The concept was simple but the execution would prove to be quite a challenge and require a considerable amount of work.
Without question the eventuality of any classical musician is the largest, most powerful and most majestic incarnation of musical instrumentation; the frontier of the symphonic pipe organ.
The sound and power of an organ is no less than breathtaking and intrinsically haunting, worthy of its label as the king of musical instruments. Without having a grand auditorium of one's own and an investment of money exceeding more digits than one would hope to earn in a lifetime, the induction of modern technology has opened the doors to reproducing the sound and ambiance of a cathedral pipe organ in your own home and made it possible with a small investment of money, time, and a love for good music.
My goal was to construct a playable organ console.
The minimum components required for such a proposition:
(1) One manual (piano keyboard), with MIDI output
(2) Pedalboard, with MIDI output
(3) Sampler (running on a computer)
(4) Stereo speakers or headphones
History of Pipe Organ Pedalboards
The vast majority of consumer-grade electric organs that have been on the market over the past half century have had pedalboards, but only of the very basic kind. Most were only one octave (13 notes) and were short and stubby, known as spinette style pedals. Some of the more complex organs had two full octaves of foot pedals, giving a much greater range but still inadequate for playing many of the great classic organ pieces from composers over the centuries which were written for recitation on a pipe organ. They required pedals ranging a full two and half octaves (32 notes). The specific dimensions and ergonomic construction of this truly "industrial" grade pedal set is quite specific, and was inducted into the AGO (American Guild of Organists) as the de-facto for serious organ music and are only found on high-end electronic organs and large-scale pipe organs. Anything less would be amateurish.
The Organ Pedalboard
The thought occured that the most difficult and time-consuming part of a project like this would be either (1) acquiring the entire pedalboard intact or, as a last resort, (2) appropriating the proper materials and building the entire structure from scratch. Ouch. Believe it or not, I was dedicated enough to making this project a reality that I was prepared to do the latter. Fortunately I had enough perseverance that that was not necessary. |
I spent many days and hours on the phone with dozens of music shops, churches, ads in the local Buy & Sell papers, eBay, and on and on. My search for a used or discarded set of organ pedals was proving to be fruitless and I was getting increasingly desperate. The reason being was that I was not looking for just any old set of pedals, I of course wanted the best.
So expectations were high and hopes were high, and I was in total shock when the amazing happened - I actually found them.
As a last ditch effort, I went on eBay to see if I could find this beast. There was nothing of the sort, of couse, spare someone selling assorted parts from a dismantled pipe organ; magnets, windchest enclosures, etc. And by luck I noticed this fellow was from my city, so I thought 'why not,' and I sent him an e-mail detailing what I was after and if he knew of anyone who could help me out.
I nearly fell out of my seat when he sent me an e-mail back and said that he not only had an old AGO 32 pedalboard mechanically intact, but he had the bench to go with it. How much did he want for the whole package? $75. In Canadian funds.
It turns out the fellow repairs organs and had acquired an old console, footpedals and all, and had the works stashed in his garage for a few years and was looking for someone to take parts of it off his hands. When I called him up, asking for specifically that, he was only too glad to get rid of it.
What I received was an authentic piece from a real pipe organ built sometime around the 1950's.
So naturally, I had to clean it.
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Standing it up on my balcony, I took a bucket full of soap and water and had to scrub off five decades worth of dirt, grime and bugs. The thing was filthy to the nth degree. I even had to 'floss' between each pedal with a rag, and the bucket was pitch black after I was done. It took several hours. |
The second piece that came with the pedalboard was a long contact plate with little flexible metal poles, likely used at one time in the original organ console as switches to create an electric circuit. All with grime caked on. I had to clean each contact with rubbing alcohol and Q-tips several times. There were 4 contacts for each note. 32 x 4 = 128 contacts. That took way too long.
The original wiring was way too difficult to decipher, not to mention brittle and grimy, so I cut it off and left the contacts as solder points for later. |
So that's all fine and dandy, but how does one make this hair-brained scheme actually work as a playable instrument?
That's where this little baby comes into play: |
When I was first trying to plan how to go about a project like this, the most important part determining whether it would be worthwhile or not is if I had a means to make it work.
The next step in my evil genius plan was to purchase the cheapest piece of crap piano keyboard I could find that had MIDI output. And I found this little gem, and it's perfect. For $40 (Canadian, remember) including shipping and all, I got this little 3 octave MIDI controller off eBay. And I think you can guess what happened next. |
Being the cheap piece of crap that it is, I knew it would suit my purpose perfectly.
All you had to do was wire each note to each respective contact on the contact board.
See, expensive keyboards' circuitry is much more complicated and would not be well suited for this application. They have touch-sensitivity which means variations in how hard or soft you hit a key produces louder or softer notes. And that's not what we want for a pedalboard. Cheap keyboards, on the other hand, do not exhibit such a luxury, the volume of each note is always the same because they do not have any circuitry measuring the velocity of key presses: they simply close a circuit and trigger a note. Magnifico simplistico. A larger keyboard would have been more expensive, and much too large for this purpose; where would I put it?
The four buttons attached to the keyboard let you transpose up or down, as well as change the output program # or channel #.
The architecture is also perfectly suited. If you notice, the pedalboard is 2.5 octaves and the keyboard is 3 octaves, both starting on C. The extra notes can optionally be wired to additional controller buttons at a later time that I could mount on top of the pedalboard to perform programmed functions such as changing stop combinations in mid-performance.
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Here you can see the contact board roughly mounted on the backboard with the pedals in correct position. You press a pedal down, and the oddly shaped metal hook comes in contact with the four wires below it, closing a circuit between them all. It was apparent that the pedalboard was designed as a modular piece of equipment, as it was in no way permanently mounted on the chassis of the console. You were able to remove the pedals and even swap them for a different set, it seemed. The pedals clamped onto the backboard with two metal hooks to keep them in place and assure the correct alignment and distance between the contacts.
There is one long metal wire spanning the entire length which is soldered to the fourth wire of each contact, in case the electronic schema calls for such a requirement in circuity. In my case, I was able to use this to my advantage because of how the electronics in the little keyboard were designed. |
Oddly enough, I was racking my brain on where I'd get enough wiring to complete the project. Then I remembered I had a box full of IDE cables. One cable did the job; after removing the two connectors, both ends were bare and ready for soldering. Its length was perfect; I just peeled off one wire at a time.
After working for a few hours each day over the course of a week, I had all the wiring soldered and the entire unit tested without a flaw. |
The wiring got out of hand as I approached completion of the soldering, and I tried to restrain it with little twist-ties.
I was anxious to try the whole thing out, so I put it all together with whatever I could find around the living room. (Computer is located just out of view to the right) |
The finished console after the project's completion: |
This is an old photo :)
I've purchased new KRK V8 studio reference monitors since taking this picture.
Retail Products Comparison
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Roland PK-25
25-note pedalboard
MSRP: $4000.00+ CAN |
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Classic MIDI Works
32-note pedalboard
MSRP: $1389.00 CAN |
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Do-It-Yourself Retrofit
| 32-note pedalboard: |
$75 |
| MIDI circuitry: |
$40 |
Total: |
$105 CAN |
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Links
I'm not the only one to cook up a project like this!
Take a look at other people who have attempted the same thing with varying complexity:
Hauptwerk
Laukhuff's Portable MIDI Organ Pedals
International Organ Federation
Stephen Malinowski
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