How Does A Player Piano Work? - A Basic Explanation 

Who would even think of this? Beyond genius.

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.

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!

Amazing technology for 1929

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.

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 can't believe something that complicated from back in the 1920's actually works. Great video, Thanx!!

I got my first player piano yesterday, going to do a full resto by myself!

How did I go by all my life without this information?

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!

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.

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.

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.

Great video, glad it got recommended to me (:

Thanks for the video, I was looking on how those pianos worked after starting watching Westworld, truly amazing!

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.

I have this exact piano which has been completely restored to original specs. I always wondered how it worked. THANK YOU - This was fantastic!

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.

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 this. I was able to get my great grandmothers piano to work scrolls again for the first time since I was a little kid. Tempo is a little wonky but it still works pretty well.

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.

Ingenious. I often wondered how those tiny little holes played the notes. Thanks for the 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.

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. I’ve been trying to get my grandmothers Steoeber working properly. This video answered several questions

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.

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 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🙏

Merci beaucoup pour les explications, bien faites et pas trop rapide, je suis français et j’ai tout compris!

That tracking servomechanism is so beautifully simple. Great video!

You make the excellent observation that transposer tracker bars do not have sustain pedal holes because they don't always line up.

This was recommended to me somehow and on top of thanking RU-vid for the rec, I thank you for the neat video. Completely awesome. Have subscribed.

My piano playing sucks too. Brilliant explanation. I love the fact that midi imitates the pianola Roll.

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.

Wild wild west ! Insanely complex pieces of machinery! Love it ! You can connect a shop vacuum by the way ! It will work

This is incredible, such an amazing machine. So cool

This is crazy complicated I can’t believe the things people’s used to come up with.

Fascinating. Thanks for the tour!

Insano stuff, I'd never be able to reproduce this amazing invention, Edwin and Edward were freaking geniuses!

This is INSANE! What an amazing invention!

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.

For a basic explanation, yours is very good

This is so cool, I gotta get one someday. Would be so fun to restore something like this!

Really fascinating. I had no idea.

Thank you! Well done.

This is fascinating.

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).

I love this Piano

3:44 lol that was cute

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

Can you do a video taking the top system out and putting it back together? I'm trying to get my player piano going.

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.

Thanks indeed. Very well explained.

Thanks a lot for this!

Great video. I was curious about this and you have satiated that curiosity!

Awesome! Really interesting.

I am a amateur keyboard player and am thinking of purchasing a used piano. However I am very interested in player piano. Will I be able to use it as a regular piano? What are your thoughts on this? Will this also play as good as a regular piano? While some people think a player piano was a gadget in that era, I am thinking this was a work of a genius: a regular piano and a player piano all in one.

Wow! It's an Otto Higel if I'm not mistaken! Neat! (the player action)

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?

Incredible

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 love this video and player pianos😍😍😍👍

Hi Chris, thank you for this video. What kind of maintenance do you do for it? Looking to purchasing one soon, a Bell 1900.

i love this machine!

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?

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.

sick!

thank you bro

Excellent vid. I suddenly wondered how they worked, though why I was thinking about them, who knows?

I love this song😍😍

That's the exact piano my grandmother had

Yay, Oshawa! 🇨🇦

I enjoyed your explanation…essentially.

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)

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...

It was create and “invent” by ... god ? LoL... but more than a genius one are behind this type of Piano was incredible.... sensational !

great content!

Cool

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

Thank you! =D

Wao

Is there a difference between piano brands vs rolls? Are the rolls interchangeable?

Does anyone happen to know if some of these types of player pianos were ever refitted later on to also run on electricity, rather than manually pumping the foot pedals? Back when I was a little kid in the '70s, our house had one, and I remember sitting on the bench, pumping the pedals to listen to the songs, but I also have vague memories of it being able to be set up to run on its own, without having to have someone physically operating the pedals. Am I correct, or is my memory just playing tricks on me?

Yay let’s listen to piano music with no dynamics or articulation said no one ever. Archaic

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.

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.

How do you play music without having to press the pedals?

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.

GASTON JOSH GAD LUKE EVANS ENSEMBLE QRS ROLL PIANO

leg day piano :D

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?

My niece's husband has a player piano whose make escaped me at the moment. The tubing is right in front of the strings below the pin block, which raises the question, how are you supposed to tune it if you can't get your temperament strip in to mute the strings when setting the temperament?

How would I align and set my role? Mine will move left and right and it starts to mess up my paper.