Piano Roll - Metronomic, Hand Played, and Reproducing Rolls

Metronomic, Hand Played, and Reproducing Rolls

Metronomic or arranged rolls are rolls produced by positioning the music slots without real-time input. The music, when played back, is typically purely metronomical. Metronomically arranged music rolls are deliberately left metronomic so as to enable a player-pianist to create their own musical performance via the hand controls that are a feature of all player pianos.

Hand played rolls are created by capturing in real-time the hand-played performance of one or more pianists upon a piano connected to a recording machine. The production roll reproduced the real-time performance of the original recording whilst played back at a constant speed. It is industry convention for recordings of music intended to be used for dancing to be regularized into strict tempo despite the original performance having the slight tempo fluctuations of all human performances.

Reproducing rolls are the same as hand-played rolls but have additional control codes to operate the dynamic modifying systems specific to whichever brand of reproducing piano it is designed to be played back on. The roll plays back at a fixed constant speed to preserve the inter-relationship of these control codes and the time it takes for the pianos dynamic mechanisms to operate between sequential control codes.