All I want for christmas is a good midi controller

["Daniel V. Samons" <dsamons@qcark.com>]

In the past several years we have seen the arrival of a number of 
products that do a good job creating hammond sounds (XM-1, V3,
XB-2, etc.)  What we need now is a really nice midi controller
made especially this purpose.  I could really make some use of a
controller with the following features:

        -61 note upper and lower manuals, with the capability to
                program the first octave or so as presets.
        -upper keyboard with typical hammond style "waterfall keys"
                (although I could live with synth keys)
        -At least one set of drawbars on-board, perhaps expandable to 
                as many as four.
        -lower keyboard could be a good semi-weighted, synth-action
                keyboard feel, (not an actual weighted feel but with
                enough of that to be able to use it for piano playing,
                perhaps along the line of one of the nicer Roland synths.)
        -Old style leslie switch on board with three positions:  chorale, 
                brake, tremolo.  
        -Several assigable continuous controllers for controlling any number
                of hammond features.
        -Several assigable switches, to controll V1/V2/V3/C1/C2/C3 and other
                functions like key click.

I have often wondered why such a beast has not been manufactured.  I for one
would purchase something like this in the $1000 range provided it was well
built.  I'd give even more if it was a really pro piece of gear (I payed 
almost $400 for a Fatar to go with my computer midi setup and it is an
el cheapo peice of plastic!)  It seems that for a lot of rock and popular music
players this would be a very useful controller.  You could set it up for
piano/low and B3/high or a twin manual B3 for more intensive organ work.  For
other types of music you could just assign the keyboards to any number of 
different synth sounds.  The possibilities are virtually endless.  On synth
patches you could program the drawbars to controll oscillators, filters etc.
But the real advantage would, of course, be with the hammond stuff.  

I would be interested in seeing if other players have thought about a 
similar controller, and what their ideal specs would be for such a beast.
Perhaps we can come up with the ideal blend of features that some budding
venture capitalist can turn into a product we can all use.

seasons greetings
daniel samons
dsamons@qcark.com

what do you want for nothing?
rubber biscuit