[sdiy] One Octave Foot Pedal Project

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Saturday 10 July 2004 10:44 pm, Glen wrote:

> Just in case anyone wanted more details:
>
> The AGO (American Guild of Organists) standard for a pedalboard is 32
> notes. The surface of the pedalboard is concave in shape, and the pedals
> are arranged in a radiating pattern--not parallel to each other. You will
> find this on full-size organs, especially pipe organs or electronic organs
> built to sound and play like pipe organs.

Having had to move these several times while working on them (and yes, they 
are normally removable without too much trouble :-),  I know exactly what you 
mean here...

Best one I can recall was a 1940 vintage Wurlitzer that was in a church, that 
had, after it had been put in place,  had a "choir loft" built around it.  
That didn't give me a whole lot of room with the bench and pedalboard in 
there.

As it turned out,  there was next to no electronics in the console,  it was a 
_reed organ_!  Most of the electronics were in the tone cabinets,  and it 
took some doing to get to them.  That involved carrying what I needed up a 
rather rickety wooden ladder that was NOT attached to the wall and up through 
a hatch to get to where they were.  Tube checker,  etc. went up the ladder 
with me.  The floor up there was carpeted with dead bats,  over which I had 
to walk to get to the tone cabinets <crunch, crunch...>

Darn near 30 years ago and I still remember it well!

> The BDO standard is 30 notes. I'm not sure what the abbreviation stands
> for, but it seems to be a standard somewhere other than in the USA.

Don't think I ever encountered one of those,  only 32,  25,  and 13 on spinets 
(sometimes 12 if it was a real old Hammond :-).

> Hammond organs with supposedly "full pedalboards" had only 25 notes, the
> pedalboard surface is flat, and the pedals are parallel to each other. This
> was done as a cost cutting measure, once Laurens Hammond decided that most
> organists didn't use the highest notes of the AGO pedalboard very often
> anyway! Later, Hammond did produce some organs with full AGO pedalboards,
> but this was only done on a few models intended to please the pipe-oriented
> AGO crowd.

Do you happen to recall which models those were?  Most of the Hammond stuff I 
encountered was smaller models.  Some of the later solid-state stuff was 
truly awful,  in terms of how much noise came though when you weren't playing 
anything.

> Smaller organs,  especially those made for home use, often had a 13 note
> pedalboard, instead of a full pedalboard. It is flat, with cantilevered
> pedals mounted in parallel fashion, permanently attached to the organ. (The
> larger pedalboards are not usually permanently attached to the organ.) This
> is no doubt a big cost cutting effort, and it relies on the idea that most
> beginners won't miss those extra notes anyway.

One pro player I used to do work for had a couple of different sets of pedals 
that he'd use with a small Rhodes.  He wanted to be able to use them with his 
Hammond spinet as well (I don't believe that this guy actually hauled that 
thing around himself!),  so I got a hold of a friend of mine who was good at 
woodworking,  and we built a "box" of sorts under there where the old 
pedal-board lived.  I installed a power connection,  and a length of wire 
that terminated in a 1/4" plug,  and was wired to the pedal drawbar.  It 
worked out pretty well,  actually,  and he was pleased with the result and 
could get the sound he wanted,  and didn't need a separate amp for that pedal 
board.

> As for portable organs, such as combo organs, I believe that most of those
> had 13 pedals. I can't say that with certainty, because I haven't
> personally seen too many portables with a pedalboard attached.

I remember a bunch of those that had a _connector_ for one,  but don't 
remember too many with pedals attached,  either.  Though one of my earliest 
recollections was some of the nifty bass sounds you could get out of a 
Farfisa with that one octave of reverse-colored keys (I must've been about 14 
or 15 at the time  so yeah,  it was nifty back then!  :-)

> Also, the bottom note is always a "C" note on all the pedalboards I've
> seen. (I've seen quite a few.)
>
> As a historical note, there were also a few "double" pedalboards made a
> long time ago. I'm told that they had two rows of pedals, with one set
> hinged at the organ side of the pedalboard, and the other row of pedals
> were hinged at the player's side of the assembly. Yes, one pedalboard
> "pointed" toward you, while the other pedalboard "pointed" away from you,
> and the two pedalboards met each other in the center of the assembly. It
> seems this was an early attempt at a "two-voice" pedal system--not just two
> notes, but potentially two different organ voices simultaneously accessible
> from the pedalboard. I've never seen one, and they were something of an
> experimental feature that apparently died out a long, long time ago.
> (Possibly due to the impact of a large meteor?)   :)

This is the first time I've ever heard of such a thing.

> So if you want to gather up some maple hardwood and make your own
> pedalboard, and you want to make it to some sort of common standard, the
> above information should help a little bit. If anyone needs standard
> dimensions for pedalsticks, I could probably come up with that also. It
> shouldn't be too hard to build your own from scratch, instead of relying on
> cannibalizing an existing organ.

Speaking of cannibalizing,  the worst setup I ever saw was one where somebody 
had removed all of the actuators from the pedal set of a B or C series 
Hammond (I don't recall which model) and mounted something in the console 
that had little bitty *push buttons* on it!  This was some aftermarket gizmo 
that somebody had bought,  and had installed,  and the sound was truly 
horrible.  The person who called me in wanted the original setup restored,  
so I did that,  and in an attempt to fix that aftermarket crap I had to 
replace *all* of the push buttons,  as they were all pretty much shot.  
Broken contacts,  partially broken contacts -- these were _open frame_ 
buttons!  Not at all robust,  and certainly not capable of withstanding the 
force that was being applied.