Success

Downloaded the free edition of HW this week. It installed successfully on my laptop and I am now able to play the swell keyboard of the St. Anne organ from my Roland keyboard. Sounds great when fed into my stereo system.

Is it possible to somehow access the great via only one keyboard or must this wait until I can buy another board or midify my Allen ADC 1000. Price for this mod quoted by the dealer was pretty high. I am pretty comfortable around electronics after years in the electrical trade. Does anyone know of a reasonably priced source of Allen compatible midi boards? I do not really want to buy more keyboards/pedal board when I already have them it would seem to be better to put the money into midifying the Allen. Any thoughts/advice on this topic would be welcome.

Thanks in advance.

Dave

[B. Milan]

Page 107 of the Hauptwerk user guide section on The Registration menu: Floating divisions will allow you to swap your keyboard between the two virtual keyboards. Follow the tutorial on page 109 for St. Anne's and that should get you going.

I do not really want to buy more keyboards/pedal board when I already have them it would seem to be better to put the money into midifying the Allen.

Agree, adding MIDI to your Allen is the better plan. "Extra" keyboards are readily available on ebay relatively cheap. That's good if you want to go that way but, being they are available and cheap means minimum resale value. If you are concerned about adding MIDI, there are many here to help and being this Forum has world wide participation, help is usually available quite soon. I continue to be impressed by the vast knowledge and experience exhibited by the participants, even sometimes sprinkled with a little humor.

You can get advice on "virtually" every aspect of the project. Some, especially software vendors charge for every assist they offer, and here the price amounts to spending the effort to make the request and a few minutes to type it out.

Rgds,
Ed

Dave,

Is it possible to change the MIDI channel of your keyboard? That should work too.

I started with two keyboards and a three manual organ. Changing the MIDI output channel on my Roland allowed me to select a different division.

Regards,

I use the solo to choir coupler(or so to sw) when I want to play anything from a fourth manual on my 3 manual organ. I cant see why the same principle cannot be used for just one keyboard. Make it for the Great organ and use the couplers to get swell or choir stops on the same keyboard. Using the hauptwerk add-ons you can even get the bottom note to play from the pedal stops- all on the one keyboard. If you have a swell pedal, again it will operate on only the swell and maybe choir stops,never mind what they may be coupled to.
Charles

Thanks for the feedback, guys. All of it valuable, I shall try the various suggestions later this week. Currently practicing on the Allen for my lesson tomorrow. Don't like to show up for that with no progress to report from the previous week.

I did a complete midification of my Allen ADC-1000, rewiring the two manuals, pedal contacts and swell pot to Highly Liquid MIDI CPU boards. Not at all expensive but a fair bit of work (would have been easier had it not been my very first go at electronics). Eventually I replaced the two Allen keyboards with three Fatar 61TP/6LP, using three MidiBoutique boards for the MIDI. Much easier than rewiring the first time around, and definitely cheaper from a time-is-money perspective. With some simple woodworking you can even reuse parts of the Allen keyboard stack.

Wow! That sounds like a pretty big undertaking, Jarle. especially for someone who is new to electronic modifications. When you have time I would love to hear more about costs etc. At present I do not even know how to access the keyboards on my Allen. I know the top lifts up some but not sure where the screws or releases are. At this point I am not too bothered about adding another keyboard. I would be quite happy to have the two manuals and pedalboard working with HW.

Jarle, Have you documented your Highly Liquid conversion online anywhere? I am considering the HL as a less expensive alternative to Artisan. I have a project where two consoles need to be converted and would like to save the money on the practice console and use Artisan on the other. A journal of your experience would be of value to the community I think.

mike

I used the Highly Liquid MIDI-CPU to midify the expression shoes on my Johannus Opus 910. I'll add some photos online soon.

My assessment of the HL board is that it's a great piece of kit, but slightly user-unfriendly. There are no buttons or switches at all. The entire config is done with sysex codes through the midi port. The config is verified by doing a hex dump of the board. On the other hand, once it's working, I don't expect I'll ever want to change it, so a bit of config hassle doesn't bother me.

For the expression shoes, I used the existing potentiometers. They're 2.7k, which is within the recommended range of 1k to 10k for the HL board. The midi values I get from the two shoes are 0 through 127: the full range.

One thing I did to make the install easier was using multi-pin molex connectors for all the wiring. This is a kit from digi-key that has a bunch of parts for a reasonable price. You may want more multi-pin bodies for wiring a keyboard or two:

http://www.digikey.ca/scripts/dksearch/ ... nd&stock=1

Using these connectors, I was able to keep the existing expression shoe wiring intact. By opening the console and swapping one plug, I can revert the organ to factory operation, where the shoes control the built-in speakers.

One thing to be careful of with the config is whether you're working in decimal or hexadecimal. midi-ox outputs in hex, and Hauptwerk (I'm using v3) uses decimal. This is less of an issue with v4's method of identifying midi inputs, as I recall.

Any other questions, let me know.

Michel