[sdiy] keyboard: good designs?

[Ray Wilson]

Hi MED

Check this out for some ideas. It is a bare bones 1V/Octave design.

Ray

http://atlas.csd.net/~rjwsoft/keybrdcontroller.html

Hope this helps.

My wife was given a room warmer style organ which I swore was going to burn
the house down. I finally gutted it and that (believe it or not) is where I
got my piano style keyboards. It actually had piano keyboards with the
crappiest wire switches you eve saw. But all they had to do was make and
break and I guess they did that alright for forty or fifty years.

Cheers

Ray


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
[mailto:owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl]On Behalf Of MED
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2003 6:12 PM
To: Ray Wilson
Cc: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
Subject: Re: [sdiy] keyboard: good designs?


On Thursday 20 November 2003 16:24, Ray Wilson wrote:
> Another source: pawn shops.
>
> Also I can't help but wonder why people in Santa Barbara can't give organs
> away? Is there some law against it? Does Arnold know about this?

I guess no one wants the ancient organs that warm up rooms and have horrible
leakage/drift problems caused by thirty-year-old (sometimes paper)
capacitors... for some reason.

> I am always on the hunt for keyboards too. I hate to part with $300.00 to
> $400.00 to get something I'm going to tear up. You can also switch-ify (I
> want credit for that word) an old piano keyboard and there are tons of old
> pianos around that people just want hauled away.

Okay, now this's going to be a pretty darn newbish question but i've been
hunting around the net and going through schematics and whatnot and i can't
find an answer. How do you connect keyboards to generate 1V/octave? I'd
especially prefer to not use a microcontroller/digital scanner, because it
seems truly overkill.
I've got three keyboards (pulled from an organ -- two manuals, one
pedalboard).
The manuals both have about 47 keys.
One has four metal rods running all throughout the keyboard, which are
contacted by pins when the keys are pressed. I'm assuming these are the
"buses" to which everyone refers. Correct me if I'm wrong, for I'm not sure
if I have the lingo down properly :)
	The other keyboard simply switches between one metal rod when the key is up
and another metal rod when the key is down, but has a wire coming from every
key. Would this be two bus, or one bus?
The pedalboard (24 note) is more complex. I think was already wired for
lowest-note-priority monophonic sound, because that is how it operated on
the
organ I pulled it from.
There are three pins per key: a common pin, a normally-closed pin, and a
normally-open pin. The moving (connected to the key) pin rests on the top
(NC) pin while unpressed, and it moves to touch the bottom (NO) pin when
played.
It was soldered so that, from the top of the keyboard on down, the
normally-closed connection of one is soldered to the pin connection of the
next, and so on down the line. The lowest note's normally-closed pin is
unconnected.

What is the best approach to make 1V/oct keyboards out of each of these
keyboards? I mean both in terms of physical/wiring connection and
electronics
involved. I've been struggling with this for a while and want hte help of
someones more experienced.
Thanks in advance,
-MED