Well, thank you to one and all, I'm overwhelmed!
Hello, ahinton, I should have guessed you wouldn't be far away - rather pleased about that. Invitation to visit still holds.
Ruby2, I'm out of practice with other people's repairs, but your piano looks like either a Triumph Auto or a Higel. The tubes to your wind motor governor could certainly do with being replaced.
You can still buy decent rubber tube of the right sizes from W. Mannering and Co, in Bellingham, south-east London -
http://www.mannering-rubber.co.uk.
In general terms, pianola repairs are not difficult, but they are time-consuming. Those who do it for a living don't get rich, because customers don't really believe the time it takes. For the piano side of things, you can obtain piano sundries from Heckshers in Camden Town -
http://www.uk-piano.org/heckscher. Rubbercloth is not as easy to find as it used to be. Rick Alabaster in Australia used to sell good cloth, and you'll find his details if you scroll down the page here -
http://www.player-care.com/supplies.html.
But for most people wanting small quantities of a variety of materials, try the following suppliers in Kidderminster -
http://www.musicanic.com. I haven't used them myself, but their penultimate predecessor was a lovable rogue whom I used to visit in the 1980s and '90s, who smoked like a chimney and charged for secondhand piano rolls according to their length!
To those wanting to know what a pianolist does, to save me copying it all out longhand, might I refer you to the webpage at
http://www.pianola.org/history/history_pianolists.cfm? You'll find the explanation starts there, and continues on other linked pages. There's also a list of some well-known pianolists, and if you dig, you'll find freely downloadable pdfs of various manuals. I shall never finish the website, so there are areas which are incomplete, but if you look carefully, you will find most of the important topics are covered, and there are many mp3s of musical examples. Please don't all download immediately - we are limited to 250 Mb download each day for the whole world, or we risk being taken off the air!
Questions about Stravinsky and the pianola can mostly be answered at
http://www.pianola.org/history/history_stravinsky.cfm.
Someone will ask why you need a pianolist when Paderewski already recorded the roll. That's not the pianola, it's the reproducing piano, which is different.
http://www.pianola.org/history.history.cfm will explain it all.
Finally, do remember that the pianola is simply an instrument, dependent on the way in which it is played. It can be used for mechanical-sounding music, though it was not designed for it, and it can be used for classical and romantic music, jazz, pop of various vintages and so on. If you hear it being played mechanically, that will reflect the choice or perhaps the standard of the player. You don't have to go far for that, since YouTube is full of such performances.
Oh, and by the way, I am not a Cardinal. Cardinal Rex Lawson was a Nigerian band leader from the '50s and '60s whose name still resonates in the world music community. Our Nigerian postman delivered a parcel last year and couldn't stop grinning when he read my name.
Good to meet you all.
