From schelsullivan@hotmail.com Sun May 11 22:24:48 2003
Subject:Brilliant Idea or Insane Ramblings - B4 custom controller

Hi

A week or so ago I mentioned building a clone dual manual contoller
using B4 and Petkov's B4CE and actual hammond parts.
Someone brought up an interesting point (I dont remmeber who it was)
which is the ingenious way the key contact are
made in real Hammond organs. The contacts are made in such a way
that a very small amount of travel will only activate
the tone from the higher drawbars, and the other draw bar tones fall
in succession will further small amounts of key travel.
Being a very new owner of a Hammond M-162 I hadnt notice this
before, but sure enough its there, adding the possibility
of more expressivness than I had previously been aware of.

The person also pointed out that this is not possible with B4, or is
it! Not being familiar with any of the hardware clones out there my
question is this:

Do any clones reproduce this effect?

Now my idea of how this could be achieved usin B4:

Forgive my lack of knowledge concerning the actuall working
mechanics of the key contacts, but as i understand them, the
principal is this: 9 key switches all stacked under each other, each
with its on wire activating a particular draw bar tone.
Ok heres my idea: Take a really nice fast computer, using Vstack (or
similar VSTi host) run 9 INSTANCES OF B4 EACH
ASSIGNED TO A DIFFERENT MIDI CHANNEL. RUN 9 OF PETKOV'S B4 ENCODERS,
RUN THE CORROSPONDING
KEY SWITCH TO EACH ENCODER, INTURN TO EACH INSTANCE OF B4 WITH ONLY
THAT PARTICULAR DRAWBAR
PULLED, ALL THE OTHERS SET TO 0. This would infact reproduce the
effect would it not? And with a nice programable
midi fader box (like peaveys pc1600x, i love mine) you can program
each slider's midi CC and Channel to controller the
correct drawbar.

Am I crazy? Is there a simpler way? Do any other clones reproduce
this effect?
Thanks for listening to my ramblings,

Schel Sullivan