Reproducing Pianos
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, but this coding was never recorded automatically. Different companies had different ways of notating dynamics, some technically advanced (though not necessarily more effective), 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 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, Edvard Grieg, Claude Debussy, Scott Joplin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin and George Gershwin are amongst the composers who have had their performances recorded in this way.
Duo-Art featured artists such as Ignace Jan Paderewski, George Gershwin, Maurice Ravel, Percy Grainger, Leopold Godowsky and Ferruccio Busoni. The Ampico brand's featured artists included Sergei Rachmaninoff, Leo Ornstein, Mischa Levitzki, Winifred MacBride, and Marguerite Volavy. For Welte-Mignon, which was the first reproducing system, there played artists like Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Alexander Scriabin, Eugen d'Albert, Josef Lhevinne, Raoul Pugno, and Carl Reinecke (who was the earliest-born pianist to record in any media format).
There were hundreds of companies worldwide producing rolls during the peak period of their popularity (1900–1927). Some other non-reproducing rolls makers of live performances are listed below together with their most memorable recording artistes.
- QRS Company — James P Johnson, Fats Waller, Zez Confrey, J. Lawrence Cook, Pete Wendling and Victor Arden
- Mastertouch Piano Roll Co Australia
- US Music Roll Company; Lee Sims, Robert Billings
- Imperial — Charley Straight, Roy Bargy
- Vocalstyle — Jelly Roll Morton, Walter Davison, Clarence Jones, Luckey Roberts, Charles 'Cow Cow' Davenport'
- Capitol/Columbia; Jimmy Blythe, Clarence Johnson
Read more about this topic: Piano Roll