Midi-Kahler

Hey best people,

I noticed that I haven't been on the forum for a long while. But i have some new interesting things to talk about. I've been very interested in bass trems for a long time but I also was interested in midi aplications on instruments. Now I built a roland devided pickup in my six string bass with trem. It seems to work quite well (depending on the settings in the guitar to midi converter (in my case a axon ax100) you get either a nice dive bomb sound or a slide sound as you would hear on a fretted bas (with semitone steps)). Very happy with this result I decided to take it up a step, since my six string bass starts to look more battered and bruised after every project I use it for I am going to make my own six string bass. And what would be more logical then buying a john brown modified kahler? So I did......
It is now lying in my home, and I'm very anxious to start building this summer when I have the time.
I'm very interested in technique, so the first thing I did when I unwrapped that pretty baby was look how John added midi capabilities to our beloved kahler. I noticed that the rollers had disappeared, and that John machined new saddles were he put in midi crystals, he covered these in a low friction black plastic for smooth action of the string over the piezo's. (I think and hope he used TEFLON one of the lowest friction plastics on the market.)
If you would like to share ideas about my plans, I would enjoy that.

Greetings Jim

Never seen it ... pictures of the redesigned trem please ... when you get a chance.

Embarking on this bass trem adventure started with how to install and has turned into doing complete builds.

Would be happy to share experience, techniques and ideas here with you on a build.

Gonna try and finish my current project and post pictures today. We'll see how it goes.

There you go. The brass coloured parts are infact machined brass by John Brown, the black in there is the piezo crystal covered in a plastic (I think it is TEFLON). If you would like i can post you some pictures of the unit I have at home for details.

Here is the site of John Browns guitar factory:
Browns Guitar Factory

Here is a site with some information on the piezo equipped Kahler:
Piezo equipped Kahler

Hope that is enough information for you, I'll be available for more questions.

thats awesome!

Welcome back, Jim!

I remember reading about John Brown, and how he added MIDI to the Kahlers. Really cool application, and absolutely a good idea!