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MIDI Controllers


isaac42

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Who knows about MIDI? I'd like to have a MIDI pedal controller I can use to play a drone note while I play bass on top of it. There are other ways to get the drone, I know, but I'd like to be able to put an old MIDI keyboard I have to use. Ideally, of course, I'd have a two octave organ-style pedal controller, but that can wait. I see several tutorials on how to build the pedals, but nothing about how to do the electronics. Is it so simple that no instruction is necessary, and I just ignorant?

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I'm guessing you were talking about a bass pedal like this.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/13-note-Lowe...item35c1c4dc27
The midi versions like this are pretty expensive
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Roland-PK-6-...item27cb60c853

The lowest price on a midi controller pedal I've seen is the behringer FBC1010
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Behringer-FC...item27cd457ef1
You can find them regularly for under $100 on EBay.

As far as building one, I'm like you, I haven

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I'm pretty sure you have some misconceptions in there. The keyboard player in my band uses an 88-key MIDI piano controller when he plays piano, and it has no internal sound banks. The keyboard signals from that go to his synth, where the tones are generated. As for wedging something between the keys, that won't work because the drone I want would come in the middle of the song, so I have to be able to start and stop it while playing bass. Of course, I could just place my keyboard on the floor and play it with my foot, but that would look silly!

As I need only one note, it would be easy enough to make an oscillator and turn it on when I need it. Could do it with a 555 timer chip. But I suspect that, once I have one note, I'll want another, and pretty soon I'll be playing bass with my hands and synth with my feet, just like Geddy Lee!

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I built a pedal about ten years ago using a pic I bought off a guy in ireland and using an akai s20 sampler for the sounds. I ened up building a 13 key manual out of mdf and copper tubing. It was heavy, unreliable, and ugly biggrin.gif

I don't think that the electricals are tough, but the physical part of the device is picky enough that I feel I would have been better off buying something.

IMO it would have been about the same cost and much more reliable to buy an already made product.

If you really want to play organ pedals, the roland pk5 is pretty good. If you just want to get into it to try it out, the behrenger fbc1010 footpedal will send note-on messages.

I'd start with that and some kind of synth, and if you like it and progress to more "playing" rather than droning, sell it and move to one of the organ pedal setups out there... I haven't looked in a while, but there used to be a lot of these kinds of already built midi setups on ebay.

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Looking back at your original question... if you're just hacking your current synth into a different setup, the electircials would be the same-- you're just reworking the physical implementation.

The other common route (I took above) is to find a switch to midi converter and use that... and then if you need something custom you go from there...

but as I said, if I already had a midi keyboard, I'd probably just get the fcb1010 and start from there (actually, I currently own and FCB 1010, but didn't find it all that exciting, so... biggrin.gif )

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