Joe Rinaudo presents a concert on his Style 20 American Fotoplayer. The concert took place March 22, 2020 just as everything was shutting down for the covid19 virus.
The American government needs to give Joe a grant so he can buy all the remaining Fotoplayer's and restore them to their former glory. We must protect this man at all costs! God bless Joe!!!
While playing an onboard Fotoplayer of course!! NASA have decreed that all future 'space' missions will carry a Fotoplayer to keep 'aliens' from invading.
31:40 sounds exactly like how drummers will make up their own parts in a songs , as soemone in a Drumline , maybe it’s only just for highschool so it’s more laidback, we just make up a lot of stuff if we loose our music or the music is too easy/hard and we want to spice it up or tone it down a bit.
The fact that this instrument, the fotoplayer, is SO FUN to listen to in 2023 makes me think it must have been absolutely exhillerating to listen to in a time where there were no televisions, radios, or computers, etc...
Well I understand how the piano plays itself now. Look up something called a player piano. It's essentially a paper with midi notes cut out and the holes suck air in and actuate some valves. Too complex for my brain to explain in fully but there's a video I watched a couple days ago.
There was a local pizza joint in Sacramento in the 80s that had one of these. A guy would come play the hell out of it once a week. As a child it just sounded like cartoon music, I had no idea I was being treated to a one of a kind experience from one of the rarest instruments remaining. Hearing this zany assortment of sounds brought back so many interesting memories. Thanks Joe, be well.
@@DBHEcho We had a similar pizza joint in Connecticut in the 80s, "Pizzas, Pipes, & Pandemonium." Sadly, my father only took me once, no matter how many times I begged to go back. Since then, the building has been a hardware store (NHD) for a little while, and now it's a Planet Fitness.
At the time we originally made this video as a facebook live concert the upload speed was non- existant at Joe's house and the feed kept cutting out. We had a seperate audio recorder and video recorder going, but the HD video quality turned out to be trash. I downloaded the facebook video and married the better audio recording and that is what you are watching now. This is what happens when my daughter saw a meme of Joe on twitter at 3 am on Wednesday, reposts it saying she has known Joe all her life and is a close family friend, and then the repost gets 250 thousand re-tweets overnight with people asking for a concert. Between Wednesday and Friday she was contacted by various streamng services all asking to facilitate the concert and monetize it. The catch was we had to use their equipment and software. RU-vid had a policy that in order to go live you needed something like 500 subscribers, and we didn't even have a channel at that time. We knew we had to strike while the iron was hot and had no time for promotion or figuring out anything other than setting up a very basic smartphone and microphone system. We did a 2 minute test-run on Saturday and then decided to go live on Sunday night. There were ten thousand viewiers interacting with Joe and asking questions. My daughter Nina is dong the announcing. It was exactly one week after the big Covid shutown, and we were happy to give the world something to occupy their time and put a smile on their faces.
This is actually a form of computer! The paper rolls are the storage media, the instrument is the processor, and Joe executes special instructions when needed!
@@jeffreyyoung4104 Funnily enough, in robotics faculties at universities, the question "what is a robot?" is similarly broad. If it's something that executes instructions on its own and takes action in the physical world to make something happen, a microwave oven is a robot.
@@anonymike8280A computer is any sort of machine that does computations. Meaning that bow the digital and analog systems can be designed to be compute as long as they can perform automatic calculations, input outper functions, and ideally some form of loop and or logic gate. Machine completely qualifies in the same way analog automatic machines have had in the past. Fact, the term computer used to be an actual human job position that basically meant someone who's really good at high level mathematics and or fast calculations which then got replaced by machines over time.
Comments are now available. When this was first posted nearly 3 years ago there were various restrictions when setting up the video and that caused the comments to be turned off.
Honestly, this needs to be taught to Disney so it can be recreated by young blood at the parks. Imagineers could put there expertise behind restoring this stuff.
Disney asked us to make things that look like this but we're merely speakers that played pre-recorded music. The old Disney is long gone. 20 years ago they got rid of all these kinds of mechanical musical instruments because they took too much maintenance and weren't a profit center.
I'm amazed at the talent of this man. There should be a university course or degree in musical history to play historical instruments like this. An absolute legend. I wish I was younger to learn how to play the instrument. God bless you, Joe
@@garygibson5983 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Ot_2aOfY-Z4.html You can really hear Joe's influence in the first song. (This is a meme video of an AI Drake rapping over "goofy" songs that sound like they're played with a fotoplayer. Would love to see you collab with Zakk James!)
My brain literally went "Wait, this is the SMALL machine?!" What a wonderful video, thank you so much for making this happen and thank you Joe for sharing this amazing history and your talent!
As a clock repairman and multi instrumentalist, I would be absolutely honored to wake up to Joe's magnificent fotoplayer concertos! The hour of triumph is probably my favorite roll.
I just watched the California Gold "the original episode" where they also featured his projector that would be playing along with a Fotoplayer, he is such a fascinating gentlemen. I I'm so glad this video popped up all of a sudden.
what an absolute flex. i don't even want to imagine the work it took to get this magnificent piece of musical engineering operational again, or the trek and a half you had to take to find those rolls. god bless Joe Rinaudo.
Joe Rinaudo, thank you so much for taking the time to share this wonderful machine with us and taking the time to answer our questions. I feel so honored to have stumbled upon this video today. I've laughed, cried and been overwhelmed with joy. I enjoyed learning about this machine as much as i have watching you operate it. Its a very wonderful thing. Thank you sir. You are very generous. I am so thankful for people like you who take the time and effort to preserve these wonderful pieces of American history. Thank you ,sir.
I think one of the coolest things is that it's a player roll system. But because of the interactive portion with the artist at the console, every single performance was still unique to that showing.
Just found that Disney toon scene... A hilarious throwback to silent-movie era slapstick, with Joe playin' that cartoon Fotoplayer at five furlongs per jiffy! Great stuff!
One of a kind Joe ( Fabulous sound ).. It is beyond belief that your Photoplayer was ever created. Please don't give up, you may get the hang of it one day. Good luck Boy. Bill Headford, Cornwall England.
arglaggin car of 🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂 The prety song they make tglaggle sand, the song they play at glognut stands that could joyou 😀😀😀😀😀😀😀joyou🙂🙂🙂🙂🙃😇🙂joy Reminder to tear apart emphosoposters!!
The Great Race just made my day. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time. It reminds me when me and my dad would watch it every Friday night. You have no idea how happy you’ve just made me. Thank you
Thank you for your reply.I really miss Jim. we did the pipe organ wiring in two buildings on Sumner street. Him and I did the wiring the first building using the white telephone company style crimps. We stay up and it took 3 days to complete everything. Then of course we did more work tuning the pipes..I only had 1 year of piano lessons but Jim liked hearing me play the pipe organ. He was a really good piano/organ player.
It's absolutely wild how in between the invention of electric motors and the invention of synthesizers, there were contraptions like this with an entire array of actual physical instruments controlled by a singular console. An old theater near me has something like this that's an entire organ, and it's absolutely beautiful, like one of these Fotoplayers but with enough force to make the floor rumble.
In the 1950’s there was a real live ice cream parlor in Eagle River Wisconsin. It was a classic original. White marble counter tops, wire bistro tables and chairs, a red and white color scheme with a white and black mosaic tile floor. And there was the mandatory two little old ladies scooping out ice cream, getting the candies and and squirting real soda water into the glasses with flavored syrup in the bottom,,, “one squirt or two?” But the real treat was the back wall of the store. It was an entire automated orchestra in a box. Behind the bubbly glass doors were instruments, beautiful instruments of all types. Violin, cello, piano, many types of drums including a really big one with red, black and chrome lettering on it. There were probably 15 or twenty instruments. Each instrument had every sort if wire, strings, boards, supports, tubes, gears and pulleys connected to and obscuring them. When you put in a dime there was some groaning and strange wooden sounds as it awoke. And then it would explode to life. Loud drum beats. Wild piano. Frantic string instruments. And wonderful whistles. All together they blasted out Sousa Marches, the Star Spangled Banner, Beautiful Ohio and tons of patriotic songs from World War I. It was magical to a six year old boy in the north woods summer.
This makes me rabbit hole into the photo-player. Because this is clearly in a beautiful moment after film yet before talkies. I have to wonder if our gracious host is also a musical historian with specializations in Hollywood and:or American film history. And also whether there was a “same way every time” vs an “open to current events via small musical expression” beef.
zeer geachte heer, ik heb genoten van uw bijzondere muziek. In deze toch weer moeilijk tijd, voor ons in Europa, heeft uw muziek mij vrucht gebracht...heel veel dank daar voor....
This is just beautiful to watch. I am always so amazed at the intricacy of the machanics behind machines like these and the Wurlitzer organ. Thank you for doing what you do!
Another thing I've been wondering is the name of the opening song he plays. It gets stuck in my head, but I don't think Google would understand why I'm trying to sing to it Michael Winslow-style, lol!
Joe, you are wonderful. I've never seen an instrument like this before. You made me smile. By the way, I played the clarinet in high school & college, still wish I could learn how to play the piano.
I believe it is fascinating to see how Joe is playing on the machine !!!! Wow! And I love the other comments. Nothing discouraging and all loving people.
Joe mentions that they have a Photoplayer in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney Australia. Unfortunately, they still had it in storage and not on display, possibly because no one in Australia knows how to play one. I visited the museum about 2 months ago and did not see it on display.
A few years ago was at the Speelklok museum in the Netherlands and didn't see their Fotoplayer. I asked the person on duty and she said You mean that thing with all the buttons and levers??? It's in the warehouse for maintenance.
I originally stumbled across the California Gold episode about Joe at the beginning of Covid. Sorry I missed this concert from 2020! I hope Joe is doing great! ❤
He is doing well and spending as much time as possible getting the parts Madd to completely rebuild the workings of the Fotoplayer. It still plays reasonably well since the original rebuild in 1976.
That would be beyond amazing. I wanna try to get some musicians and engineers to collaborate and make a new fotoplayer AND write sheet music for modern songs and even have us all take turns on it and play some modern songs on this incredible machine
Jim Spohn played the pipe organ himself. We made 5 different sound chambers/ Included pipes, drums and train whistler. He also played at many well recognized theaters as the organnist for silent movies. Whenhe died, I do not know who got all the collected things he had, like 2 plaeyer pianos. and many player piano tolls. He used to show some silent movies he played to here at the Granada Theater in Bakersfield. The theater now belongs to a indian ? church across the street.
I knew Jim and visited the Granada, but I don't think he played for silent movies at other theaters. He worked on the organs of all those other theaters. I'll bet everything went to the dump just like the fantastic organ he built in the Granada. It was innthe process of being sold and someone got the ear of Jim's wife and lead her to believe she was getting ripped-off. The person facilitating the sale backed-off and told rhe wife she was on her own....and there were no buyers with the money this guy told her it was worth. A few years later I was doing a show at the Bakersfield Fox and some guy was telling me that it was too bad Jim's organ never came to the Fox, as the one being used our the show was rented. He said he watched it being destroyed at the dump.
