From obxwindsurf@yahoo.com Mon Oct 20 05:59:34 2003
Subject:Update on Hammond Chorus/Vibrato simulator - launch has been scrubbed

All,

As I have said in the past, thanks for all the responses to my
original thread.

After demo'ing the B4 through my leslie and with my keyboard setup, I
have decided to abandon the Chorus/Vibrato simulator project and
instead build my clone rig upon the B4 platform.

Interestingly enough I was able to get it to run cleanly on an old
Thinkpad 380 which I believe is only 166 MHz with 48Mb ram.
Unfortunately I have to use an old-style joystick interface MIDI
connection because this laptop (available and FREE at the moment)
does not have USB ports and is only running Win 95 (yes, it's old).
When the laptop finally dies, I'll see if I can find a replacement on
e-bay that I can install XP on.

The only downside is was that I had to reconfig the 380's sound card
to reproduce slightly sub-quality (from CD quality) sample rate on
the audio in order to get rid of "interrupt noise" and maintain a
decently low latency. But that's what I have to work with for now.
I talked my wife into getting the B4 for me for Christmas instead of
the silver bracelet :)

Quite frankly, I can't hear the difference through my Leslie and I
think I owe that to the low-to-midrange character of a Hammond and
the Leslie's frequency response.

Rather than extend any energy into the Chorus/Vibrato project I have
instead decided to build a realtime drawbar and rocker switch MIDI
controller for many of the B4's functions. I have just secured a set
of M3 drawbars and will integrate these along with some switches to a
Basic Stamp microcontroller. This unit's design will allow me to
control (with the M3 drawbar set) 8 great, 9 swell, and 1 pedal
drawbars, along with on-off switches for percussion, overdrive,
rotary on-off, velocity, vib-lo, vib-hi, and rotary speed.

The rest of the parameter settings I will control from the "Control"
view of the B4. I'll post updates on my website as they become
available.

(I still can't get over how much the B4 sounds like a Hammond!)

Best regards,
Kevin