Piano Rolls massacred

[ivoree]

OMG - I just read this https://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/stephen_hough/blog/2009/02/20/punctured_rolls   Will they survive?

[pianowolfi]

Why should that be a massacre? It's just reality.

[ivoree]

I guess it is - I just thought about the accuracy of the roll but never thought about the pianist's side of it.  Really interesting to me - I always wondered why so many rolls sounded so bad

[arensky]

I found this paragraph particularly interesting, I hadn't thought about this aspect before


It's interesting that pianists whose playing had less rubato (Rachmaninoff and Lhevinne for example) tend to fare better on rolls than those who played with more rhythmic freedom (Paderewski and Friedman, whose piano rolls are ghastly). This has to do with the fact that rubato and sound are inextricably linked. You can't take the timing of a rubato and separate it from the nuance of a rubato and have anything other than a mess. When working at the turn of a phrase in, say, a Chopin mazurka we are literally splitting hairs of inflection and colour. If that F sharp is played a quarter-second later it will need a slightly different weight of sound. To hear it inadequately on a '78' is frustrating, but true; to hear it approximated on a piano roll (on a different piano, different hammers, different strings, different dampers, different soundboard, different rim, different keybed, different repetition action etc.) is a travesty based on a total fiction.

[richard black]

Most piano roll re-recordings (transfers to LP or CD) are extremely badly done. You haven't heard what they medium is capable of until you've heard transfers made by someone who really knows what he's doing. Unfortunately, there aren't many of them! I must get round to posting some Paderewski transfers done by Denis Hall, who really does know what's what. They're extremely fine.

[thine]

what is a piano roll?

[pianowolfi]

what is a piano roll?

You know these sort of buns especially designed for pianists to eat while practicing. They are made of a special dough so they won't always crumble between the keys.






 

[soitainly]

 I haven't seen a player piano in over 30 years. Can they record any dynamics, and if so, how? Do people still make player pianos and piano rolls? Don't get me wrong, I don't want one, just curious.

[richard black]

You know these sort of buns especially designed for pianists to eat while practicing

Don't be silly. A piano roll is a piano between to bits of bun, simple as that.
 

Can they record any dynamics, and if so, how? Do people still make player pianos and piano rolls?

The most common types of piano roll have one code for overall dynamics (with 32 different levels available) and one for any one single note out of however many are playing. To improve on this, clever roll editors made use of the fact that the mechanism can play a quiet note followed extremely rapidly by a loud one, and vice versa. There was a lot of skill in editing a roll so that it followed the original performer's intentions closely, and the performer was usually involved in this.

I haven't heard of anyone making a playing/reproducing piano in decades, though plenty of people are involved in restoring them. Rolls are still made, though, by two or three specialists around the world who have built or restored roll-making machines. That said, I'm not aware of any new reproducing roll recordings since the early 1930s, the new rolls are either copies of old originals or new player rolls (which are cut from first principles rather than recorded from a pianist playing a keyboard - the best-known examples are the studies by Nancarrow).

[joyna]

Some years agp I purchased a CD put out by Naxos (Historical Division) of a
digitally re-mastered performance on a Welte -Mignon piano.  You might check this
out.

[richard black]

Some years agp I purchased a CD put out by Naxos (Historical Division) of a
digitally re-mastered performance on a Welte -Mignon piano.  You might check this
out.

Some of the Naxos transfers were among the dodgiest, actually.