American Piano Company
The American Piano Company, or Ampico for short, in East Rochester ( NY ) was an American manufacturer of high-quality automatic pianos, including reproduction pianos from 1913 .
The American Piano Company was founded in 1908 through a merger of the companies Chickering and Sons from Boston , Wm. Knabe & Co. from Baltimore , as well as the Haines Brothers, Marshall and Wendell and Foster, Armstrong & Company (all Rochester (New York) ).
The main activity of this company was in the early three decades of the 20th century, before the era of radio . Right from the start, Ampico had hired the inventor Charles Fuller Stoddard (1876–1958), who developed and improved the automatic gaming equipment (Ampico reproduction equipment "A" and later the "B").
The pianos manufactured by Ampico were known colloquially as electric pianos , but they are pneumatically controlled. The only electrical component in later years was the motor that moved the bellows that generated negative pressure (suction air). The incorrect use of the term electrical can be traced back to the fact that, long decades ago, everything that was somehow automatic was classified in this way; In the case of pneumatic reproduction pianos from manufacturers such as Ampico, this was a misnomer, especially since the negative pressure had to be generated by pedals on many automatic pianos until the 1930s.
In addition to operation using the piano rolls, it is also possible to operate an Ampico piano as a normal piano, and this also in mixed operation: a pianist can press other keys in addition to the automatically played keys. The vacuum actuators do not prevent normal piano playing and work alongside normal key presses.
The recording format of the piano rolls with the control of 88 keys used by Ampico is the most frequently used format according to the so-called Buffalo Convention of 1909. The frequency of the instruments and piano rolls sold allows this music to be enjoyed even today. Original Ampico instruments are very rare in Europe as the main market was the USA. By 1929 at the latest, AMPICO was in considerable economic difficulties and was taken over by the Aeolian Company in 1932 .
literature
- Larry Givens: Re-enacting the artist: a story of the Ampico reproducing piano. Vestal Press, Vestal, NY 1970.
- Elaine Obenchain: The complete catalog of Ampico Reproducing Piano rolls. American Piano Co., New York 1977, ISBN 0-9601172-1-0 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Zeitschrift für Instrumentenbau , Vol .: 50, Leipzig, 1929–1930, pp. 240, 274.