Keyboard Second Touch

[jimhenry]

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

[Rednas]

jOrgan is capable of handling aftertouch as a seperate division now, but for hauptwerk (and miditzer?) another channel will suit best I think. This will also work fine with jOrgan.

[johnh]

Jim Henry wrote:

"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 visited a gentleman this weekend with a 5 manual and pedal console.  The bottom three manuals had second touch springs installed but no contacts.  In fact, none of the  manuals had contacts.  He was using the Gulbransen (now MIDI-9) optical keyboard encoders and the second touch was indeed indicated with polyphonic aftertouch messages.  Unfortunately his Mac based 'relay' was down and the organ itself wasn't playing (I don't remember how many ranks of pipes he has installed).

Just FYI...