Viscount Domus back in business

Tonight I did something I’ve thought about for a while: I disconnected the pedalboard from my midi encoder and moved it from my virtual organ console back to the old Domus. As I hadn’t altered the pedalboard at all, the whole operation took about two minutes.

The rationale is very simple. The time slots for practise that I get are often very short and unpredictable. Booting the computer and loading a virtual organ takes a couple of minutes — time that could be better spent practising. In addition, I often need to cease practising with very short notice, and shutting everything down is also a couple of steps. So I figured that it would make sense to use the organ that I can simply switch on, play, and swith off. Should work well for practise, although I will miss the sound quality from my Hauptwerk setup. But switching back is as simple a process if I should want to.

As a side note, I am considering exchanging my old Domus for a new, digital, organ. Something that should greatly improve the sound quality, while maintaining the on-play-off simplicity. We’ll see what Santa can do in this area…

1 minute coupler toe piston

I realised that I wanted a button or (even better) a toe piston to activate and deactivate the manual to pedal coupler. Every button on my keyboard is already assigned to some function, and there’s nothing I want to change. Instead of building something (which I may end up doing in the end) I thought of a quick fix. I connected my old sustain pedal to the keyboard and checked what MIDI signal it sent. When pushed, it sends a controller event with value 127, and the same event with value zero when it’s released.

Sustain pedal used as a toe piston

By connecting (in Hauptwerk) the controller, value 127, with the pedal coupler, and using the toggle function (which causes Hauptwerk to toggle the state of the coupler each time the value is received), I have a working “toe piston” for the coupler, after about 1 minute of practical work (and a few minutes figuring out the MIDI and Hauptwerk configuration parts). Nice and easy!

MIDI-fying the Viscount Pedalboard

Now you can read the full story on how I MIDI-enabled the pedalboard from my Viscount Domus electronic organ and connected it to the computer in order to play using the Hauptwerk virtual organ. I purchased a special MIDI encoder and created a connector similar to that of the organ, that fits in the connector on the pedalboard.

The pedal MIDI encoder, hooked up and ready.

I could then use an old IDE-cable to connect it to the MIDI encoder. After that it was quite simple, I just hooked up the MIDI encoder to the computer using a MIDI cable and it worked like a charm on the first attempt.

Now that the pedalboard is working, I’m thinking about how best to take advantage of the extra inputs of the encoder. Maybe add a few stop controls?

You can find the full description in the “In depth” box to the right or just follow the link from here.

Hauptwerk setup finally in place

Finally, I have managed to get the pedalboard and both keyboards connected to the computer, and I’m able to play using the Hauptwerk software. It works like a charm! I just love the sound of the sampleset I’m using, the Silbermann organ in Grosshartmannsdorf, Germany. The setup is shown below. It’s messy, but it works great. Notice the baby monitor to the left of the music stand. It’s a vital accessory since I’m often playing while the kids are sleeping. Without it, if they wake up crying, it could take a while before I hear their screams through the sound of the organo pleno… 🙂