My quest for bass pedals....help, please?

OK....yet another story.

I've always LOVED bass pedals. You know, like Moog Taurus pedals? I once played in a cover band where the singer had a set of Taurus I's for me to use, and I never forgot just how powerful they were.

Cut to the past couple of months. I didn't want to drop $1,800 for a set of Taurus III's, so I thought I'd do a homebrew version. I found an Elka OMB-5 that came with pedals (this one isn't mine, just an image from the web, but they are the same). I reckoned that the upper keyboard could be messed with in the studio. It was the pedals I was after, and not a bad deal. $150 on eBay:



Now to MIDI-fy the pedals. Seemed easy enough. A Highly Liquid MIDI converter specifically made for such a project. $45:



Now for the brain. Had to be a Moog Minitaur. $600:



So the MIDI retro-fit goes flawlessly. The pedals are now MIDI. I go to our studio to plug it all in....only to discover that the pedals seem to want to trigger the upper notes....but not the lower ones.



The CPU has a jumper section to allow for multiple MIDI channel switching, but the literature with the Minitaur seems to not care about channel assignment.

So my question is, has anyone else ever done something like this? What am I doing wrong?

I was tempted to go the analog route with the pedals using a bass synth module made by Basyn:

http://www.basyn.com/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=3

But when I emailed the company asking them about some specifics, I got no reply.

What to do?

We are so not, "p bass into the ampeg" type players. Aint it cool!?!?

Your heading down a road that ive never been down. That moog stuff fascinates me tho. I love synth. Please keep us updated with your progress.

I don't know very much about it Eric, but I do know this:

- Every single note has it's own distinctive midi-name

Since this is the fact, and you haven't modified the Moog I guess the problem is in the footpedal and the Midi convertor.

Is it perhaps possible (I do not know how the midi converter works) that the midi converter connot detect the lowest pitches (since it may not be designed for very low frequencies) and thus will only detect frequencies from the first harmonic and up. This would mean it will translate the notes in the correct pitch, but only one octave too high.

As I mentioned, I don't know much about it, but this is where I would look for the problem with my very limited knowledge, hope it may help you in some way.


And Mike,

I totally agree with you! There is nothing cooler than people who think out of the box and go their own unusual path!

Thanks for the support, Guys!

I believe you may be right, Jim. I do know that the Highly Liquid CPU has octave-switching capabilities. But when I first asked them about it, they came back with some really complicated tech-talk about how to do it. Kind of strange that the CPU isn't set to default to the lower notes to begin with, since it WAS designed for the very project I am undertaking. You would think that a MIDI CPU made to turn analog bass pedals into MIDI bass pedals would be automatically set to trigger....well....BASS notes, right?

I sent an email to Moog, and the tech seemed to think the same thing.

But I have also sent another message to Highly Liquid, and I am hoping for a response soon.

I completely get your fustration Eric, it all doesn't seem to make very much sense.

On the other hand:

I do know that correct converting from analog to digital for very low notes is not easy. The usual method is to measure one complete sine wave of the lowest harmonic. This in terms of use translates for us non tech heads and users to higher latency times for lower notes. I guess they must have used a filter to filter out the lowest notes and use the harmonics (which can be measured faster because of their higher frequency) to measure the frequency of the root. Somewhere in converting this measured harmonic to the root note must be the problem...

Thanks, Jim. I've learned a few things in the past couple of days.

First of all (and this has to do with the fact that I neglected to do enough reading about the product), the Highly Liquid MIDI CPU is automatically set to MIDI channel 1. Secondly, you have to go into the CPU using a MIDI interface and program on the computer in order to get it to change octaves using something called SysEx.

So after learning all of this, I decided that I had gotten in over my head. It was simply going to be too much work. I already have the Moog Minitaur, so I was back to needing the bass pedal controller. Fatar makes them, but they are really stripped down for around $500. Suzuki makes a set for Hammond that are really nice, but they cost $635. And Roland has their's, but they go for $900.

Funny how timing works out, because I went back on eBay out of frustration....and found this for $350:



Mine!

Sweet.