Mr Pudding

David came round this afternoon, and various things were discussed. A further check was made to the toe piston moulding before applying the saw, which required the expression shoe assembly to be unscrewed again (there were tears), and instruction was given regarding the screwing-down of the keyboards.

This might not look much, but it represents a major step forward: the choir keyboard has now been permanently affixed to the console and connected to the MIDI nerve-centre

I’ve checked the keyboard, and it works. I’ve also double-checked the pedalboard, and discovered that pot #2 is not as silent as I had hitherto believed. It is perfectly well behaved on its own, but when I start playing the pedals, it spits out all manner of random messages. I have done some testing on this, and it would appear that the problem is either the PDS interface board, or (more likely) the wire. I have a couple of alternative solutions to think about, both of which involve butchering a CAT5 patch cable.

Apart from deciding on the best way forward for the pots, the plan for the rest of this weekend, or at least for the next several days, is to secure all the manuals together and connect them up. This will allow me to finally get some sound out of the console, via the laptop. There won’t be any more progress beyond this until some time in July, as I have to fit in with Norwich Organs’ other commitments. At least I will be able to do some left-hand-and-pedals practice.

Yay.

Faced with a variety of alternatives to resolve the shouty potentiometer, I opted for the simplest and least invasive first. Wrap a loop of wire around the exposed cable, and attach both ends to GND.

Result: silence.

I’ve no idea why the interference chose this wire and not the other two, but I’ll put that down to magic.

This weekend has been given over to wiring up the pedalboard and expression shoes. It should also have been given over to cutting the grass, but that wasn’t nearly as interesting although it may have proved less frustrating.

The first vexation came when I connected the pedal MIDI nerve to the MIDI central nervous system and plugged that into the laptop to sniff the MIDI messages. The first seven pedals were fine, but the eighth was silent. The next seven were also fine, and the eighth was silent. This pattern was repeated a third time, and then the last eight notes were completely mute. Nary a message issued forth. This was the cue for much poking and prodding with a multimeter, discussions with people who are more knowledgable than I about such matters, an email to Roman at midi-hardware.com, and much stomping around in a foul temper by me. Roman replied with an obvious question: was the PDS module correctly seated on the header pins of the REED32 module? ‘What?’ I asked myself. ‘What a ridiculous question. Of course it is. I’m not stupid.’ Still wearing my stompy boots, off I went to check again before penning a scornful reply.

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The PDS module was not correctly seated: in fact it was out by a pin. Correcting this embarrassing error proved that the pedals were, in fact, all working perfectly. Somewhat chastened, I spent about half an hour crawling around on the floor with a hot soldering iron in one hand, wiring the pots up to the cable. That was fun. Then back to testing, to discover that, while the first and third (swell and solo) shoes work perfectly, the middle (choir) shoe is generating spurious messages on average once every fifteen seconds. I think that this is down to interference, and I have to try and wrap some additional earth wires around the bare wiper wires tomorrow, which will hopefully solve the problem. If it doesn’t, it has been suggested to me by a beermat that some cat 5 network cable would be even better and have superior shielding ability over such a short (1 metre) run of cable. That’s plan B.

Today’s photographs are the fully wired expression shoes from behind, and the organ console with the pedalboard attached, possibly for the first time in several years. Dewi thought I was photographing him, and wouldn’t stay out of the way.

Once the problem of the interference is solved, I’m somewhat at a loss to proceed further, until I get some hardwood to fill in the gaps on either side of the keyboard, or the toe pistons – both of which David is currently working on.

I may have to cut the grass after all.

Without much comment, anyway. This is what the console looks like at the moment. It is perfectly organised, and I know the location and purpose of everything on it. Compulsively tidy viewers may wish to look away now.

And so, before another shoe-related pun escapes from my fingers, I must bring an end to this two-part series by offering part four for your consideration.

Here are the three shoes firmly affixed to the base board. You may observe that the rubber on the swell shoe (the left) is slightly different to the other two. This is because shut up.

And the view from the rear. Note that the new sibling has three pots rather than one. I’m not sure why this is the case, although they were all wired up when I received it (it came from a Norwich Organs console, so I will ask David when I see him). I will only be wiring up a single pot, since the interface only has space for three – one on each shoe. In any case, I could always attach the pot to multiple actions in Hauptwerk, should the need arise.

I will dust off the bottoms of the shoes before putting them into the console. But that is a job for this weekend.