Tearing Apart An Organ And Making A MIDI Keyboard

pedul

What do you do if you’re in a band and have an old, dead organ lying around? Build a MIDI foot controller, of course.

After dispensing of the old organ guts, [Mark] mounted the pedals in a handsome road case and started working on the electronics. His first inclination was to mount an Arduino Pro Mini on a piece of stripboard, but after that failed decided to learn Eagle and fabricate a PCB. each key of the organ pedals are connected to a switch read by the Arduino which sends data to a Korg Microsampler over MIDI.

The swell pedal from the organ was also reused, but because the old incandescent light in the pedal was toast, this was replaced with an LED. It still works, allowing [Mark] to do volume swells on his new, fancy, MIDI foot controller.

You can check out a video of the controller below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehf451c4AAk&w=580]

5 thoughts on “Tearing Apart An Organ And Making A MIDI Keyboard

  1. Waiting for a cheap 2 octave mini keyboard-controller to come my way, because I have a compact 2 octave pedalboard to wire it up to. I will have to pass at the whole code and ‘duino thing.

  2. Ok , I have a Adurino Mega 2560 R3 and a Conn 25 pedal electric Church Organ . I want to convert the pedal only to midi as the rest of the Instrament works fine . Every schmatic i look at is 13 pedals only and very vauge at best. Can you help with this project ? . Then I can also use the pedals wit my synth keyboards when performing other than Clasical Organ music .

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