Inventor Strikes Up the Automated Band

With a keystroke on his laptop, Ken Caulkins brings a 147-piece orchestra to life.

Another keystroke and the grand piano stops playing Bach as the guitars strike up Elvis. His fingers hit the pad again, and conga drums, maracas and steel drums create a Caribbean tune.

There are no tapes or CDs in Caulkins’ music system, only real musical instruments operated by modern computer programming and the 19th-century pneumatic technology of player pianos.

“It’s music for the new millennium--three-dimensional live music from a computer,” Caulkins said. “In a stereo system, you have two or four or maybe eight sources of sound. But with automated instruments, there are 100 or more sources of sound. Each instrument has its place and can be singled out by the eye and the ear.”

On this day there are 53 instruments hooked together in Caulkins’ workshop. With multiple pianos, guitars, drums, accordions and other instruments, the total ensemble is a 147-piece orchestra. The laptop computer is loaded with arrangements for 415 songs.

“In one click, I can take you from China to Poland,” Caulkins said, breaking into a polka dance step as the cymbals and flutes suddenly yield to the sound of accordions, guitars and drums.

Then he quickly clicks from the “Pink Panther Theme” to a tango to the big band sound of “Putting on the Ritz” to the surfer song “Wipeout” with its spectacular drum solos. Each song features a different set of instruments.

The banjo and train whistle are featured on “Wabash Cannonball,” and there is a drum major’s whistle in his arrangement of “The Washington Post March.”

Caulkins, 47, was 16 when he saw his first automated instrument, a player piano that operated on paper rolls with punched holes. He was fascinated, and by age 19 he had started a business restoring and building player pianos. In nearly three decades, Caulkins and his staff have built and sold nearly 8,000 roll-driven pianos.

Over the years, he has added bass and snare drums, cymbals, tambourines, wood blocks, accordions, glockenspiels and other instruments to his pianos, making most of them into nickelodeon-style pianos. In 1992 he started building calliopes, band organs, musical popcorn wagons, carousel organs and other automated instruments, but the 88 positions for holes on piano rolls limited the number of instruments.

“When I started working with computers, I was struck by the fact that the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files on the Internet were based on the same principle as a piano roll. Only instead of having just 88 positions to work with, you have more than 2,000,” he said.

With the capacity to run larger and more complex groups of instruments, he started building “orchestrations” of 20 to 40 instruments in 1997. A software expert helped him develop a processor to coordinate arrangements for even larger groups of instruments.

Now, Caulkins said, player pianos account for only 10% of his business, and his biggest customers are amusement parks, casinos, shopping malls and large stores that want to attract shoppers with music.

His customers range from Euro Disney to Opryland and Busch Gardens, from Japanese health spas to exclusive shops on Rodeo Drive. Entertainer Michael Jackson is one of his clients.

His factory and showroom fill two warehouses on a rural road next to a wine grape orchard across the road from silos of hog feed and birdseed in the San Joaquin Valley.

It includes a cabinet shop and stained glass shop, a fabrication plant for making the various valves, levers and other specialized parts for his pianos and other instruments and a showroom filled with refurbished antiques and newly built cabinets and bandstands to display dozens of different combinations of automated instruments.

Currently, Caulkins has a straw hut with steel drums, guitars, accordions and more than a dozen varieties of other drums being prepared for shipment to a customer in Finland, several coin-operated guitars and banjos--his newest product--and several acoustic orchestras.

He said he experimented with electronic triggers to operate various instruments, but nothing yet matches the precision and reliability of air pressure or suction valves.

That means hundreds of feet of tiny air hoses using technology developed in the late 1800s, changed only by the substitution of electric air compressors for foot pedals to pump the air and by the adaptation to plunk or tap or pound on different instruments.

His catalog of products ranges from an $89.95 train whistle to a $123,000 “Gazebo Americana” bandstand equipped with two pianos, two accordions, four steel drums, three racks of pipes and 30 other drums, whistles and other instruments.

“I call them orchestras, but that’s not really the right word,” he said. “I put the ‘Wow!’ in automated music.”