Music Box Composer

Please tell me what is the best way to glue strips together.
- Do you use an overlap - how much?
- Do you use paper glue or tape??

Thanks for any suggestion and help!
Rainer

Hi-
I've just now got a system working for getting a MIDI files from a recording from my MIDI guitar to MusicBox Composer.
I think Herr Dampfboot and I are at the same point, looking for best practices to get our systems working.

I have several 30-note strips from you--and a punch--and the best possible way to do this would be to print directly on the strip.
However, I'm thinking that I don't have much of a chance to get the registration right, using my printer.
So, printing to a thick paper and then cutting and joining strips made from that seems to be the best approach.

Please let us know if you have any suggestions. If I find any myself, I'll upload them.

This is a great product, thanks for producing it!

Robert

Hi Robert,

I found out the hard way by myself that gluing the strips by overlapping is not a good idea. The paper which came with the music box is 0.3 mm thick. I Thought I was lucky to find a 0.5 mm thick paper - with an overlap it is 2x 0.5 = 1mm thick. I tried to play that strip but it stuck in the mechanics - of cause - but you can not turn it backwards after it got stuck. So I tried to drive it through. By this one of the gear wheels broke apart. My advice for such a situation is to stop playing, loosing the two gear block screws. Dismantling everything and remove the stuck in paper strip.

Now I found out that it is the best way to make a butt joint of the punch strips by thin adhesive tape on both sides of the punch card strip.

By the way - I am Rainer and not Herr Dampfboot

I haven't tried it myself yet, but what I would do is align the two strips that are to be joined, and then diagonally cutting the strips over the overlapping section. So cutting from one corner of the overlapping area to the opposite corner. Remove the cut-off pieces and use cellotape to join the two strips together. I think making the join diagonally makes it less fragile and prevents it from folding when rolling your strip up.

The overlapping section of the strips printed out using MBC is quite short, so the angle you can cut them is not very less than 90 degrees.
At such an angle it seems to me to be very hard to align two strips really exactly to join them then.
Moreover, you´re running into difficulties, trying to make strips a little bit longer, and still want to roll them: at least for the widely spread Yunsheng movements you need paper of 0.3 mm thickness to work right.
In Mechanical Music Digest (just google) Hans-Martin Meyer-Georges suggested (already several years ago) to build "leporello-books" (i.e. zig-zag folded) instead.
I guess, he was right, but am still experimenting, trying to make a working hinge between the parts of a strip, using scotch-tape (or may it be tesa

Best regards, jeb!

What some places have suggested was to cut strips to have an angle at the ends and then use thin tape on one or both sides so that it feeds in a gradually line rather than one big fold. Granted if you were using pre-printed strips that could be problematic, but if you are transferring the holes onto the strip(s) afterwards then it could be an effective way to make a more workable long length strip from smaller sections.

@ AlexD:
I´m not quite sure, whether I understood your way to make (physically) playable strips...
Print out the MBC-PDF, then transfer the punch-marks to blank strips, which you can buy, etc. ?
Would you please be so kind to give us some more detailed information

Hopefully, jeb!

Sorry about that, I'll try and explain it better. Basically assuming you either have a number of blank precut strips, or have paper that you have cut into the correct width strips, you would cut an angle (45 degrees) into the ends that are going to be connected. After that you line them up even so they form the continual strip and can tape them. It uses up more paper this way than joining the strips together from the square ends, but as the strip feeds in to the musical movement it's only a small amount of the seam that feeds in at a time rather than the entire seam all at once. From there what I generally do is just print off the strips on regular paper and use a light box to overlay the holes onto the strip with a pencil/pen/marker and can start punching away.

This image may be more useful in describing what I mean:

@AlexD:
Thank you so much for your thorough explanation!
A lightbox I really didn´t have in mind - wouldn´t have expected that to work with such thick paper... But I´m still learning
May I ask you two more questions: what kind of tape do you use to join the parts of a strip, and, how do you store longer strips - roll them up?

Best regards, jeb!

The following is for reasons of pure vanity

Forgot to mention: just succeeded in making my first working Leporello - it´s not very nice, but at least playable

Best regards, jeb!