Tuesday, 30 January 2007
The first organ
Where was I ? Ah yes, just finished building the busker .. and here it is !
I was quite pleased with it and it didn't sound too bad. Trouble was I only had a single paper roll (for the trumpet hornpipe) which everyone (including me pretty soon got fed up with !
The cost of ready punched rolls being rather high and the time taken to punch them somewhat long I then turned to Bob Essex's midster punch which could produce punched paper rolls from a midi file.. Once again impatience prevailed and I was over at Bob's house like a flash for the plans. (Unfortunately for the ever patient and helpful Bob Essex and John Smith I live almost exactly half way between them). I managed to build it OK but my mechanical engineering was not up to Bob's standard and I never quite got it working.
In fact whilst constructing it I was already asking myself "If I am using MIDI to punch a tape why not cut out the middle man as it were and control the organ from MIDI directly."
So why not build another organ ? I had already been looking wistfully at John's Universal 26 note and reckoned it would be a good idea to build a midi version, perhaps a little larger .. 31 note say with slightly larger bellows. What to use for the solenoids though. I didn't like the look of the price of the real thing so I started to look around. Eventually I tracked down some surplus solenoids that looked as if they might do the trick. I took a couple over to John for him to play with and he reckoned they would probably do the job.
Work then commenced on the "Super Universal" Readers will have gathered by this time that I am congenitally mean ( I like to think of it as careful) so it will come as no surprise that I decided to have a go at building my own midi board. Time to rearch the Web again ....
I was quite pleased with it and it didn't sound too bad. Trouble was I only had a single paper roll (for the trumpet hornpipe) which everyone (including me pretty soon got fed up with !
The cost of ready punched rolls being rather high and the time taken to punch them somewhat long I then turned to Bob Essex's midster punch which could produce punched paper rolls from a midi file.. Once again impatience prevailed and I was over at Bob's house like a flash for the plans. (Unfortunately for the ever patient and helpful Bob Essex and John Smith I live almost exactly half way between them). I managed to build it OK but my mechanical engineering was not up to Bob's standard and I never quite got it working.
In fact whilst constructing it I was already asking myself "If I am using MIDI to punch a tape why not cut out the middle man as it were and control the organ from MIDI directly."
So why not build another organ ? I had already been looking wistfully at John's Universal 26 note and reckoned it would be a good idea to build a midi version, perhaps a little larger .. 31 note say with slightly larger bellows. What to use for the solenoids though. I didn't like the look of the price of the real thing so I started to look around. Eventually I tracked down some surplus solenoids that looked as if they might do the trick. I took a couple over to John for him to play with and he reckoned they would probably do the job.
Work then commenced on the "Super Universal" Readers will have gathered by this time that I am congenitally mean ( I like to think of it as careful) so it will come as no surprise that I decided to have a go at building my own midi board. Time to rearch the Web again ....
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The Solenoid
The surplus solenoid shown fitted with a wooden pallet