Making new piano rolls in the days of online music streaming is less a business and more a labor of love. When you buy a JAZZAPATION PIANO ROLL, you are primarily paying for manufacturing costs and the royalties our musicians make per piano roll sold. That’s because we are committed to charging as low a price as we can without sacrificing quality, as well as continuing to attract outstanding musical talent by compensating them fairly.

Our hand-played arrangements are all captured on high-end digital pianos or acoustic pianos with built-in MIDI capability. Rather than recording an audio file, MIDI allows us to capture what is, in essence, a virtual piano roll of the artists’ playing. We use Logic Pro X to edit these performances to play correctly on a player piano, while still preserving the overall personality and flair that every artist brings to their performance.

Deep Henderson was recorded during a live concert at the home of Bill Hoffman. You’ll notice quite a difference between the unedited, live take and the edited final product:

Deep Henderson unedited

Deep Henderson edited

You may be inclined to ask, “aren’t you editing out all the subtleties of the hand-played performance?” Absolutely not! The main challenge faced in the editing process is interpreting sustain pedal usage. In many cases, pianists use a technique called “half-pedaling,” in which the sustain pedal is not fully engaged, but rather, only partially engaged. This helps the pianist create subtle legato effects that a pneumatic “loud pedal” on an ordinary 88 note player piano is unable to recreate. The elongated notes you see in the “edited” picture allow us to emulate the pianists intended legato/half-pedaled sound within the parameters of a pneumatic player piano’s function. Most—but not all—of our rolls are snapped to a grid, so that our rolls can be perforated at an economical step-rate and to insure that our rolls will make any player piano in average condition sound as excellent as possible. Our editing process ensures that the artist’s intent shines through on your piano!