Adding Chimes

Has anyone found a way to add free-standing chimes to their HW instrument, playable independent of, but with, a HW sample set? If not, how complicated is adding chimes to a sample set with CODM?

David

This company produces many fine Midi devices,
among them are these two, driver Boards that would be perfect to Interface Hauptwerk,
with a set of solenoid operated Tubular Chimes;

http://www.midiboutique.com/

mr9ss
MIDI - relay w. 9 solid-state relay output channels
9(AC/DC)
AC/DC power, >>>> .120 Milli-amp Maximum load
DB25 female connector
>
mr16 MIDI - relay w. 16 electro magnetic relay output channels
16(AC/DC)
AC/DC power,screw terminals, utilizes Relays for output !

Mel---TheOrganDoc--- ( I am not affiliated with them)

One thing to consider using a MIDI decoder (NPN Darlington or the coil and contact reed relay type output) is the (note) dwell time. It should be independent of the organist's touch. In other words, the organist can press a key fast or slow, but the strike time (solenoid to chime tube) be the same.

For our church installation, I used a Highly Liquid MD24 http://store.highlyliquid.com/collections/midi-decoders/products/md24 driving home built SCR's. The advantage of this unit is that the strike time is programmable using a sysex transfer utility program. There is some good info in this thread 'Fixed programmable note length for the MD24' here http://forum.highlyliquid.com/showthread.php?t=312 We arrived at the best strike time to 13 milli seconds for our setup.

Other decoders are : http://store.highlyliquid.com/collections/midi-decoders/

I have further info if you need it which is also available on the Highly Liquid Forum as well.

Rgds,
Ed

Another thing to consider is that many chime systems combine the striker action with the damper action. So not only should the strike time be considered but also the amount of time the dampers can be left off.

---john.

Good point, John. The Deagan chimes we have use a weighted felt disc on the top of each chime tube and so do not have dampers. I believe the dampers you mention are used on the larger diameter chimes tubes. I believe our's are approx 1 1/4" diam. Since they are up fairly high, a little hard to measure now that the scaffolding is down.

Picture of chimes along with 4 stereo pairs of main organ speakers. The center speaker is for the sound reinforcement system and partially blocks the view of the 2 center organ spkrs.



The organist can play the chimes from the Great manual as well from a smaller 21 note pull out manual under the right side of the console. I used a computer, under desk slide out for that small keyboard. The small keyboard is live whenever it is pulled out, when playing from the Great manual, there is a drawknob which drives a small relay to activate the chime MIDI circuit.

Rgds,
Ed

[mdyde]

Hello David,

Has anyone found a way to add free-standing chimes to their HW instrument, playable independent of, but with, a HW sample set? If not, how complicated is adding chimes to a sample set with CODM?

Adding chimes within a CODM organ definition is no more difficult than adding any other stop/rank (you would use the Stop, ExternalRank and StopRank tables to do it). However, creating a CODM organ definition is moderately involved and you would need to (re)create the organ definition for the whole organ from scratch in the CODM if you wanted to use it to add your chimes to an existing sample set (assuming a CODM organ definition for the sample set doesn't exist already). If you wanted the chimes to work with multiple sample sets then you'd need to (re)create all of them as CODM organ definitions, which could be quite a substantial task.

If you haven't already done so, start by having a read through the CODM user's guide on the Help menu in Hauptwerk, and have a look at the example CODM organ definitions installed in [Hauptwerk installation folder]/HauptwerkUserData/CustomOrganDefinitions, to get an idea of what's involved.

Overall, it might be simpler not to use the CODM and instead just to configure Hauptwerk always to send MIDI note-on/off output to them (via the 'Primary output' tab on the 'Organ settings | Keyboards' screen) and then implement an external hardware stop switch of some sort to enable/disable them as a whole.

I thought I'd "chime" in!

If you can settle for a digital version of the chimes stop, you can simply lift the code from my Model 945 organ, which has a chimes stop. Take a look here:

http://www.nightbloomingjazzmen.com/Les_Model_945_Organ_HW4.html

Les