Push up Piano Player

Push-up Player

The pneumatic player piano mechanism, played by perforated paper music rolls and powered by suction, made it’s big public debut in America in the late 1890’s in the form of the Aeolian Pianola, a “pushup” external piano playing device. From that time until a few years after 1908 when 88-note music rolls were standardised, many early brands of mechanisms were developed and incorporated into pushup piano players and player pianos. There were many and varied scales of rolls for these devices, there were, 58, 65, 70, 73, 82, and 88 , many of these were short lived and are fairly rare today.

88 note rolls are the standard today (as mentioned earlier) . As with midi which was standardised in 1981 so to were piano rolls, as different rolls weren’t compatible in different players.

I have two pushup piano players, both of which are the “Claviola” manufactured in Germany and very well made. One is a 73 note player made around 1904 , I restored this particular player about three years ago and I’m fortunate enough to have a hundred rolls for it, mostly all classical.

The other one is a “Claviola” too but is a standard 88 note pushup but also a themodist, (which simply means - has more expression capabilities) it was probably made a couple of years later. At present it is in a thousand bits all around my shed , I’m in the process of re-building it, with , I might add a long way to go yet. “Patience it’s called !!!” I’m hoping to have it going by the end of the year, “but I’m not holding my breath”. Push-up Player Keys

The beauty of these devices is that your not limited to the one piano, you can in fact play any piano with it. It’s great being able to hear some of these golden oldies on “new” pianos.

Reproducing Mechanisms were also built into pushups, or Vorsetzers as they were called which is German for “set-before”. Welte Mignon was the main manufacturer of these but there were a few others.

I in fact would like to build an Ampico Vorsetzer one day (there were never any made in the Ampico configuration) I have seen two that have been made by collectors and would like to do like wise. If there are any collectors reading this and have had experience in this field or have some spare parts for this (I’m still hunting) I would be pleased to hear from them, so please e-mail me.

I’d like to use this to experiment with Midi and the computer age., ie. electronic keyboards, roll cutting, roll copying, editing, roll scanning, etc. There has already been a lot of work done in this area as there is quite a lot of enthusiast’s out there fairly keen to travel along this line. I’d also be keen to here from them too. “Has anybody out there ever built their own roll cutter ?”