I Didn't Expect A Self Playing Piano To Be So Complicated.
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
- PUTTING A PIANOLA BACK TOGETHER
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#pianola #reassembly #howitworks
Remember, i didn't restore this, im not sure who did most of it, i know lucien did the pipes from what i have heard, i merely reassembled it.
It is leaking. Lucien did say it needed work. Solution? Add a vacuum pump. 😅Don't mistake this video for me getting it to work! it already worked, it was just in pieces :D
DONT DO IT LIKE THAT....
honestly. i have likely done something wrong. comment below what it is, but don't be a grumpy git about it thats all i ask :D
a note. the midi mod will involve zero modification, it will basically be an overlay to the machine. got the concept down, but not all of the parts have arrived yet.
After the midi mod, please play the pianola using the game boy 😁
22:18 definitely wont be taken out of context xD
.. also an alternative idea would be a device, that stamps these rolls? Could be too big of a project tho.
@@DiverseGreen-Anonyep it has been spoken about! Hoping to find an older version to modernise as lasers don't seem to do great
After the midi mod, connect it to the organ for AIR MUSIC!
Guessing it would not be too much of a push to make an optical reader for the roles and link it to a MIDI out.
Be careful with that rewind switch modification: If you play classical music backwards, it'll de-compose.
😂 this comment needs more love!
Great, great comment.
You sir are a genius
🔥🔥
Or it will just sound like Boulez... 😁
I am beyond jealous. I love this kind of challenge. I'm sure Mr. Nunes would be smiling right now.
He was my friend for 40 years. It was hard to see these instruments leave his home, but he knew they were going to good homes. Thanks Sam!
With today's technology, you would be tempted to say that such a project is impossible without a microcontroller. And here is the thing, just pumps and pipes and a roll of paper. Look mum no computer, indeed. 😁
It's a shame now adays that also myself included opt for microcontrollers. It's such a boring means to do things haha
Where do you think they got the idea for MIDI? 😏
You could have argued that MIDI was an innovation that would have happened eventually due to its sheer necessity, but the piano roll system is definitely inspired by these rolls of paper
These "rolls of paper" *are* piano rolls. The originals. I wouldn't say MIDI piano rolls are "inspired by" them as much as they are a direct digital implementation of them, right down to the name.
Before the computers the paper tape mechanism was the way to automate complex machinery such Jacquard looms to weave complex patterns. Punch card technology used in computers to store programs and store data until the mid 1980s was directly inspired by this technology. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine
Sam, quite a number of tunes were composed for the pianola in a lot of cases by little or unknown composers and quite a number of these tunes can be considered lost media so I hope you record them and archive them.
That centering mechanism is so elegant 😮
right. I was following it closely and watched how it shifted left and right while the roll made its way through 🙂
It's actually very similar to the way the laser diode tracks the data spiral in a CD. There are four sensors in a diamond formation. The top and bottom form the feedback mechanism for lens focus: The spot will expand or contract, from a circle to an oval, when out of focus. The two sides are the servo for keeping the beam centered on the track -- exactly like the roll sensors here.
@@nickwallette6201 fascinating, I didn’t know that
These pre-electromechanical designs always stun me with their ingenuity. It wasn't even made that long ago yet it feels like some kind of lost technology, that steampunk appeal. Speed control and roll error correction implemented with completely analog feedback, I can't imagine the time taken to get that just right.
Mad scientist / inventor + music = creative awesomeness !
Ahhhh the "fumfa numfa" He knows all the technical blurb 👍
Seriously Sam, great that you can make use of it and hopefully he will be smiling down on your museum.. Wonderful video 🥲
Can confirm 🤣
❤ I grew up in Braunschweig and my mum worked for Grotian Steinweg 😊
This thing runs on lack of air, the organ runs on a surplus of air, they sound like perfect companions! Have you tried connecting them, maybe they start playing without any outside effort! 🙂
Infinite musical power!
That idea really sucks....no, it really blows!! OK, it's both 😁 (absolutely no offence intended)
You've just invented perpetual commotion.
Very nice! I did notice a couple of notes during that Beethoven roll that weren't working, so it might be worth a quick check once you've got everything together in case there's a blockage or something. Still I'm very impressed and I really liked that demo of the player action before you fitted it into the case. Not seen a demo of a real action working like that before.
5 in the lower register are not connected due to a leak.
Grew up in a house with one, not the same brand of piano but the mechanism looks the same. Really nice to see what was happening behind the scenes. I appreciate the work of the man who restored it for us even more now. Thanks,
When I grew up we used to have a piano almost exactly like this, though before we got it the pianola mechanism had been removed. But it still had all the recognizable bits like the "window" where you load the scroll as well as a removable panel around the piano pedals where the pump pedals would've gone. It's awesome to finally see what our piano would've looked like on the inside when it was still a pianola.
Brilliant. All it needs is a Furby in Leiderhosen. Great sound too.
I absolutely love getting to see the insides of musical mechanical foofernoofers like this. ❤
These are beautiful, beautiful machines, aren't they? My grandparents had one when i was a kid (1970s-early '90s). I remember how tricky it was to find and maintain the rhythm for songs at the start, especially if you didn't know the song on the roll!
I keep meaning to look up when QRS stopped manufacturing new rolls. It must have been during or after at least the 1970s, since one of the rolls my grandparents had was "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree" from '73.
What a neat mechanism! No chips or transistors needed, just mechanics and air wow!
My college roommate bought one of these that was on a riverboat its entire life. When we took it apart we found loads of old coins and trinkets from the early 1900's. All of the tubing and bellows were hard as a rock so we never got it working as a player piano, still fun to work on though.
Omg we had one of these in my garage as a kid forever and we had about 300 rolls all different sizes… some of the tunes were epic… such fond memories. My dad rubbed the whole thing down and pai ted it black laquer it looked lovely. Ended up giving it away as noone would buy it! It looks the exact model we had.
I am working at the Grotrian Steinweg company in Brunswick and we have the same Playerpiano standing around waiting for restauration. So nice to see yours playing so well!
I really admire your patience and technical ability...
Seeing the Dropkey Murphys' first live performace was a real treat!
The "snake bites" holes are actually controlling part of the expression system emphasizing notes. (left ones for bass, right ones for treble) Not sustain. For sustain you can just make the hole longer in the paper. (Edit: No you can't as pointed out below correctly)
That's not the same. Holding a note only keeps the damper of that note off the string. Sustain keeps all the dampers off all the strings. This sounds different because of all kinds of harmonics sounding from strings that are not played.
@@diederikvandedijk You are correct you'll be missing out on the harmonics. Forgot about that one.
Although I’ve never seen the “snake bites” holes before, I believe @Muiskkabinett might be correct about them. Player pianos do commonly have a pneumatic to operate the sustain pedal, but it would be controlled by a hole along one side of the roll, and the hole continues for the entire time the sustain pedal should be pressed. At least that’s the way it was on the rolls that I’ve seen. I grew up with a player piano built in 1971, and its “soft” mechanism (an upright piano, so “soft” was just moving the hammers forward to shorten their throw) was split into bass & treble halves, pneumatically operated, although in this case it only had manual buttons to control their vacuum signals. So perhaps the “snake bites” holes were an automated way to soften some notes just before they were struck.
Now , part 2, diy plotter that will "print" (i.e carve out the holes) a new roll based on a midi feed 😅
Well! It's unsalted beef tallow for ALL my squeeky bushed bearings, from now on!
This was a lot of fun, thanks. I learned today that player pianos have auto-tracking, and that's amazing.
Do you realize that this is the very first recording technology? It's literally an analog recording of the performance. They even used to edit them by hand, cutting and pasting bits of paper together, and even punching out the glissandos and fancy trils by hand. I find it incredibly facinating to hear 100, 150 year old interpretations of music -- it's often different from how we hear the same pieces today. In partiular, it's always amazing to listen to the playing of the world's very first recording star, Scott Joplin.
8:24 - I know i am getting ahead of you but hot damn that paper tape reader is sooo cooool, what geniuses. the whole blimmin thing is pneumatically powered
You amaze me with your knowledge..... only very few people know that it is indeed called the 'boardy-woo-di-woo-woo'.... such a depth of esoteric knowledge!!
Good idea to know the names of the parts of a piano. For instance, the damper assembly system is called the damper "action", and the hammer assembly system is called the hammer "action", and the keyboard assembly system is called the keyboard "action". I watched other RUclips videos where professionals who actually work on pianos and pianolas and orchestrions know the names. And you are right to call the harp a harp. 😀
Thanks! Yeah I did it on purpose that. It's more a demonstration to show that words are not needed when you can put things together! I'm not a words person, definitions come second to physical demonstration. a demonstration that not knowing definitions should not stop anyone tackling projects respectfully.
19:57 Moonlight Sonata MVT3 My Absolutely Favorite piece of Piano Music 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 Good Choice Sam
thank you I was going nuts trying to find the name of the composition. It's been in my head on repeat since I saw the trailer for this episode on facebook 🥲
I'd never considered the power source for those before, but the fact that it's powered by a foot-pumped vacuum motor is fascinating.
Seeing this video reminds me of some of the time I spent with my Grandfather as a kid. He was always fixing player pianos and recruited me to hold various nuts and bolts as he combined one of these pianos and a pipe organ. Thanks for putting this video together!
a clear cover to showcase the mechanism would be a great addition
One should be able to 3D print a MIDI interface. Tuned up and in concert with the pipe organ will be a show indeed.
That is fantastic! So fascinating! Thank you so much for sharing this journey.
The things people can think up are amazing. All those pneumatic mechanisms! Thanks for showing all the parts, so cool.
Can't wait to see him put a static bike for people to power it up by themselves. :)
Thanks for showing how they work ! Took a lot of the mystery away for me 😅
Sam is out here living all my dreams!
Till I saw it in time lapse, I had no idea how long of a job those keys would be! Great video! More plz 😊
Working on a piano is nuts. It’s easy enough to do things once or twice, but doing it 88 times for keys (or 230 for strings!) is a whole other kettle of fish
Can’t wait to see you make your own piano rolls.
Oh man, I love watching that thing work.
Wow, that mechanism is beyond complicated and wow to you for fixing it up - love the explanations as you go - thank you so much.
You should add a big lever on the wall to one side so that Henry can take over from the peddling.
Can't wait to see it with midi
I can't honestly say I ever looked at a self playing piano and thought "well that looks simple, I could knock one out in my garage!" hats off to you for your attempts as always
What a wunderful beautiful mechanism. A midi interface which covers and opens the holes for the air is a great idea. Logical step for you Sam 👍
You should visit the mechanical music museum at Kew
I had no clue player pianos were so freaking cool!
what an amazing contraption! all that vacuum majiggy somehow fits quite nicely with that detuned saloon piano sound
Very interesting. I'd like to see how the tempo adjustment works, I didn't see any adjustable gearing or anything that might do that. Or maybe it's a vacuum restrictor? I'd also love to know how that auto alignment thing works - on all the pianos like this I've seen, the alignment was manual, there was a lever that physically moved the brass reader piece (with all the holes) left and right so that the operator would align it.
@ScottsSynthStuff I'm guessing that the vacuum would vary depending on the number of notes playing and the diameter of the take-up roll, so I would use a governor (like the one used in a wind-up gramophone) to keep the speed constant.
For tempo control, I don’t really know, but my guess is that there’s a flow-rate regulator controlling the vacuum supply to the motor. That way, it’ll stay at the set tempo, regardless how hard you pump the pedals.
For the auto-alignment thing, I grew up with a player piano in the house (1970’s US, the piano was built in 1971). It had both an auto alignment thing, and some knurled screws for manual adjustments. Its auto alignment thing didn’t work very well (poorly designed mechanism, unlike what we see in this video), so you were forced to use the manual adjustment pretty often.
Wow loved every minute of this . Especially the last mvt of the moonlight sonata. Well done. You certainly don’t need a computer.
Brilliant work Sam!
Let's make an hardcopy of an Ableton arrangement, put it on the roll and let's start the pianola. Whatever you touch - it turns to gold! 😀👍
Amazing! I live in Boston, MA USA and in the early and mid 1990s (and probably for a long time before that) an old man would somehow bring one of these player pianos to Harvard Square (in Cambridge - not UK :-) ) and busk with it *outside* on the street most weekend nights. He would sit there pumping the pedals and people would stand around on the side of the road and put money in the ole basket. I never saw the piano get delivered - he must have had a small van of some kind.
Working or not, thanks for letting us watch you get it to even this point. It's gorgeous. Plus, it was like watching Dad put a very complicated Ikea shelf together or something. Only tremendously British and about ten times as cool. :3
One of the most interesting videos I have seen since the organ videos! Thank you.
what an amazing instrument worth alot im sure
I've owned one of these for over 45 years. Very expensive to restore all the bellows, vacuum lines ect. Mine has the foot pedal pump but it also has the electric motor option to drive the pump and the option to slow it down or speed it up. I noticed that many of your keys are not fully dropping. It sounds good so far but you'll need some calibration/tuning, to get it up to par sound wise and performance wise. I'll never get rid of mine. Only wish there was a way to turn the volume down since they play so damn loud :) Cheers
Awesome machinery.
Sure, we have computers and midi.... but I LOVE that this is all mechanical, no electric needed.
I hope I get to visit the museum soon, you’ve got such cool shizz there now!
Interresting mechanism. The piano roll is like a physical midi file. I wonder if they had a programming piano to actually create the piano rolls from scratch. It’s pretty much a paper tape mechanism on steroids like those of a 60’s computer. Those had hole punchers as well as paper tape readers.
Removing the weights may be a bad idea, you will figure out why, possibly during fast or slow passages. (stuck notes, delay in note-off) Shouldn't be an issue while its manual, but might wanna put it back if you automate this. But it does work. The keys not moving was an 'advanced' feature so you could more easily play along with the music.
Having spoke to people they said the action was heavy. I only removed half. An advanced feature but not a welcome one! They are staying out cheers :D
I was wondering if someone was going to talk about leaving the keys up to enable playing along, I have a vague idea some late models let you switch it either way, but that may've involved electric controls, I don't know for sure.
Just Amazing work ❤
I have a complete restoration project of one of these (not a Grotrian though, unfortunately). I need to re-cover EVERYTHING on the action and the stack. It'll stay on the back burner for a little longer while I sort out the other piano projects.
Its wow! TY!
You can always spot a pianola owner . . . They're the ones with the enormous thigh muscles.
Fantastic video, as always.
I loved your names for stuff. Your knowledge of the subject is astounding! 😂
If I ever get rich... One of theses would be the perfect gift for my mum!
Is there anything you can't put back together!! Excellent, you have great skills. 👍
I bet there's quite a bit of interesting engineering behind recording and replicating those scrolls too.
🙃The best project for when analog electronic synths aren't analog enough! 😆
I've seen few of these in real life, and never the bits and pieces of it, awesome video!
Sam, I have two words for you: Conlon Nancarrow. Its a name, actually. He composed for the player piano in the most insane and demented way, long ago. Please look into his work!
Note: you're likely aware but I wanted to make sure :)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlon_Nancarrow?wprov=sfla1
I'd happily come around for a workout every day if it meant I could listen and see it play.
Noted: Unsalted Beef Tallow. =-)
What a cool bit of mechanical marvel.
The red line on the rolls indicates tempo variations. You most follow the line wite te leve of tempo thats extacts below the red ondulated line.
This is to add fell to the pianola.
You don't have to follow. Everything is optional in this world :)
Brilliant mate - MOAR!!! 😅
bloody fascinating
I am now waiting for the midi interface and constant vacuum sans pedals !
the vacuum solenoiuds you linked are the ones i am using.
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER great minds think alike fools seldom differ 🤣
Years ago, you used to be able to buy a wall poster of the Duo-Art Reproducing Piano logic diagram. The way the a player piano works is basically in binary (either there's a hole in the piano roll or not) and it takes a lot of complex logic to not only play the notes but also the expression. I've always regretted not buying one when I had the chance.
Dude, this is super cool.
Wow a player Piano wish I had on of these at my home, but I happy to have a normal old salon Piano
Amazing!!
brilliant work Sam. A nice bit of 3d jigsaw work on a grand scale!
What a fantastic piece! We have one of these (a Schaff Bros. Co. Solotone) at a museum I volunteer at and it works flawlessly. It was upgraded to run off electricity some time ago, so I'm curious if the vacuum engine is still intact on it.
SAAAAAM what are you doing?! It's not a foofernoofer, it's a bunglegrundle! I can't believe you would do this Sam. You don't know what you're doooooiiiiinnnnggg
You need to put a roll with one of these wild west saloon tunes in 😊
Absolutely fascinating, very enjoyable as well. I WANT ONE. :-)
Can you change out the foot pedals for a stationary bike? I think it would be funny to see someone dressed up in biking gear to play this song
Sam "You do not do what your doiiiiiiinnnn" 😂
Next step: Having a buick-rover V8 and its MIDI controled appropriate gear box to actuate the pedals in order to listen to the music while drinking a Pimm's #1.
(yes I know, a moped motor would be enough, but bigger is often better)
Well now you need to make it work with a henry vacuum and have him sit in the chair “playing it”
Would be cool if you could get some of Conlin Nancarrow's studies for player piano for that thing.
"Boardy-wardy-woo-woo" is just GOLD!
That vacume engine is brilliant, as was your explanation 👍
Wintergatan could learn something from it ;)
That "damn" killed me
Fucckin' Epic Lego build dude!
A midi interface would be a interesting idea