My setup for practicing at home.

February 3, 2003
Great news! I got email from some very nice people at Electrovoce. Turns out that since PAVO (the MIDITools people) went out of business, these guys now have license to distribute the MIDI controller unit that I use for the organ pedalboard. I may have to buy more of them just to have them around!
May 5, 2001
Sadly, the 1960's Rodgers that I bought for a song and I thought would be neat had to go. It was taking up too much space, and I just didn't have time to fix it up right. I hope the guy who bought it can get it to work. He said he's got a friend who fixes Hammonds, so he should be able to make it work right, and then it'll be a really nice piece.
My current gear list is:
In order to practice at home, I wanted two manuals and a pedalboard. The manuals were easy: I also play synthesizers, and I own two synths (one keyboard and one rack-mount module) and one controller:
My keyboards and pedals. view of top of pedalboard My keyboards and pedals. My keyboards and pedals.

The keyboard synth and controller are on a two tiered fully adjustable "Z" stand. The second tier can be tilted, but I use it flat. I can adjust the overall height of the stand (the diagonal of the Z extends), and I can adjust the second tier's height above the first, its tilt, and its depth, as well as the distance between the arms. In order to better simulate organ manuals, which are fairly close together (and to support the QS8, which is kind of heavy), I've put a wood platform on the top Z arms to lift the bottom keyboard up higher. Also, this helps compensate for the height of the bench, since I have to sit above the pedalboard. These Z stands are *much* sturdier than even double-braced X stands, but they aren't easy to move. If I ever have to take my synths out of the house somewhere, I've got my old double-braced X stand, which folds neatly and is sturdy enough for an evening or three.

The bottom synth is an Alesis QS8, an 88 key weighted, piano action controller with some great sounds. I have an expansion sound card for it called the Sanctuary Card which contains many sounds usefull to church organists. Yes, I know, it's a synth. Deal with it.

My rackmount stuff. My rackmount stuff.
The rack above contains (bottom to top): amp, eq, mixer, and a shelf with the mics in boxes and some mic cables.

The pseudo rack, held together by 2x4 lumber (hey, it works) contains (bottom to top): the second synth, the MIDI box for the pedals, the MIDI patchbay, and a shelf with the reverb and a CD player (and the zip drive).

The second synth is a Kurzweil K2000RS with 16 MB of sampling memory and the P/RAM expansion option. I use an Iomega Zip drive with it. I've got one three-disk (floppy, not zip) set of a 4 rank pipe organ principal chorus which I like very much. It includes a low reed pipe which is perfect with the pedalboard. I've recently began playing around with transfering the organ samples to a FlashRAM card to use in the Alesis, but it's handy to have two different synths because I get more polyphony that way (i.e. I can play more notes at the same time, which is important in pipe organ playing).

Since the Alesis Monitor One speakers are meant to be studio monitors rather than home stereo speakers, they have a very "flat" frequency response, which is good for mastering tapes but isn't much fun. The EQ helps boost the bass, clean up the midrange and eliminate nasty hiss from the treble (although this is less of a problem with the new mixer, which is very, very quiet).

Here's a view of my racks and the computer next to them:
computer and racks

The controller on the upper tier of my two-tier stand is a Fatar 610+, a semi-weighted synth action 61 key controller. Ideally, for a practice instrument that is close to an organ, I'd have a second Fatar 610+ and the two would be closer together. If I have money burning a hole in my pocket, I may someday get a second one and build them into an organ-type console or something, but this works for now. Besides, now that I've bought the good microphones (Shure SM81) to do recording, I won't have money burning a hole in my pocket for a while.

The whole shebang is connected together via an 8x8 MIDI patchbay in the rack. For those of you unfamiliar with MIDI, the basic setup would be something like:
Basic MIDI SetupAnother Basic MIDI Setup
However, my system with the patchbay and more equipment is more complex:
More Complex MIDI Setup
The idea here is that the patchbay would look like this in back:
Back of Patchbay
The Fatar has no inputs because it's only a controller and has no internal sounds. The PAVO box has an input but I don't need it so it isn't hooked up. There's no reason to use it when I have the patchbay. My MIDI patchbay works like this: on the front panel is an LCD which shows the 8 output ports across the bottom and the 8 input ports on top. Each output port can have an input port assigned to it. The external merger allows me more flexibility, because I can combine more inputs and send them to one output. The JLCooper patchbay is powerful because it has two built in signal processors and a built in merger, but I need it all for reasons too technical to go into here.
Basically, it works like this: 

 IN: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
OUT: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
That way no instrument is controlling any other. If I want to have the Fatar and the Alesis keyboards control the Kurzweil and the Kurzweil (with its built in sequencer) control the Alesis, I'd do:
 IN: 2 8 0 0 0 0 1 4
OUT: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
What that does is:
The output to the Alesis (1) gets input from the Kurzweil (2). The output to the Kurzweil (2) gets input from the merger (8). The two merger inputs (7/8) get input from the Alesis (1) and the Fatar (4). Ok, so, for my organ set up where the Alesis handles the manuals and the Kurzweil handles the pedals:
 IN: 4 3 0 0 0 0 0 0
OUT: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
There. The Fatar (4) controls the Alesis (1) (oh, and the Alesis always controls itself, though I could change that if I wanted to -- that's internal to the Alesis configuration and isn't affected by the patchbay) and the PAVO module (3) controls the Kurzweil (2). If I wanted full coupling on full organ, it'd be a little more complex using some of the MIDI thru ports, but it could be done. A really loud, messy full organ sound could be had by doing:
 IN: 4 8 0 0 0 0 1 3
OUT: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
That way, the Fatar (5) acts as swell and controls just the Alesis (1), which could be set to have a reed chorus. The Kurzweil (2), which is set to a principal chorus with a hearty reed in the bass, is controlled by both the Alesis (1) and the pedalboard (3). Because the Alesis is *also* controlling itself, when I play the lower manual (Alesis) and pedal I get the whole shebang, whereas when I play the upper manual (Fatar) I get something smaller. The important thing to note here is that both the Alesis and Kurzweil can respond to different MIDI channels, so I can have the Fatar control a different sound on the Alesis than the Alesis itself controls, or I can set the Alesis and PAVO module to send signals on different MIDI channels and affect different sounds on the Kurzweil. There are a lot of possibilities and combinations, and it all gets rather confusing after a while.

TECHNICAL STUFF: For those who are truly interested, I traded my older basic patchbay for the JLCooper because of the signal processors. The Alesis synth is multitimbral, meaning that it can play several programs at once on different MIDI channels. The Fatar and the PAVO box only transmit on one channel at a time, and one of my favorite organ sounds on the Alesis requires two channels in the bass and three in the treble (one of the sounds only goes down to F2). So, I can use the patchbay's processors to take the signal from the pedalboard, bounce the MIDI channel, combine it with the standard pedalboard signal (merge), and then merge the pedalboard and the Fatar again with the external merger and send that to the Alesis for bigger, better bass on the pedals. Phew, but this gets to be complex.

I just recently replaced an older 12 channel mixer with a new Alesis Studio12R. It's really a great mixer for a great price. It's almost silent noise-wise and has some nice features, including real sliders for each channel (instead of knobs). The output from the mixer goes through the M-EQ 230 in the rack and then to the RA-100 amp (also in the rack), then out to the monitor speakers, which have a fantastic sound for such small speakers. I can use the compressor via the insert jacks on the back of the mixer, so I can patch it into any channel that I want to compress (probably usually the mics for live recording). There's a lot of Alesis gear in my rig, and I like it that way. I've been very impressed with their quality, price, customer service, tech support -- everything about them, really. They're a great company, and no, I don't work for them, but I probably would if they were on the East coast instead of the left coast.
The pedalboard was a bit more work because it had to be a custom job (or I'd have had to pay someone big bucks to make one for me). I bought an old, beat up but working almost AGO 30 note pedalboard from an organ builder I met over the Internet. It cost me $50 plus $60 for shipping (he lugged it with him to a consultation a bit north of where I live). It would've cost even more to crate and ship with a shipping company. I'd suggest finding one in your area if you choose to try this -- it'll save money.

For the MIDI controller to send messages from the pedalboard to the patchbay, I used a Miditools 64 note custom instrument kit:
PAVO Midi Custom Instrument Unit
My home built PAVO kit Another view of my PAVO kit
It's a single space rack-mountable unit that comes complete with programmed ROM, LCD, and three circuit boards with parts that you need to solder together. The circuit board in the top right corner there is the main CPU board. The LCD board and the Human Interface Unit (front right -- has eight push button switches and sixteen LEDs) connect via 16 conductor ribbon cables. The cables from the pedalboard come through the opening in the back left of the rack case and connect to eight 16 pin IC sockets on the Custom Instrument board, so the best way to connect up the pedalboard is to run 16 conductor ribbon cable from switches on the pedalboard to the IC sockets and plug them in using 16 pin DIP connectors. The LCD circuit board comes assembled but the other three don't. The LEDs on the Human Interface board aren't used for the Custom Instrument kit, but the CPU board and case are used for a number of different PAVO kits. The only buttons that do anything are the top four and the bottom rightmost. The first three on top control the MIDI channel select (1-16), the MIDI note offset (-128-127), and the MIDI velocity (0-127). The rightmost buttons increment and decrement, which can also be done quickly via the knob to the left of the LCD. The three values (CH, OFF and VEL) are displayed on the LCD at all times. It took me one afternoon to put it together. The only thing not included are the cables to connect the pedalboard to the unit, because they don't know how much cable you'd need. The unit is $270 shipped. The kit was very well done with professionally printed circuit boards and good instructions. The folks at PAVO, especially Paul McClellan, are extremely friendly, helpful and knowledgable -- I highly recommend them.

I ordered 50' of 16 conductor ribbon cable and 16 pin DIP connectors for it from Jameco Electronics for around $20. Then I bought small magnets at a local hobby shop at 5/$1 ($6 total) and 30 magnet switches from All Electronics Corp.. The switches are small 1"x3/4"x1/8" black plastic with two screw holes and about 2' of wire lead ending in a molex plug. The switches were 10/$7.50 without magnets. So, total, the extra stuff was $20+$6+$22.50=$48.50, making the total pedalboard assembly (without shipping the pedalboard) $270+$50+$48.50=$368.50. Considering that Fatar sells a 12 note Hammond style (short, parallel, flat, plastic) pedalboard for $350, I consider that a good deal.

Pedal Diagram 1Pedal Diagram 2
I attached a magnet to the underside of the end of each pedal using 5 minute epoxy, and I also epoxied a switch to the frame of the pedalboard such that when the pedal is depressed, the magnet approaches the swith from one 3/4" end. It works perfectly. It took me about two hours to epoxy the little parts and about another two hours to cut, strip and connect the ribbon cable. If you tried hard, you could probably put one of these together in one day. The finished product with switches and magnets attached looks like:
Back of pedalboard photo

In order to use the pedalboard, I had a small problem. The little X bench isn't wide enough to fit over the pedalboard, so I needed to build a bench. Now, what I know about carpentry I've learned from watching Bob Vila (tm) and other home shows, but I've got most of the tools needed to make a bench, and after posting my dilemma to the organ list Bruce Behnke was nice enough to tell me what he did. I basically followed his design, with a little advice from the cabinet maker at the home store (which I won't name because I don't really like them and in general nobody there is helpful anyway except I guess for the cabinet maker in the lumber section):
Bench Diagram
The lumber guy (not the cabinet maker) who cut the wood cut the 2x4s wrong which is why they are different sizes, but that actually worked out well because the foot rest/stabilizer beam is now mortised into the legs which really helps to keep the thing together. The cabinet maker told me to use dowel pins instead of screws, so after glueing it together it probably would have stayed, but I added some L brackets just to be sure. The whole thing is painted gloss black and works great:

(It's an old picture from the apartement, but it's the best pic of the bench I've got.)