jimhenry

I am just getting started with construction. However, it immediately strikes me that the single row pin headers used on the various boards may be less than ideal in the environment of a midified organ console. They aren't very robust, you wind up with a lot of connectors, and you can't make cables with IDCs. I am looking at the possibility of laying out the DIN board to bring all the inputs to a single 2x20 0.100 pin header which could be shrouded. This would allow the use of a single ribbon cable connector for 32 inputs. On the console side you could use the same connectors or 37 pin D or 50 pin telco, all available as IDC connectors. The board might be slightly harder to construct by having a few more jumpers and by having the pull-up resistors a bit less regular. There are two problems I see in using a single input connector. The bit order WILL be scrambled. The scramble could either be in the order of the data received or in the order of the inputs on the connector. It is hard to fill the unused inputs randomly. If you use 2 32 input connectors for a keyboard, the 3 extra inputs aren't easy to take elsewhere. Any other thoughts on this? Jim Henry

Hi John, It sounds like your plan for the keyboard channel assignments will work just fine with the Miditzer. Eventually that will be configurable in the Miditzer anyway. I'm really puzzled by why you don't get the proper sounds from the Miditzer. The Miditzer really only does two things on the output side. When you select the MIDI Out Device, it sends the necessary commands to set bank 25 and instruments from the Miles' corg_r SoundFont on the channels used by the Miditzer and it routes the inputs to the appropriate MIDI output channels based on the stop setting. Are you absolutely sure you have the Miditzer MIDI Out Device set to the SB MIDI Out Device that has the SoundFont loaded? The Miditzer MIDI Out should be the same as the "Audition Device" seen in Options... on the Creative keyboard. Are you running any other programs that would be competing for the sound card? Stops are controlled from the screen for the moment. This past weekend I finally figured out the problem that had me stumped for a couple of months on how to control stops with MIDI messages. It will still be some time before I release a version of the Miditzer with MIDI stop control in it because this will require a fairly extensive facility to allow people to customize what message should control what function. For reasons explained at http://tadstone.home.netcom.com/Orgel.htm stop control will most likely use controllers 80 and 81. I expect it will be unusual for people to have consoles that match the Miditzer very well as far as stop layout go. It will probably be more useful to use combination pistons via MIDI. Combination pistons will be controlled by at least Program Change messages. In the very long run, Miditzer may be able to be customized to match the user's console. But Miditzer is at the moment almost obsessively driven by historical accuracy to a real Wurlitzer organ. I'm not sure how well that can be reconciled to customization for specific consoles. You'd be amazed at how many special case things are in the code. Some are due no doubt to the ad hoc coding being used in the early phases of the project. But some of these things will be real challenges to handle in a sufficiently general way that they could be reconfigured by an average user. Jim Henry

I haven't encountered this problem but here are two things to check out. Have you run out of memory for SoundFonts? There is a setting for SoundFont cache size. Since you seem to be loading a number of SoundFonts, perhaps you ran out of memory before the Tibia loaded in Bank 25. I don't think this is it but I did notice that if you inadvertently set Miditzer MIDI Out Device to "SB Live! Sw Synth" rather than "SB Live! Synth A" you get a buzzing sound rather than the SoundFont. Also note that the Creative software loads SoundFonts into the A and B synths independently. You have to load a SoundFont twice to make it available in both places. I don't think it uses any extra memory, just uses up a Bank slot. Jim Henry

A feature of theatre organs that captivates a lot of peoples' imagination is the second touch. The standard touch for an organ natural is 11/32 of an inch at the front of a natural. Theatre organs use thinner felt under the keys so the total travel is increased to 1/2". An additional spring and stop mechanism is added so that there is a stop at 11/32" but the stop is a spring and with more pressure the key can be pressed an additional 5/32" to activate an additional contact. This allows the organist to add various types of additional musical effects such as initial emphasis on playing a key, intermittent emphasis, or even playing of a counter melody over accompaniment chords. I have heard of a few attempts to add second touch to keyboards that weren't made for it, none successful. If you want to try, the first thing to look at is whether you can increase the travel of the keys to accomodate the second touch. Second touch gets the most use on the Accompaniment if you want to do just one keyboard. I have an Ensoniq VFX synthesizer that has polyphonic aftertouch. This is very much like second touch in that MIDI messages are produced based on the pressure holding each key down. But there isn't much movement of the key to produce the aftertouch signal and it is very hard to control. To tie this to Midibox, if you do put second touch on a keyboard there is the issue of what MIDI message it should produce. Probably the most compliant to the MIDI standard would be a polyphonic aftertouch message with pressure = 64. However, in terms of using it with a virtual organ Note messages on an additional channel are probably preferred. I am not much of an organist so I can't offer much help in saying what is and isn't playable. I just go by the fact that theatre organs provide a very definite and obvious feel to the second touch. Even with that, not many theatre organists really make a lot of use of second touch. BTW, there is second touch on the pedals too! Jim Henry

There were some questions asked about jOrgan and my program, Miditzer, in the thread that became the basis for this topic. I think this is getting out toward the fringes of being a Midibox thread and I started a new thread so at least some of these issues can be discussed as uses of Midibox without cluttering up discussions that are more directly related to the Midibox. In Pipe organ Conversion to Midi John_W._Couvillon wrote: Mickey, I downloaded the midister software to try it out. The display looks good. The soundfonts are the same as for Jorgan, however, it doesn't appear to be configurable. Don't see any setup to assign the keyboards, pedalboards or stops. Did I miss something? John No John, you didn't miss anything. Miditzer is hardwired to use a single MIDI Input device with the Solo manual on channel 1, Accompaniment on Channel 2, and Pedal on Channel 3. For the time being I suggest using Midi-Ox and Midi Yoke to remap the input as required. Let me know if you need instructions on how to do that beyond what comes with Midi-Ox. BTW, the SoundFont used with jOrgan depends on the disposition file. I think the disposition provided by Bruce Miles uses corg_s in Bank 24 because when he prepared it jOrgan did not support transposition. Miditzer uses corg_r in Bank 25 because Miditzer does transpose and unify the inputs to produce the MIDI Out messages. You had another post where you were getting odd sound results from Miditzer. It is possible that you didn't have the right SoundFont setup for Miditzer. Jim Henry

Hello, Jim Henry here and this is my first post. I am looking at using Midi Box to provide MIDI Out from a 2 manual Wurlitzer theatre organ console I am restoring. I plan to use the output as input to a PC running the Miditzer program that I am writing. Details are at www.miditheatreorgan.com . It seems like there is a lot of interest in the applications of the Midi Box to organs. Perhaps a topic area devoted to organ applications would be appropriate? A theatre organ has what is called second touch. It is the original polyphonic aftertouch! Each key has two switch closures. This means that two manuals, pedals, stops, swells, and miscellaneous buttons is going to be about 400 inputs. That would mean 4 cores and about 13 DIN boards. Does anyone have any feeling for whether a single core has the horsepower to deal with say 512 inputs if the appropriate input boards were designed and a driver was added to MIOS for such a board? Jim Henry