Musician Gear & Tech Discussion

I had an old beat up Hammond J series Hammond, It was one of their first attempts at making a non-tone wheel spinet back in 65, It uses a 30 Watt Amp, a bit louder than the M-100 or M-3 and sounds great for a Tube guitar amp, But I have the left over pedals and wondered if there was a way to rig the pedals to work as midi pedals, did some searches but didn't find any info and thought I would ask here.


Thanks

John

John,

I can't give you specifics, but I do know that it's possible to do what you describe.

Several years ago, in the dawn of the digital synthesizer age, I successfully modified the key switch of an old Ace-Tone combo organ , to produce a digital output.
This entailed soldering a diode to every key and modifying the key switch buss bars to a matrix configuration that could be read by a analog to digital converter, which I purchased in kit form from the Piea company.
It was also nessaccary to build a scanner to enable the keyboard to function as a digital controller. I was then able to use the keyboard to play those little synthesizer chips that could be bought at Radio Shack for a couple of bucks. I'm sure that a similar procedure could be done to convert an old pedal board in similar fashion, which would then allow it to control MIDI devices.

Hopefully, tecnology has advanced to the point where there is now a less arduous way to digitise an analog keyswitch.
Hopefully there is someone more aware of such a proceder. A search on the net might prove fruitful. Try googling something like "analog to digital keyboard converter "

good luck,
John

Thanks, I figured there would be some obscure electronics place on the web that sells a little box I could plug the wires into and I would be good to go for midi, but I'm not sure what you would call it...ahhhh only in a perfect world things would be that easy...I have a hard enough time finding my favorite candy bar

Analog to Midi signal processor???

I had an old beat up Hammond J series Hammond, It was one of their first attempts at making a non-tone wheel spinet back in 65, It uses a 30 Watt Amp, a bit louder than the M-100 or M-3 and sounds great for a Tube guitar amp, But I have the left over pedals and wondered if there was a way to rig the pedals to work as midi pedals, did some searches but didn't find any info and thought I would ask here.


Thanks

John

Hi John, There is a way to make "vintage Bass pedals" a midi Bass pedal kit. You will need a MIDI controller. Go to You Tube and type in "Midi organ bass" someone had posted a very helpful video on there, Hope that helps!

Ahhhh Sweet....EXACTLY what I wanted!!!!

Thanks!!!

The PEDMUX13 for $59 from Sound Research will be perfect for the 13 pedal rig.

http://www.sound-research.net/pedal_encoder.html

This will work great.

Will post a video of how I built it when I'm finished, it's a Spinet pedal board so it's a bit different and will be easier to build.

Thanks again

John

John,
Good luck with that pedal project. It seems a worthwhile project if you have the time, since I notice a pedal board can be somewhat costly these days. Ive considered adding one to my setup a few times over the years, but I've been fortunate enough to have had a wife and son who are both competent bass players. Besides, there are still quite a few tricks I've yet to learn about getting both hands working together while singing.

Looking forward to that video.

John

Thanks, if this works out well, I want to midi-ize a set of lighter old divingboard keys that will go into a custom Bass Body so I can play keyboard solos with my right hand, bass with my left and use the midi Bass pedals at the same time. My guitar player from Buddhashake had a friend from college named Jay Wasco from Johnny Skilsaw that built something similar back in the 90's "the swiss Army Bass" that got me hooked on the technique.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFU7W2-iov4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0C1CgpIvRw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR9a2RbvNWY

I tried something similar with a Korg RK-100 years ago, but that thing was made of solid wood and weighed a ton and with the Bass, it was just too much on my back playing it for more than a few songs.

I play guitar and bass a lot while sitting and playing the Hammond Organ and organ bass pedals at the same time, trying to put together a much lighter solution to Jay's rig that I can stand up with that will cost me less than a couple hundred in parts to build.