What are you listening to?

[Rambunctious]

 

[Rambunctious]

 

[Rambunctious]

 

[Mindful]

The Manchester scene:

 

[P F Tinmore]

ff to :45 where it begins. I was fortunate enough to visit the Musical Wonder House in Wiscasset, Maine, which had a large number of these music boxes. The owner gave us the tour and he knew everything about them, repaired them, too. Unbelievable to hear these in the same room with you.

Outstanding post, thank you.

I visited a musical instrument museum in northern Michigan where they had piano rolls 'recorded' by people before high fidelity recording was developed -- these rolls would copy all the intonations of the player who made them. We watched a player piano play a composition as played by George Gershwin himself, live, which is pretty remarkable since he died in 1937.

Wow! I never knew they could do that! I love anything that winds up--clocks, music boxes, automatons. They've always fascinated me.

Wiki: >> Rolls for the reproducing piano were generally made from the recorded performances of famous musicians. Typically, a pianist would sit at a specially designed recording piano, and the pitch and duration of any notes played would be either marked or perforated on a blank roll, together with the duration of the sustaining and soft pedal.

Reproducing pianos can also re-create the dynamics of a pianist's performance by means of specially encoded control perforations placed towards the edges of a music roll. Different companies had different ways of notating dynamics, some technically advanced, some secret, and some dependent entirely on a recording producer's handwritten notes, but in all cases these dynamic hieroglyphics had to be skillfully converted into the specialized perforated codes needed by the different types of instrument.

Recorded rolls play at a specific, marked speed, where for example, 70 signifies 7 feet (2.1 m) of paper travel in one minute, at the start of the roll. On all pneumatic player pianos, the paper is pulled on to a take-up spool, and as more paper winds on, so the effective diameter of the spool increases, and with it the paper speed. Player piano engineers were well aware of this, as can be seen from many patents of the time, but since reproducing piano recordings were generally made with a similar take-up spool drive, the tempo of the recorded performance is faithfully reproduced, despite the gradually increasing paper speed.

The playing of many pianists and composers is preserved on reproducing piano roll. Gustav Mahler, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg, Teresa Carreño, Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Scott Joplin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Scriabin, Jelly Roll Morton and George Gershwin are amongst the composers and pianists who have had their performances recorded in this way. <<​

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Interesting, One of my father's business partners used to make these. Actually he would convert existing pianos. He would make recordings of his piano and they would play them at the local classical music station.

He moved to California in the '60s and I don't know what he did there.

 

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[P F Tinmore]

Sitarist Ravi Shankar's Aman Manch (National Peace Forum) performed by Daughter Anoushka Shankar

 

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[Mindful]

 

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[Likkmee]

Pretty cool acoustic there Tinman

 

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[Pogo]

Pretty cool acoustic there Tinman

Macyn Taylor is an awesome talent. PFT turned me on to her in this thread years ago.

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("Luttrell" is the name of the town in Tennessee where Chet Atkins was from)

 

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I forgot Glen Campbell could lay down some leads.

 

[Pogo]

I forgot Glen Campbell could lay down some leads.

Despite the image cultivated later GC was part of the "Wrecking Crew" (or "the clique" according to Carol Kaye) first-call session musician list that laid down so many backing tracks for so many pop records of the '60s.

Here's two of them, Glen Campbell and Leon Russell, in early 1965 before breaking out in solo careers (GC on inaudible banjo)

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[P F Tinmore]

Now I need my Macyn Taylor fix.

 

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