From sgtpepper@surewest.net Sun May 11 23:11:44 2003
Subject:Re: Brilliant Idea or Insane Ramblings - B4 custom controller

The biggest problem would be the flood of MIDI commands on the low-bandwidth
MIDI interface, which runs (IIRC) at 32K bits per second. A MIDI Note-On
command without velocity is 16 bits, so the effective command rate is
limited to about 200 commands per second. Every time you press a key on your
MIDI controller, you will generate 9 Note-On and 9 Note-Off commands. The
next problem is multiple instances of B4 on a single computer--when I have
accidentally run two copies of the program on my computer, neither one
functioned properly. Had to reboot the machine to get B4 to behave properly
again.

--Steve

----- Original Message -----
> 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
>
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