Roll O-1001, as numbered by Gottschalk Music, and first released by PPCo and Gottschalk Music, was a Christmas roll arranged by Dave Junction as a commission by Durrell Armstrong of PPCo.

I was recently engaged by Gottschalk Music to restore the roll. The original master, which was hand punched by Dave using a rail type punch device, is unavailable, so the only copy that could be scanned was a very early version from the original release by PPCo owned by Paul Gottschalk. It has numerous errors, mostly inaccurate onsets and offsets of slots. Since the original is apparently lost (neither Durrel nor Paul have it) its original accuracy can never be ascertained.

First, Wayne Stahnke did the scan of Paul's copy. Then, using his amazing software, he was able to resprocket the roll to the point where one could see that Dave really did think as the old masters did. Absent the original scanning/perforating errors, one could see how he targeted the arrangements for a perforator advancing at 240/foot and in discreet steps per beat values of 8, 10, 12 and 18. depending on the desired tempo and placement within the roll. The transcription from master to duplicate suffered quite a bit, however, and the result was a roll image that needed further hand editing to bring it "up to spec."

Having read Dave's descriptions of Capitol coding technique in Bowers, I knew that he really knew what he was doing, and so could eliminate the ragged onsets and offsets of the slots with some confidence. Where these differed by one row, I felt I was justified in aligning them. Where they differed by more than one row, and in an obvious arpegiated pattern, I tried to edit them to what I thought he intended. Marimba effects were a problem. When they occurred in a 10/beat 4/4 arrangement, it was impossible to make them an even division into triplets or 8ths and so forth. I always had to keep in mind the "3 rows of land" rule when straightening them out. All off-beat "pahs" were adjusted to two rows, and so on and so forth.

The result, I believe is a version of the roll that accurately reflects his intentions. In fact when I play the before and after results to novices (non musicians and tin ears alike) everyone notices a difference. The edited version seems crisper and snappier. To musicians and people with educated ears, a lot of Dave's delicious counterpoint and syncopation suddenly becomes apparent, whereas before it was just muddled. Some have even said that the original was blah and unremarkable whereas the edited version, even though it's the same notes, suddenly makes their faces light up.

As a demonstration of the results, here are two RealAudio files of tune 5, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" -- before and after. This should put to bed once and for all, the argument over whether re-cuts and re-editions of paper rolls should be as accurate as possible, or simply "good enough."