Not through perforated paper but digital technology and also replicate whatever you're playing on the guitar. You can also play a long phrase on the guitar and command the piano to loop the phrase, so that you can play against the loop.
Now for the big leap. There's not just a piano. There are two pianos. There's also a vibraphone; a marimba; a groaning array of drums, cymbals and shakers; an acoustic guitar and bass; eight individual one-string guitar robots; and two apothecary shelves of glass bottles filled with liquid at different levels, which produce a vocal-ish sound from jets of air blown therein. A wink of light flashes wherever a sound happens.
You've called it an orchestrion, referring to the no-hands, multi-instrument contraptions made in the 50 years or so before the advent of recording technology. You've done it mostly with solenoids transducers that use electromagnetic energy and the rest with pneumatics.
You're the only human onstage at Town Hall on Friday. You've got your foot pedals and five or six guitars, but also there's an orchestrion behind you, under wraps instruments in cages and carpentry, on rods and risers and 1,500 people before you.
They've never seen anything quite like this before. Its best not to overwhelm them, so you begin with solo guitar: several pieces you've recorded over the last three years with Brad Mehldau, and a song (Unity Village) from your first album. It's pretty strummy, a lot of parallel chords. Then you un-tarp the imaginarium, the crowd says, Whoa!, and you start activating things.
