Re: All I want for christmas is a good midi controller

[Dave Chesavage <dchesavage@qualcomm.com>]

>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.

YES! Wow, how funny. Yes, I've wanted to build something exactly like this
for a long time. I used to write embedded digital piano software for
Gulbransen (who is NOT in the organ business anymore, BTW). They do make a
groovy retrofit MIDI controller for acoustic pianos, which I guess I should
point out unfortunately does not lend itself well to a Hammond installation
- it has to do with the way the Hammond keyboard was manufactured. I have to
admit that was a hell of a fun job at times, but after 5 years there it was
time to move on.

Anyway, for a long time I thought it would be really cool to make a keyboard
just as you described. A weighted 88-key keyboard on bottom, with an
unweighted 61 on top, with one or two sets of drawbars. I was thinking keep
it really simple, so just piano, organ, strings, maybe brass and a few pads.
If you want more sounds, that's what MIDI's for.

A big part of the charm of the Hammond organ is its funky close-but-no-cigar
tuning. Many of the Hammond clone keyboards (such as the old Korg BX-3,
CX-3) use octave-division synthesis and can't be tuned this way. The XB-2
was the first clone I heard that had the correct whiney not-quite-in-tune
quality, which is why I bought it. Among the XB-2's problems, though, is not
enough oscillators. Don't ya hate it when you do a left hand mash potatoes
swirl only to discover all the oscillators got stolen from your right hand?
I don't know how the XB-2 works, but it obviously only has a few
oscillators, so it has to have some sort of assignent algorithm to figure
out where to steal oscillators when it runs out.

As the trend towards more oscillators continues, I thought, hmm, with a 128
osc synth, you could solve this problem the right way. I don't think anybody
has tried this before. If you actually had 128 digital oscillators, why not
pre-assign each oscillator to a sampled tonewheel waveform, tuned exactly to
the same Hammond tuning that we all know and love. Then the key assigner's
job would be to turn on each oscillator to the correct amplitude based on
drawbar position and key position, exactly the way a real Hammond works.
This would only leave a few oscs for Piano mode, so I don't know how you'd
get piano and organ simultaneously. After we gather our consortium of
venture capitalists, I'd love to be involved in the effort to figure out
how. ;-)

Something else I thought would have been cool to build is a Hammond clone
contained entirely in a drawbar module. A while back I saw that new (well,
it's not new anymore) Oberheim unit and I thought "Yes! Exactly!" until I
played it and went "Ouch... ooh, no, not exactly..."

Uh-oh, I'm rambling, and I'm supposed to be working. Ahh, right then!
Anyway, I think Daniel's idea is right on the money. Don't know how big the
market would be for such a thing. The comprimise I've come up with is a Korg
SG-1D on bottom and an XB-2 on top. I made a wooden rack to get the two as
close together as possible, but still not as close as I'd like.

Dave