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I just written a ragtime-style song called "Louis' Handy Blues." Since I no longer have a publisher, I might as well link to a Score, too, in case anyone wants to play it sometime. It's a bit of a challenge for a mediocre pianist like me--which is why it's a MIDI rendering rather than a recording of me murdering it--but any good pianist, particularly anyone skilled in stride or ragtime, should be able to knock this out without too much difficulty. The rolls and the last repeat octave change aren't in the score, but feel free to add whatever embellishments work for you.

Hope you like it.

I enjoyed it, only wish it was played by a real pianist. thanks for sharing!

I second every part of this comment

Thank you both. I appreciate your comments. I agree that a live performance would be a great improvement. Unfortunately, I do not have the facilities (or the talent, if I'm being 100% honest) to produce a high quality, live recording.

Any volunteers?

This would sound nice on a player piano, with a lot of octaves, runs and preferably some notes out of tune and out of rhythm. Anyhow, I suddenly felt an urge for music played by player pianos and I had a good time listening to old piano rolls. Thank you for that.

When I was a kid, I had an album called "Slugger Ryan Plays Honky Tonk Piano."


I really loved that album, and I listened to it until the phonograph needle cut the grooves on one side all the way through to the other side, leaving me with a bunch of tiny, spiral vinyl rings. Almost. The point is that the album left a huge impression on me, and it inculcated a love of ragtime music--Scott Joplin in particular, who is one of my heroes.

Thanks for the player-piano video. It brought back a lot of great memories.

I must have a midi of this roll. I’ll look for it and post a recording or it playing on my Disklavier after I get my piano tuned in about a week.

That would be nice. I suddenly remember that the maestro who trained me wrote a composition for player piano (we call it a pianola). That was in the days before computers and midi. He was fascinated by the idea that you could play anything on a player piano. He would have loved a virtual piano or a disklavier. Here is a link to a video with the music.

I should add that there is a sad story attached to it. In the video, the pianola is played by Lucius Voorhorst, a good friend of his. A few years later he was murdered by his wife.

I used to work at the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music. Although our main mission was to preserve field recordings made by anthropologists, we had a lot of very old commercial recordings, and we also had a collection of piano rolls, including some made by Maurice Ravel and others by Jelly Roll Morton. How's that for variety?

I guess these were probably the first "MIDI" recordings, or I guess they should be called MIAI. I imagine many rolls were exact transcriptions, but a lot of them were not, and the pianists who made these rolls would sometimes go back and add extra notes and make corrections.

Cool. This guy sells piano roll transcriptions:

https://www.spencerserolls.com/Ordering.html

I have bought the collection of 5000+. It’s fun to play them on my Disklavier.

Some player pianos had expression levers and pedals so you could add your own interpretation. You could always add your own notes, but not to the rolls.