (Roland SC-50 Sound
 [ Canvas) to audition the music files.  This device seems to be
 [ capable of emulating the sounds of A- and O-roll machines, but it
 [ has no means to convert pneumatic lock-and-cancel commands from the
 [ music roll image file into registration commands for the synth.
 [
 [ Jody suggests that a modified MIDI driver for the computer's sound
 [ card could do the task, or else a special MIDI-conversion module
 [ could be inserted in the wireline to the external synth.  -- Robbie