Playing percussion from thrid keyboard

[ChuckH]

Jim,
I have assigned the bottom ocatve of the third (upper) keyboard to play selected percussions and toys. The toys play OK (one note per toy), but the percussions (eg bass drum) only turn on but do not actually play the sound, I still need to get the sound by pressind a pedal. Is it possible to assign the bass drum to sound by pressing a particular note on the upper keyboard?
Charles

[Jim Henry]

Are you setting up the bottom octave to send MIDI Control Change (CC) messages to the Miditzer to play the toys? And then trying to do the same for the percussions? It is an interesting idea but, as you discovered, it is not going to work for the percussions in the Miditzer.

The reason actually makes more sense for the percussions. The CC messages turn stops on and off. The basic paradigm of an organ is that you have to have both a key and a stop on to activate a sound. E.g. a pedal key and the bass drum stop. So sending only the CC to turn on the bass drum stop is not enough to play the bass drum. You can't get tricky and set up your bottom octave key to send both the CC and the Pedal Note On because that will play every Pedal stop that is on.

So why does this work for the toys? The answer is that the toys are a quirky implementation. You would think the toys should be controlled by Program Change (PC) messages because they are pistons. And that was the first thought I had about how the toys would work. But I realized that PC messages are just momentary. They don't provide an on and an off. MIDI Note messages would probably make more sense for activating the toys but I wasn't keen on introducing a "Toy Clavier". For better or worse, the toys were implemented as special stops that do activate a sound without needing an associated key to be on. So you can activate the toys directly and individually with CC messages.

The easiest way I can think of to have the percussions on the third manual keys is to program them to bypass the Miditzer entirely. Since you are running through MIDI-OX, you could route the percussion keys to something else to produce the percussion sounds. General MIDI includes a good selection of percussion sounds so even using the default Windows MIDI Out might work.

More limited but possibly of interest would be to use the TRAPS 1st/2nd toggle switch, which is a feature on some real Wurlitzers although not the 216 if I remember correctly. (The real 216 Pedal percussions are always on second touch.) When in the 2nd position the Pedal traps are on Pedal second touch. If you programmed a key to play on a Note based Pedal 2T clavier, it would play whatever Pedal percussion stops were on.

[ChuckH]

Thanks for the explanation - it makes me appreciate all the more how clever you were to have designed and built Miditzer.

Another problem suddenly arose today and I am not sure what caused it, but whenever I press any non-key control, including General Cancel, the train whistle sounds until I click the Miditzer name plate. This is not the result of any change to the Midi-Ox mapping. I had this issue earlier but this time I can't fix it by reinstating the saved CBO and XML files. Charles

[Jim Henry]

Another problem suddenly arose today and I am not sure what caused it, but whenever I press any non-key control, including General Cancel, the train whistle sounds until I click the Miditzer name plate. This is not the result of any change to the Midi-Ox mapping. I had this issue earlier but this time I can't fix it by reinstating the saved CBO and XML files. Charles

Is this with the alpha version? If so, do you still have the release version that you can compare to?

[ChuckH]

Anything I do will be with the latest version, in this case, Alpha V3. I don't keep old versions on the Conn.
I plan on uninstalling V3 today, clean out everything on the Conn associated with Miditzer and start again but I won't touch MidiOx, and see how that goes.

[ChuckH]

Jim,

I followed the plan I set out earlier and everything is fine again.

I also decided before doing the reinstal, to dispense with associating percussion instruments with the upper keyboard but still have the toys triggered from the lowest set of 6 notes.

As a matter of interest, before uninstalling V3, I did get the pedal percussions to sound on the upper keyboard by changing the pedal second touch channel from 13 to 1, but I have reverted to keeping them set to channel 13.

Charles

[chad121]

No unless the is specifics to the music your playing. Usually high to low on tom's,which is why they are different sizes, snare how you like it. But to a particular key no. Not generally just tensioned right by tapping near each lug round the drum so they sound the same by ear.