How Does A Player Piano Work? - A Basic Explanation
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 พ.ค. 2020
- In this video, I do my best to explain the inner workings of my player piano, and how it works. The roll used to demonstrate is QRS roll 8818: Blue Tango by Leroy Anderson, played by J. Lawrence Cook.
At the time of uploading this, my channel is nearing 100 subscribers and 100,000 total views. I am incredibly thankful to all my subscribers and viewers for getting me here. I had no idea that I would have that many views/subscribers when I started uploading videos. - เพลง
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Who would even think of this? Beyond genius.
AND THAT'S WHO THINKS ABOUT IT
That's all I was thinking the whole time.
Edward Leveaux and Edwin S. Votey, basically super geniuses of their time
Someone that hated piano lessons.
And as far as I could see - no electricity involved !
Fantastically complicated. I wonder who invented it. By the way, this poor gentleman is trying his best to explain how it works. God bless his efforts.
I always wondered how one works, but seriously, the vaccuum storing, using ACTUAL PAPER as a valve and having a pneumatic vacuum engine to move it is just pure 200iq. I once built a vacuum engine out of lego of all things and with just a vaccum cleaner, they can easily reach 1hp and 6000 rpm. I always thought they worked like a music box, putting tension on the hammers, releasing them and then playing the note, also thinking it was spring or weight powered. But no! Thank you for this great video 🎉
Very interesting! My piano was formerly a player piano that was converted back, but I've always wondered how they worked. And now I am wishing it had never been converted because I just saw an identical one restored and for sale for nearly $30,000!!!! But my piano and I are good friends so I guess I'll just keep it as is, here with me. Thank you so much for this video.
I find this fascinating, because I do music production with MIDI files, and it's interesting to see how instruments were played automatically before computer technology.
Amazing technology for 1929
Just amazing technology in general, do you think any person these days would think of doing it this way? People would rather listen to music on their headphones...Jeez
I refurbish pump organs as my personal interest.
Extremely informative. I’ve seen it in western movies and I always wondered how it works. Thank you very much for posting this video
I got my first player piano yesterday, going to do a full resto by myself!
61 years on this planet, and I finally get to find out how these work! Thanks! Since the roll is "code" driving a real instrument, It's kind of MIDI!
Fascinating. Thanks for the tour!
I can't believe something that complicated from back in the 1920's actually works. Great video, Thanx!!
is this piano from the 1920s?
@@gracew150 I don't know if this particular one is, I'm not going to watch the entire video again to see if he mentions the date, however, it is very similar to a piano I'm nearly certain is from the 1920's (the foot pedals have been replaced by an electric motor)--th-cam.com/video/zsjuIVoWuEg/w-d-xo.html
Kids today think us old buzzards are stupid.....these inventions (ie Big Steam locomotives) Vs 2 'thumbs on a screen' ; (invented by us old buzzards) !!!
@@philhugill8458 th-cam.com/video/bsdWgmp4TaQ/w-d-xo.html
This is INSANE! What an amazing invention!
Here's my take on the air motor. When there is vacuum applied the motor, one of the bellows collapses. Then that makes the crank shaft turn which lowers another small door in front of another hole and that causes that bellow to collapse. This goes in circles like that.
Thank you! Well done.
That tracking servomechanism is so beautifully simple. Great video!
That tracking system is very unusual for most pianos. Typically the roll moves not the tracker. The transposing system is also an odd duck as many transposing bars just move the whole note range of the piano over instead of the whole bar.
How would I align and set my role? Mine will move left and right and it starts to mess up my paper.
@@sublime88dc What brand is your player piano? Wurlitzer had a really bad mechanism that shifts the roll back and forth constantly, there's nothing to be done with one of those...
@@PiotrBarcz it's a Modello. The auto on the roll doesn't work too good. I keep it in hand and twist the knob ţo adjust as it plays.
@@sublime88dc Disconnect the camshaft from the bellow on the tracker and you can just adjust the roll by hand, it's very effective and I used that method when my piano didn't have the tracker installed (it was away on a restoration vacation xD)
This was recommended to me somehow and on top of thanking TH-cam for the rec, I thank you for the neat video. Completely awesome. Have subscribed.
Ingenious. I often wondered how those tiny little holes played the notes. Thanks for the explanation
Thank you. I’ve been trying to get my grandmothers Steoeber working properly. This video answered several questions
Thanks for the video, I was looking on how those pianos worked after starting watching Westworld, truly amazing!
Incredible
Thanks indeed. Very well explained.
This is incredible, such an amazing machine. So cool
Wow, that is a classic steampunk-style invention. This video was very fascinating and quite informative. Player pianos are really cool and are awesome to watch. Thank you for this fascinating upload!
thank you for sharing such an in-depth tour of your piano. I’m really interested in pneumatics and this also inspires my passion in music. the fact that we can combine them is truly fascinating.
This is fascinating.
very interesting. My Grandparents had a player piano. That was one of my favorite things to pump and watch the keys play and the piano roll roll.
Thanks for the great walkthrough. I love mechanical devices and always have. A piano is complicated to start with, and it's amazing how all the player parts are fitted and working reliably.
Really fascinating. I had no idea.
Awesome! Really interesting.
Great video, glad it got recommended to me (:
I have this exact piano which has been completely restored to original specs. I always wondered how it worked. THANK YOU - This was fantastic!
Great video. I was curious about this and you have satiated that curiosity!
Thanks a lot for this!
This is so cool, I gotta get one someday. Would be so fun to restore something like this!
Insano stuff, I'd never be able to reproduce this amazing invention, Edwin and Edward were freaking geniuses!
Great video! I remember seeing these on older TV shows when I was a kd in the 80s an just assumed itwas magic. Thanks for the clarification. Again great video and explanation.
Thank you, currently restoring an old story and clark. Troubleshooting peddles right now which are very difficult. Roll goes very slow and is extremely tight and the pedals are a massive workout but it does play.
I worked tuning-up 6V-71 Detroit Diesels, I’ve also worked on clocks, but I have never seen any mechanism as complex as that in your video. There seems to be a thousand thing which could malfunction, but apparently they don’t.
The most important thing for good operation of any mechanism is maintenance. All moving parts need lubrication. What lubricant do you use?
As far as getting your piano tuned, it doesn’t sound that bad. Usually you don’t need a professional tuner, because most of the strings are in tune. Only a few loose strings can make a piano sound completely out of tune, but you can easily find these few bad ones. For middle and high notes, there are three strings for each note. With the sustain pedal down, pluck each string for a note. An out-of-tune string will sound off (usually flat) from the other two.
Takes a quarter-inch square socket on a ratchet or socket handle (a really long one, or use a pipe extension) and _verrrrrry slowwwwly_ turn the tuning peg for the offending string - tighten to raise the pitch or loosen to lower until the offending string matches the pitch of the other two. Same with the two strings per note on lower notes.
Doing this on your own, you can eliminate many of the wolfs which make the piano sound out of tune. Your piano will not be in perfect intonation, but it will be better, and the process is free.
More!! 👍
Usually, use graphite for lubricating wood and fabric, oil is only for all metal contact, like when rods pass through carriers or linkages. I know you asked 2y ago, but answer is valid.
Wild wild west ! Insanely complex pieces of machinery! Love it ! You can connect a shop vacuum by the way ! It will work
I live in Washington NJ it was once the “ piano capital of the world?
Cornish pianos were made here( they have 4 pedals) on them... I don’t know if they made player pianos though... also... the Beatty Organ factory was in town, it they both were destroyed in fires😞😞, way before my time... (I’m 71 years old) my uncle was a professional musician Eddie Johnson, and he was Judy Garland’s piano player at one time, he also played in Ed Sullivan’s show’s orchestra... he also played at the songwriter’s guild show honoring Sammy Fain! I love your videos... thank you so much for your sharing these great videos🙏
My piano playing sucks too. Brilliant explanation. I love the fact that midi imitates the pianola Roll.
I love this video and player pianos😍😍😍👍
great content!
sick!
Interesting setup of the strikers. My player action has little wooden fingers with brass buttons that hit the wippens while your piano has the rods going straight up through the support rail with little push rods instead.
Merci beaucoup pour les explications, bien faites et pas trop rapide, je suis français et j’ai tout compris!
i love this machine!
Back in the early 50s, my dad received a free player piano from one of our neighbors in southwest Detroit. All he had to do was remove it from their dining room to our sunroom. Upon getting it home, he refurbished it. It operated by pumping 2-foot pedals & I remember inscribed inside the door where the rollers were placed said it was built in 1913. We bought the music rolls at Grinnell's. Great times & memories.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Hello from Rwanda. I'm a piano tuner and occasional repairer. My friend runs a music school for children in Kigali. A very nice Swiss guy donated this to us - we have absolutely no idea how it works or what we're doing. The mechanism looks exactly like that at the top, but there's weird wires and tubes at the bottom - I think it works on a vacuum pump. I never thought I'd see one here, so this is incredibly helpful. Ours is in pretty shaky condition. We'd love to get it playing again.
And thank you so much for covering how to take the action out - I was wondering about that as we've got a couple of missing tuning pins and would need to replace them and restring.
The mechanical sustain is by far the best kind of manual sustain there is. You don't waste air when you use it and it only uses vacuum when the piano works it by itself.
I love this song😍😍
For a basic explanation, yours is very good
Thanks!
thank you bro
I love this Piano
Great video. I learned so much.
I’m going to go look at a player piano that I may get.
Can you show me how to take the cover off so I can see the inside?
Excellent mechanical marvel !! Apart from the ingenious details, I also noted that you have said the word "essentially" precisely 15 times throughout the whole video. (I counted them all).
Hi Chris…My upright is from 1913 with a loud, bass and treble levers. Do the rolls tell when to use these levers or did the piano player back in the day simply adjust these levers by ear? Also, when you have these player pianos tuned, does something have to be removed? If so, what? Thanks!
Thank you! =D
In the single valve standard action there are two gate boxes (they are small boxes with the linkages going into them). On gate box is on the right and has one sliding valve. The one on the other side has two sliding valves. The valve on the left is the re-roll valve that is closed in play and the other is the tempo valve. When the piano is set to play, the valve in the left gate box opens and admits air to the stack. The re-roll valve in the right gate box is closed while the tempo valve routes te air through the tempo governor making the roll played at desired speed. When the action is shifted into re-roll, the valve that lets air to the stack closes. The re-roll valve opens to bypass the governor and makes the air motor speed pedal dependent. What I have done to my action is disabled the re-roll valve to stay closed even in re-roll making the re-roll speed constant and adjustable to avoid damage to my of my rolls.
Thanks for your comments, I just acquired what looks like a piano that may have been restored a short time ago and the air motor turns the roll but no notes play at all and I’m certain that with your comments and this video I will find out why the notes are not playing. My guess is that a valve is faulty or a link has come off and is not actuating the valve. Thanks again.
@@sarahdeshay1394 It looks like it's been restored recently? It should work perfectly then, that's very odd that it isn't. Is there any key movement at all when you have it in play? If there is no key movement at all, go around the stack and see if all the screws are tight, if they're not, tighten them all. If that doesn't do it then the stack might be leaking like a sieve which would mean either the restorer had no idea what he was doing or that the materials used for the repairs were no where close to being good enough for the job.
Great video, thank you! I am new to all of this. I just got a 1910 player piano by The Autopiano Company. I don’t think my bar tracker works like yours since it’s so old. How does my tracker work?
You make the excellent observation that transposer tracker bars do not have sustain pedal holes because they don't always line up.
Well, at least this type. Some transposing action such as the Standard have a tracker bar that is split into two fixed sections at the ends, and a moveable middle.The sustain hole is in the left fixed end and the moveable section has 85 notes, which means 2 dead notes in the base end and 1 in the treble. I know a couple other player actions that were transposers where like this as well.
Some transposing tracker bars have an extra wide sustain hole to allow it to work in multiple positions. It really just depends on the player action.
Hi Chris. Your video was very informative thank you. I just got a player. Foster & Co. I looks like it has been redone but I really don't know. Looks in good shape. I notice there are screws on top at the back of the pedals. Not the pump pedals. The middle pedal doesn't have a screw. Is that normal or is it missing? Thanks.
Hi Chris, thank you for this video. What kind of maintenance do you do for it? Looking to purchasing one soon, a Bell 1900.
Cool
Yay, Oshawa! 🇨🇦
Excellent vid. I suddenly wondered how they worked, though why I was thinking about them, who knows?
The tracking system if effing ingenious.
Who in the crap ever thought that "we need to make a piano play all on its own"? Then the question is, who in the CRAP ever figure all of this out? This is on the same level of "confusing" with understanding how a computer works.
Thanks for all this info! Who do you use to tune this instrument? I have a piano tuner, but we aren’t confident in taking out the mechanisms before the tuner comes.
This is crazy complicated I can’t believe the things people’s used to come up with.
How do the holes in the paper communicate the inner dynamics of the song? Do you know? I definitely hear dynamics in these pianola songs... so amazing...
3:44 lol that was cute
You described the air motor very well. It's a 5-cylinder (Like an old Mercedes!) engine driven by timed vacuum in each "cylinder" rather than timed explosions in each. The crank shaft creates rotation to move the roll. (I am a Diesel mechanic) LOL.
Kinda like a steam engine powered by differential pressure between atmosphere and the vacuum system.
An early automated instrument. What did people think when they saw these in a time when maybe the telephone and other things were just beginning to appear or appear only in certain parts of the country? The song sheet or whatever it is reminds me of punch cards that very early computers used (though we may not think of them as computers but brought in the very basic principles of computers today)
Hope you can get back to lakeside park carousel soon! I too am waiting to get back to perkasie carousel which i visit alot, which has a stinson band organ
I hope so too.
Where did you find this piano Chris? I live in Oshawa and know some of the history of Williams and Sons Piano Works. My niece Jessica was thrilled when she discovered a Williams piano in a ghost town in Northern British Columbia.
What a GREAT video and GREAT engineering!
Have you ever mirror-ed a roll? I do not mean rolling it backwards. but horizontally flipping the paper on the roll so the whole melody will be inverted
I tried it once . Found it would tear the roll. Also, the paper would raise removing the seal one needs.
Can i ask please, have you heard of a kastner & co gors & kallmann, im looking at purchasing one but cant find any info via google.
Can you do a video taking the top system out and putting it back together? I'm trying to get my player piano going.
Sure! I will try to do it this weekend.
th-cam.com/video/8UBU33TpQlo/w-d-xo.html
@@ChrisPlaola thank you so much! That's awesome. I'm going to watch and see if I can figure out what's wrong with mine. I'll keep you posted.
@@salr.f7644 Np!
I enjoyed your explanation…essentially.
To get expression with the pedals, one of my tricks is to jam both pedals at the same time and that will give a burst in volume. Pedaling slower or lighter will result in very soft playing and you can actually stop pedaling so the music slows down and gets quieter at the same time for a more virtuoso kind of playing.
I enjoyed playing with the controls as one experiment with different expressions of music as well. Sometimes found that is interesting as it would sound exactly the same has music played earlier or later in history.
@@jamesgleeson6538 Yeah, good dynamics controls on player pianos are very nice when you like to make music very expressive instead of just adding sustain like I do
Beautiful, how can I buy one like this?
Hello Chris, If the player piano plays and rewinds correctly and I feel resistance in the pedals but the piano does not play any notes should I check the action shutoff near the bottom left side?
Is there a difference between piano brands vs rolls? Are the rolls interchangeable?
I don't know what drew me to this video today, but I kind of always thought that player pianos worked like music boxes. I was completely wrong. They are way more complex. Also never thought of large systems working on the same principle, but it makes sense.
Wow! It's an Otto Higel if I'm not mistaken! Neat! (the player action)
The player action is called "Plaola" and it was made by R.S. Williams.
@@ChrisPlaola Oh it's a Plaola. Intersting, I'll look it up and if i find anything interesting I will let you know.
@@PiotrBarcz I know, late reply, but I've seen a few of these Plaola mechanisms, and rebuilt 2 of them identical to this one, the tracking device works beautifully, best ever! even compared to the Otto Higel, or Standard 4 hole tracker, this player action was made in Ontario Canada in house by R.S. Williams & Sons for their pianos and other R.S Williams brand names like Ennis & Co, this whole player system is a joy to restore, it's a simple system, but effective with the manual sustain etc..
@@tony--james So this is a completely Canadian design? Man, you guys up North really know your stuff, that action is THE best!
@@tony--james The tracker I really like because it does absolutely nothing abrasive to the roll. Then again, on the rewind it might be rough for the roll because the paper might've slipped around a bit on the takeup spool because there is no active tracking system, it's a passive design.
Chris, I have two questions, and you might find them weird, but . . . first, loved the video. I wasn't exactly clear about the piano continuing to play when the "foot pumper" stepped away from it. Would the piano still play? And how long does it take a music roll to rewind? Does it depend on the length of the piece? Thank you!
The piano will continue to play for a short time after pumping stops because there is still vacuum in the system. My piano is pretty airtight, so it takes a few seconds. The rewind speed does depend on the speed. Longer rolls will take longer.
To get a little more complicated, the rolls don't rewind or play at a constant rate. As the roll on the spool gets "thicker", the roll actually passes over the tracker bar slightly faster. Think of it like a record, where the outside is actually spinning considerably faster than the inside. This is why the songs actually speed up a little towards the end when playing. This effect can be noticed in many of my videos, especially with the longer rolls.
There are these 2 pieces of leather, one on each of the 2 primary bellows that get push pumped on my player piano. At this point, they are both curled up on the sides and aren't covering over the 5 holes any longer. I'm wondering how completely sealed these leather strips are meant to be. It appears that they should only be there for the suction and should be allowed to expend some air. Can you speak to this at all? Thanks for your video!
Those holes must be completely covered by the leather strips in order for the pump to work properly. They essentially act as one way valves, allowing for air to be pumped out, but not back in.
do all pneumatics have normal pedals as well?
Hi Chris, I enjoyed your video, but it didn't address my problem. I was re-rolling a roll and it wouldn't stop rolling. The only way I was able to stop it was to unplug the piano. It is an Aeolian Player Piano. I is there a way I can stop this myself or do I need a technician? Thanks for your attention to this.
Sorry for the delay, but in electric player pianos, the leader of the roll is supposed to strike a limit switch in the spoolbox to shut the piano off after rewinding. That is what I would check first.
How would I align and set my role? Mine will move left and right and it starts to mess up my paper.
Hello thank you for the video what is the name of the song on the roll.
The song is "Blue Tango" by Leroy Anderson.
That's the exact piano my grandmother had
It was create and “invent” by ... god ? LoL... but more than a genius one are behind this type of Piano was incredible.... sensational !
Wao
eherr do i get the whole vaccuum to install on my haunted piano?
Sir, would one be able to output the Piano's sound to be heard any sound system? I would like to know;
Regard
Takes experimentation. Each piano is different and one's preference in sound. eg. I move a high quality microphone used for singing to various sections of the piano. Inside towards the front generally works well.
I wonder if there's a machine, or some way to make those rolls, starting from MIDIs
it'd be cool to make a "black MIDI" roll, for example, or have such rolls for some popular meme songs
My father's player piano doesn't seem to work. It's a Kingston. Any advice on what to do to figure out why it's not working?
I'm drawn to anything mechanical and these things hit all the notches. Question on the paper music rolls, some of the long multiple holes on the sheet don't seem to be hitting any notes. What are the purpose for these long string of holes ? (a screen grab @ 9:12 ish shows the holes in question)
If they put really long slits on the roll, think about it. Parts of the scroll would bend to the left or right, or tear. So to maintain the integrity of the scroll, they make little holes. The gap between the holes represents a very small amount of time, too little time for the key to rise up and down enough to cause the hammer to strike the string again, or allow the damper to close. So it produces one long note.