Roller Organ Cobography

Early Arrangements

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 15:02:57 +0000

Early Arrangements Cobs 1-47+ and 101-234+ have an early arrangement often characterized by additional melody Octave Notes. It is conjectured that the earliest rollers (cobs) were arranged for pressure instruments, and upon the change to vacuum it was determined that an arrangement with fewer concurrent notes would be preferable.

Top to a 32-Note Cabinet Autophone

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 10:48:40 +0000

Top to a 32-Note Cabinet Autophone The cover is 14.5 x 10.5 x 4.5 inches. The bottom and back panels of this example are NOT original, and were probably added to make a functional container in later years.

Contact Us

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 08:07:29 +0000

Crowded Single Pin Notes

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:16:34 +0000

Crowded Single Pin Notes The photo above shows a closeup of a run of closely spaced single pin notes (cob on the right) that is later changed to two pin notes at half the repetition rate (cob on the left). Several cobs have been found where one or more runs are changed in this manner and there are no other changes to the pinning pattern. As a practical matter the single pin runs are so closely spaced that the roller organs cannot produce a distinct break in sound between the notes, achieving …

Search Help

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 05:11:54 +0000

Search Help Searching is a very powerful tool for locating information. Search results are ordered by the number of matching words, and words are highlighted when viewing the pages. For example, these searches will find a page containing the sentence

hits

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:48:47 +0000

18558809

Home

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 07:54:25 +0000

Home The Roller Organ Cobography is ... * Roller Organs are a type of organette, a hand-operated, table-top sized mechanical musical instrument, manufactured from the late 1880s through the mid 1920s by The Autophone Co. of Ithaca, New York. See Todd Augsburger's Roller Organ Website for all the info.

Incipit

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 07:10:04 +0000

Incipit Tunes may be identified by matching the Incipit--the first few consecutive notes--expressed in numerical code. Incipits are coded using 1 for “do”, 2 for “re”, 3 for “mi”, etc. Ignore rhythm, accidentals, and octaves. Thus, the Incipit for

Label Styles

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:19:31 +0000

Label Styles If you take a detailed look at the labels of rollers (cobs), you may be quite surprised at the variety of styles! The following chart shows major changes. In general, the red labels are oldest, and then the white and yellow. But there appears to be no discernable pattern to truly

Octave Notes

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:18:38 +0000

Octave Notes The picture above shows a cob installed on a roller organ at the home position with the musical scale overlayed on the valves. The scale runs from D through G on the top row and continues G# through A on the bottom row. The cob rotates three revolutions to play the tune and advances to the right by one tenth of an inch per revolution. Notice that for most of the scale, the octave notes are side by side, high note on the lower valve to the left of the low note on the upper valve. …

Alternate Pinning Patterns

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 13:11:37 +0000

Alternate Pinning Patterns In addition to the Early Arrangements that are found for low numbered cobs (1-47+ and 101-234+), there are many cobs found with two or more different pinning patterns. Most of these are found in the same low number range of cobs that have early arrangements but there are a few found at higher numbers.

References

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 12:34:43 +0000

References Original Sources Although original sources of the melodies were not documented by The Autophone Co., there are some possible assumptions. Norwegian Hymns Lindemans Koralbog Within those cobs known as Norwegian Hymns++, there are two series of cobs which are found in