The smallest flimsiest cheapest of ideas are often passed over. The tubular piano roll is surely one of these however it is probably the most novel roll idea ever developed. The big cost in roll production was spools. Presumably to obviate the major cost of rolls to customers Murdoch & Murchoch of London came up with this idea of selling rolls without spools. You bought one special spool with a detachable end, slotted the roll onto the spool, put the end flange on which locked with a ball bearing type joint and away you went! Special library cases looking like large books were sold to house the rolls.

In one of the pictures accompanying this article you can see the end of the most common type of spool showing the removable right hand spool end. You can see in the bottom of the central hole there is a captive ball bearing which engages this end flange when you push it onto the spool assembly. (There is another earlier type of adaptor which is the same but does not utilize the ball bearing type catch) On the right of this picture is the right hand end of the spool assembly. You can see the groove in the brass end piece where the ball bearing locates into. Through the end projects the standard 65-note drive lug. You can also see the groove in the spool wooden spindle which engages with a thin wooden or metal dowel stuck (see photo) to the inside core of the roll. By having the roll thus engaging onto the spool the roll core doesn't simply slip and slide around the spool bar in rewind. It is all very ingenious. The flange on the other end is fixed like normal and looks like a normal roll flange with a straight pin through it for the other side's spoolbox chuck. Most rolls are labelled as being a part of the "Malcolm Music Library" - the "Malcolm" was their own brand of push-up piano player manufactured from at least as early as 1901 onwards.

You may have heard these rolls referred to as "Golden Tube" piano rolls. They are not the same thing however. These first tubular rolls have musical arrangements which are unique to this brand. I have had the opportunity to go though a few hundred of these so can vouch for the fact. There are may characteristics of these early rolls which lead me to the strange conclusion that they are actually hand-played although they do not state this on their labels and no other roll brand was making hand played rolls at this time in earnest. Initially I presumed an apparent occasional raggedness of performance was due to rolls being copied with a sloppy roll-reading machine (like early Laguna rolls for example). However after a fine examination and hours of listening I am 100% convinced that the overwhelming majority are hand-played. There is an attempt in all the performances to maintain as constant a tempo as possible so that the end result sounds as close to a metronomic roll as possible but the rolls clearly feature uneven chord striking, non-regularized note lengths and most other characteristics of performances that came straight off of a recording piano. They were probably never converted into metronomic masters simply to save on the cost of having to adapt them into regularized performances.

What gave the game away is also quite curious. I have two tubular roll examples of the "1812". The latter one is a "Golden Tube" version the music sheet which is obviously an Imperial (Linenized) sourced roll. The other earlier one is marked as a "selection". Is it not curious that one should have a "selection" from an overture; they are not long so why only play chunks? The early roll is indeed only a "selection" of chunks from the "1812". As a collector of sheet music I could immediately answer my own question. In the early 1900s there actually were some very cheap piano solo editions sold in London of such "selections" from overtures and I do have some examples of these in my collection. I have no idea why anyone might have wanted to purchase one but they did and they were sold in some quantities. The roll performance was audibly a reasonably competent pianist playing hell-for-leather through the abbreviated 1812 selection. This cheap edition has a curiously attenuated accompaniment rhythm in places quite unlike the normal music and this was reflected on the roll. No roll company in their right mind would ever have bothered programming a proper master roll from such a cheap edition; to make a roll of the 1812 properly would have been an expensive mammoth undertaking. It is plain that Murdoch's solution to offering this piece was to get someone to play it into their roll making machine and they probably knocked the whole thing out in half an afternoon.

Rolls for the 61-note Phoneon player organ were also clearly made from the same machine as these early tubular rolls and the ones that I have examined also exhibit signs of having been hand-played with very little tidying-up if any having been done in the pre-production phase.

Later tubular rolls were standard rolls from the Aeolian factory and also Imperial. After a few years the marque was rebranded as "Golden Tube" with rectangular labels with deep purple graphics. The carboard tube and rod the rolls were mounted on was changed to a brass tube with a pressed ridge down one side which mated with the original wooden spool adaptors without any need for a redesign of the adaptor. Presumably the name derives from when the rolls were new the brass tube was shiny and golden in colour. All the rolls from the "Golden Tube" period are either Aeolian or Imperials; some even have the grey Aeolian leaders characteristic of the teens and early twenties. Murdochs had discontinued their in-house production.

There certainly existed the technical capacity to produce hand-played rolls very early on (if you look back to my Electra Patents article from a couple of years back you will see such machines from the late 1890s). I am of the opinion that Murdochs were trying to make rolls which were as metronomical as possible with the minimum of expense and that this was the result. Other companies has recording pianos but used the technology to make create masters with the notes already laid out which they only then had to regularize. A 1909 edition of the Illustrated London News showed a visit to the London factory that made Imperial rolls and depicted such a recording piano being played (see the Ord-Hume book for a copy). It is fair to assume this is what they did as there were never any hand-played Imperial rolls.

So, if you want to hear what are certainly the earliest UK hand-played rolls find yourself an adaptor and a pile of early "Patent Tubular Piano Rolls" and play through them. There are no Paderewski's to be heard but if you listen very carefully you will see they are hand-played nonetheless. Of course, these are all 65-note rolls. Another good reason to get hold of a 65-note player or push-up if you do not already own one!