Advice - Bad
drduarte
8:57 am
Dear Doctor, what is the best way to fit a mandolin rail?
Push the contents of a box of brass drawing pins into the striking face of the hammers to give you all the rinky-tink you need! An average box has about 60 pins so start a couple of octaves up or you’ll run out of rinky-tink before the high treble. Your QRS rewind holes may never sound the same again! Not all music may be suited to pianos thus doctored (no pun intended). Be warned though – that serene ballad of loveliness “The Rosary” may sound worse than usual. My inspirational genius has created a special new version suitable for mandolin rail players. The roll is;- Roll No.D-02 The Rosary – a 4 hand ragtime one-step arrangement + chime effects (Nevin arr Duarte). Why not also try my Roll No.D-03 Indian Sitar Dinner Music (traditional arr Duarte) as sitar music sounds quite realistic on a mandolin rail.
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Advice - Bad
drduarte
8:55 am
Dear Doctor, so as to easily identify my boxless Meloto foxtrots I’ve painted the spool ends blue and red. Red for hot music and blue for tunes that leave me cold.
A good idea. I painted all my roll spools accordingly until I got to “The Ritual Fire Dance” which should be “red” however it always leaves me cold so it’s all mucked up and I have consequently thrown your letter away in the bin! Incidentally Welte once used your type of colour system – turgid dull germ-manic stuff on red paper and tunes of sheet music that only ever sold less than 50 copies on green paper. Ever since then, for fear of looking uneducated, musical snobs have regularly parted with serious cash for these rolls which are so dull even bookworm leave them alone. As the old saying goes;- “Welte – bin, James P. Johnson – spoolbox.”
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Hymns
Saturday, Jul 19 2008
Advice - Good
drduarte
8:52 am
Dear Doctor, a vicar recently donated several cases of hymn rolls to me. What should I do?
What a dirty trick! “Donate” them straight back and give the man a stern ticking off while you’re about it too! This is all just another sad example of the lengths some folks’ll go to in trying to dispose of old hymn rolls. Dressing up as vicar, indeed!
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Ramblings
drduarte
8:51 am
Dear Doctor, apart from Hedy Lammars rolls did any other piano rolls help win the war?
Reading of the passing of pianola roll developeur extraordinaire Hedly Lammar I feel duty bound to inform you of the recent sad passing of a similar sub standard footnote to wartime history, Miss Ida Threebles of Forest Gate, London who passed away at the age of 97. During the Blitz master-spy Helmut Wagner wrote down plans for the invasion on the back of a 65-note roll of Beethoven’s Fifth. His absence for several weeks on covert spying missions prompted his landlady to conclude he’d done a runner and so she pawned all his possession at Miss Threebles shop. Miss Threebles, unwittingly, played the spy’s secret roll on her Angelus Duplex player. Too fat and lazy to swap spools around she played it back to front upside down and was astonished to see plans for the german invasion front line instead of the german composition’s metrostyle line. Pedaling ever faster in her excitement she collapsed before the end of the roll, fell off the piano stool and knocked herself out on a case of black market condensed milk. She was discovered on the floor by her sister Dolly the next morning and the two contacted Scotland Yard with the roll. Invasion plans were thwarted, Britain saved, Wagner secretly executed at the Tower and Churchill had the BBC broadcast Beethoven’s Fifth so Germany would know the game was up. It was speculated but never proven that Wagner got the spying/music idea from a George Formby movie and his failure to grasp English “humour” led to fatal flaws in his plan and his subsequent downfall. Miss Threebles died in obscurity leaving no children and very little money due to decades of taking pledges on unsaleable items such as 65-note rolls. Her flat was full to the ceiling with items completely priceless;- namely old newspapers and jam jars she was apparently “saving” all of which readers will be pleased to learn have been left in her will to the sole benefit of the Musical Museum at Brentford. The museum is unsure whether to store these until they acquire some price by virtue of age or to dump the lot.
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Advice - Good
drduarte
8:49 am
Dear Doctor how may I convert my player piano to remote control?
Buy an old vacuum cleaner motor from Honest Jim. Bung it up the backside of the piano connected to the a long electric lead with a table lamp switch half way along the cable. This is your main remote control. Take two long pieces of string and tie one to the play/rewind and the other to the tempo. Fit two pulleys on the ceiling and run the string up to the ceiling and across the room to the comfort of your easy chair and down again. It is possible to fit other pulleys to the ceiling so the strings dangle down conveniently above your chair. You might fit these with a tassel or for a more antique look perhaps a chain and pull ring from an old overhead loo cistern.
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Inane
drduarte
8:47 am
Dear Doctor, what’s the oddest thing you found inside a player piano.
After putting up “Lost” signs on trees down my road I was in despair as to the whereabouts of my pet cat. In despair I sank down into my armchair and put a roll on my custom built remote control pedal-electric “Meloto-Art” player. Pulling the remote control string the motor kicked into life with a most wretched goddam awful racket! I thought I had pump thump until I opened the bottom board. The cat shot out and made for the door but I managed to knock it out with a well thrown roll of “Der Meistersingers Von Nurnberg”. I went straight down the vets to have him neutered after that I can tell you!
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Sucker
Saturday, Jul 19 2008
Ramblings
drduarte
8:45 am
Dear Doctor, how much suction can the average player supply. I am very interested to know.
Quite a jolly amount infact! I was recently perusing some holiday brochures when I hit upon the eco-friendly idea of utilising suction power for locomotion. I mounted a spare Aeolian treadle pump with some old bicycle parts into an old pedalo from the local boating lake. The theory was that suction power would drive the turbines round. Sadly I fitted the flap valves wrongly. My treadling sucked in water, the boat sank and I nearly drowned. I felt just like Icarus must have! Back at home a week later I fitted the unit with wheels and brushes and now ride it up and down my hallway as a ride-on vacuum cleaner. I got the idea from Amateur Gardening looking at lawnmowers funnily enough!
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Advice - Good
drduarte
8:44 am
Dear Doctor, how may I rid my piano of the smell of mouse urine?
You want something to cancel it out, something that really stinks. Try a roll of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita.
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Inane
drduarte
8:40 am
Dear Doctor, I recently acquired a roll of “The Ragtime Goblin Man” and was wondering if this related to a true life character much the same as “Bill Bailey” does.
Yes indeed, the Ragtime Goblin Man did exist. Early in his career he was the Jig-time Cakewalk Man. He was banned from the 1894 St Louis Cakewalk Championship upon discovery his legs were naturally bandy and he was therefore to be regarded as professional. (Incidentally, Torvill and Dean retired from ice skating championships for similar reasons.) He resurfaced as the Ragtime Goblin Man around 1905 and developed a reputation for scratching ivory piano keys with a sharpened treble clef. After the ragtime crash of 1918 he found himself unemployable. Defecting to Germany in 1939 he restyled himself as The Wartime Gremlin Man and mainly seized up Spitfire engines during WWII. In the early 50’s recanting his ragtime reminiscences for the book “They All Played Ragtime” he vehemently insisted that he was a genuine goblin and had solely invented ragtime and as such had never really been taken seriously. These “reminiscences” never reached the final print and he died very senile indeed six months later.
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Advice - Good
drduarte
12:38 am
Dear Doctor, if I play a roll which requires a lot of deft manipulation of the tempo lever my false arm often scratches the wood. Is there anything I can do?
Cut a large “Y” shape about 8 inches high from some 1/8″ sheet metal. Drill a hole at the bottom of the “Y” then screw it with some washers to the front of the piano. If you rest your false arm in the “Y” you’ll find it will pivot left and right permitting tempo lever manipulation whilst keeping your false arm a safe distance from scratching the wood again.
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