From sevush@rcn.com Thu Jan 24 16:03:14 2002
Subject:Re: Hammonds and pedals - Love 'em or hate 'em

I never really had the chance to get comfortable w/pedals when I was first learning on my L100. Once in a while I'd see/use a B3 w/pedals and it was kinda scary, I'd worry about hitting them accidentally.

These days, I've got two volume pedals (Yamaha FC7-s, solid), a sustain pedal and two momentary switches. I have enough problems keeping my feet "straight" as it is. Having musical pedals would probably keep me in a straightjacket.

Like many of the people in this group, as the "keyboard guy" I'm not only responsible for the bread&butter piano, rhodes, and Hammond sounds, but I'm also to produce horns, strings, choir and the odd mallet or sound FX out of my hat. To keep my hands where they belong - on the keys - I'll program a patch where the strings/horns are controlled by the volume pedal but the piano/rhodes is not, allowing me to double and even lend dynamics to the attack on the horns. In addition, the CX3 is MIDI'd to the S80, so I'm working the Hammond layer in and out on another volume pedal.

One thing I've found that makes this arrangement much more musical is to disable several controllers on the CX3 - volume (#7), sustain (#64), mod (#1) and pitch bend. That way, most of the piano-synth things I do on the S80 do not produce weird or unexpected side effects on the CX3. The sustain pedal was a huge problem - I'd sustain a run on the S80, bring up the volume on the CX3 to lay something down on the sustained "bed" and get the horrible sound of a zillion keys sustained on the CX3! Also, using the volume pedal on the S80 would silence the CX3 when I didn't want that at all.

I think the idea of mapping some unusual sounds to a MIDI'd pedal board sounds cool for freeing one's hands. OTH, it sounds like Yet Another Thing To Carry/Setup/Break/Go Horribly Wrong and I've been trying to simplify, simplify, simplify! Two volume pedals, one sustain and two foot switches are quite enough for this severely overworked and underpaid keyboard guy.