One question one question: in between our director and thurston, I hear an intercom announcement. Kennywood’s carousel building does not have an intercom system in it, so is this not a recording of Kennywood’s band organ?
I’ve always wondered how it works. I own a player piano so I understand the whole paper roll mechanism in it. But like, do they just have endless rolls with music for the whole day on them? Or is it midi and controlled by a computer? Or perhaps they literally pay someone to sit behind it and switch out rolls all day. Sounds like a pretty nice job lol
Roll 1 plays while roll 2 rewinds. When roll 1 is done there’s a hole in it that the tracker bar reads and the organ starts playing roll 2 that just got rewound. Then roll 1 that just played starts getting rewound and after 2 is finished roll 1 gets played again, and it goes back and forth like this for 10 hours a day, 100 days a year and for the past 106 years since it was made. Pretty wonderfully amazing piece of engineering, and pretty complex. Nowadays we just listen to it from a tiny speaker on our phones, but back then they had to build this to get this music. Boy we have come so far in technology, but these old band organs can’t be beat
Basically works the same as a player piano but with a few more complexities. The rolls control the organ’s registration (different ranks of pipes and the bells on/off), and the drums. The Kennywood 153 is a duplexer, meaning it can hold two rolls at a time, and one plays while the other rewinds maintaining a constant output of music. I worked at the park on the carousel for 3 years and loved it and it only continued to feed into my love for carousel organs and this one in particular. I eventually began to handle essentially all the day to day maintenance on it in my last year of working at the park. I frequently changed the rolls for my own personal sanity as it gets old listening to the same songs all day on repeat and it’s fun to hear new music. Kennywood has a decently sized collection of rolls with a good variety of music that can be suited for different events throughout the year. (Christmas, Halloween, patriotic, etc)
