In a Themodist player, just as any other foot pumper, you control the loudness of the piano by how hard you pump. The Themodist roll has two guides printed on the roll to help you play the roll correctly. One is a doted blue line that goes from one edge of the paper to the other edge. The farther to the right edge of the paper the blue line travels, the harder you are supposed to pump the pedals. There is also a solid red line on the rolls. You are supposed to follow this line with the extension on the tempo lever. The will control the speed of the roll as it goes over the tracker bar. The combination of these two aides will give you a pretty good reproduction of a Metrostlye Themodist roll.
	 
I only have some (15 or so) Recordo Rolls. These were made by QRS during the 1920s on their marking piano. These are called "Expression Rolls". They do not have the wide range of volume of reproducing rolls. They are more rudimentary in their operation as well.

I have no idea of how many roll companies Paderewski recorded for. I know their are Welte, Duo-Art and Ampico. He may have recorded for some of the European companies or some of the lesser known systems here in the US (Apollo, etc.). If the rolls say that they were recorded by Paderewski, you can be certain that they were really recorded by Paderewski, for at least two reasons: First Paderewski had his own particular style of playing that could be easily identified. If someone said that one of their comapny's rolls was recorded by Paderewski, it could be easily identified if it was or wasn't. Secondly, Paderewski would not allow someone else to use his name. The person who did would be soundly sued!

You can be certain that any roll issued with the name of Paderewski on it will be of exceptional quality. Since he was so well known around the world, and his musical playing was just as well known, anyone would be hard pressed to issue an inferior roll of Paderewski, plus I don't believe that Paderewski would allow an inferior roll to be manufactured.

I will agree with you on Mr. Henderson. He is only looking out for number one.

I would like to ask you a set of simple questions: What is 4 + 2? What is 5 + 1? What is 3 + 3?

The answer is all the same "6". No matter which way you add these figures, they all come out the same. This is the same with the three major reproducing systems; Ampico, Welte & Duo-Art. All three systems had the capability of producing wonderful sounding music that represented the best music of the time. Each system was slightly different in how it obtained its results. But with the right pianist playing the right music on the right piano, each system produced superb music unrivaled by another.
You must realize, though, that you will NEVER be able to recreate the music as it was played in the recording studio. It will never happen. This is because:
That piano is not the same. That room is not the same. (I know, shut up)
The exact tuning and the temperament of the piano is not the same.
The weather outside is not the same.
The humidity inside is not the same.
The acoustics of the room is not the same.
The lighting in the room is not the same.
The temperament and inspiration of the pianist is not the same.

All of the above ingredients, and probably many more, have evaporated once the piano piece was finished being played and they can never be duplicated. Attempts can be made to duplicate the original playing, but the inspiration of the moment is gone. You may get reproduction that is damn close, but it won't and can't be the same.

They also had to make holes at the edge of the rolls so that the piano would get loud and soft as the pianist played the roll. It was not done automatically. Those squiggles at the edges of the rolls were the coding showed how loud each note was when the pianist struck each key. But...the Welte system used a floating system whereby the piano system was either crescendoing or decrescendoing constantly, and the editor's job was to make sure that there was enough vacuum and not too much vacuum at the precise moment that each note was played. That was not an easy job! All rolls that were perforated by the Welte corporation were made from master rolls. They were all the same, unless someone in the factory changed a note or two along the way... and it did happen. No factory is perfect 100% of the time.
QRS Pianomation is another system whereby a recording on CD can be transferred to the piano by means of a bank of solenoids.

Push ups were a pain to adjust to each keyboard, because each keyboard is slightly different in height. The carpeting underneath introduces another factor for height. The fingers on the push ups were supposed to be about 1/64" away from the keytop on the piano. 88 individual adjustments have to be made every time a push up is pushed up to a new piano.

The same reproducing piano roll played on twenty different pianos in twenty different homes/halls will sound twenty different ways. They will all be exact recreations of what the pianist originally intended and they should all sound extremely close, but there will always be the slightest difference.

I have been telling you for the past many months that you should go out and buy a player piano and rebuild it so that you can learn about players and what they sound like, so that you would learn how they are the same and how they are different. But it seems that I have been ignored, just as you have said others have ignored you. It will be your loss, though.
 
I have given you the opportunity to help yourself. You can still do this if you wish.
 
The technology in '32 was still about the same as in '04. Perforators were still used to cut rolls and also masters. The perforators at QRS were built around 1914 and are still being used today. A master roll was made and production masters were cut from the master rolls. The production masters were used to make the piano rolls that could be played on pianos. That did not change until the 1970s (1980s) when they started to read all of the master rolls onto floppy discs (at least at QRS).

Buffalo was an important city at the turn of the century. By 1904 many cities with wealthy residents had the latest "gadgets" and electricity was one of them!

The Hupfeld was produced in Germany. Wilcox and White was made in Conecticut. They were not related.

The closer the fingers of the push up are to the piano, the more responsive and better sounding the piano will be and will play the rolls better.

The Welte vorsetzer didn't need pedals. It was electrically operated. All functions were performed by the coding on the roll, which the editor added. Some of these holes were the 98, 99, and 100 note holes in the rolls, along with 1, 2, & 3.

Any Welte that was in a cabinet. The red and green would be the most likely, since the Licensee came out in the US after the push-up craze had died down.
The Welte system was electrically driven by a motor in the cabinet with a rotary pump supplying the vacuum.
I woould imagine that the Aeolian company was the largest in the US to have a push-up player. I'm sure there were other companies, though.
       
Joplin and Morton didn't record for Aeolian. Any CD of their works are interpretations of their music. No one knows what a particular artist intended unless their was a phonograph recording made, and even these, at the beginning of the century, were a very poor quality. There are scholars who have studied the music of individual artists for decades. I am certain that if anyone has a handle on how a particular piece should sound, it would be one of these people and I don't think that you should dismiss these people as "fake".

They are not like sustenuto pedals. One makes the organ louder by 
opening up swell shades (turning up the volume on a radio). The other adds 
more voices (sounds) to the organ (pretend one person is singing the 
national anthem and then other people join in the singing one at a time).

Pipe organs have had pedals for many years. In the 1930s, I believe, 
they standardized the 32 note pedalboard. Before that it had been 30 
notes. Older pipe organs had a variety of pedal board combinations. Many 
very early organs did not have pedal at all. Pipe organs go back to 
medieval or before times. I think that they were called something like 
"hydralus". They were water powered.
Interestin-so in other words thats like 2 sostento pedals? Did organs always 
have so many pedals,how much harder is it to learn to play or play-but 
those 2 pedals seem as one,both move when one pressed

The pianos in the "wild west" were more likely to be nickelodeons or 
orchestrions. They didn't have the wide range of expression that 
rep[roducing systems had, but they had the advantage of having multiple 
instruments inside the cabinet: piano, flute pipes, castanets, snare drums, 
xylophones, marimba, cymbals, etc.
http://mmd.foxtail.com/Archives/Digests/200601/2006.01.31.01.html  Welte Philharmonic
http://mmd.foxtail.com/Archives/Digests/199703/1997.03.29.10.html Four System Vorsetzer

All companies that had a marking piano to make their masters had to edit the rolls (punch holes in the paper) so that music could be heard. Corrections were made at that time also. In "Player Piano Treasury" there is a great article on how the rolls were made.
QRS stopped making reproducing rolls in the 1970s. The rolls they made in the 1970s were Ampico and Duo-Art. They also made a Welte test roll. 
It lists all the companies/people currently making rolls.
The marking piano did not have levers to pull that would hold a note. The marking piano only made marks on a blank piece of paper with carbon paper. Each mark corresponds to a key played. Each mark is cut out of the blank paper with a double bladed X-acto knife. That then represents each note as it was played by the pianist.
The other piano that has the levers is one that was used when a staff pianist sat down at the keyboard to make a production master roll. T