Music: Flashlight Piano

To become a concert pianist one must thump piano keys five hours a day for at least ten years. To become even a fair-to-middling amateur requires a great deal of patient practice. Inventive minds have long sought painless substitutes for the drudgery involved in learning how to play the piano. Short-cut systems and gadgets of recent years have included Lee Roberts’ (Smiles) sliding rule, on which colored dots indicate what notes to play in a given situation; charts distributed by NBC on which chords are indicated by numbers.

Latest gadget was put on sale in Chicago last week when veteran dance-band Maestro Carl Rupp, abetted by hopeful piano dealers, introduced his Piano Master. Rupp’s ingenious contraption makes playing a tune like Annie Laurie almost as simple as swatting flies on a windowpane. The principle is the same as that of the old-fashioned player piano, minus that part of the machinery which does the actual pressing & releasing of the keys. A motor-driven player-roll mechanism flashes a light beneath each transparent key at the moment when it should be struck. Wherever the student sees a flash he pounces. While the Piano Master requires a specially built piano, a modification, the Key Master, may be fitted to any old family upright. The Key Master flashes lights in a dummy keyboard above the keys. So highly does Chicago’s Story & Clark Piano Co. regard the Piano Master that they have already manufactured twelve flashlight pianos.