Midi bass pedals

[irvined]

Hi,

Just wanted to tell you all about my latest project to build my own version of a set of Taurus bass pedals.

I used to own a set of MK1 Taurus pedals many years ago but was talked into selling them, something I still regret.

I've been wanting to make a set of pedals for years but never seemed to find the time, then the guitarist in the band I'm playing in, came up with a tune that really cried out for a set of pedals so off I went.

I bought a set of pedals taken from a Yamaha organ on Ebay for about £20, then a Novation Bass Station for £110. All looking good so far but I needed an interface that would enable me to customise exactly what the pedals do and what switches I can add. I found the HighlyLiquid midi CPU

[url="http://store.highlyliquid.com/products/midi-cpu"]http://store.highlyl...oducts/midi-cpu[/url]

£29 plus postage. Standard posting from the USA seems to take ages but there's an option for an extra $20 which is much quicker.

Support from the forum is great and I got lots of help getting my pedals going.

[attachment=137005:IMAG0384.jpg]

I'm now going to see if I can get the extra foot switches working for patch up/down octave up/down and portmento on/off.

Great fun and nowhere near the cost of a set of vintage Taurus pedals.

Cheers,

Doug

[Kiwi]

Blimey - how ambitious is that! It'll be interesting the watch the outcome of this.

[waldflote8]

I also had a set of Taurus Mk1s and was also persuaded to sell them,.. big regret. Interesting to see that module. I had an old Maplin MIDI scanner based around the E510 chip and used that for mine - I put a PC motherboard, PSU and the scanner inside a box with a set of old Maplin organ pedals. Hopefully also do for samples and various other things. Can't upload a pic now, will do later.

When I tried to make a set for another band member though I couldn't find a suitable scanner, was going to make something using a PIC,.. or even Raspberry Pi, then took the lazier option and picked up a little Oxygen8 keyboard,.. idea being to piggy back the switches and put the keyboard inside the case with a flip lid or ?? So I too am interested to hear how you get on with the highly liquid cpu. I am using a Taurus soft synth plugin which I picked up years ago, sounds really good. cheers..

[irvined]

Hi,

The midi CPU is a great bit of kit and really configurable. You can chain them together and build big projects. I've looked around the internet for a suitable interface and this seems the best thing going. Took a while for it to arrive from the US but the support on their forum is really good.

Going to try the new pedals out at a rehearsal tonight. The pedals are working but I still have work to do to get the switches going properly. Fortunately not something I need at the moment.

The nice thing about the Novation Bass Station is it has around 60 user definable presets and 40 solid presets. I can get a reasonable aproximation of the Taurus sound plus it doesn't go out of tune. If this all works well tonight I'll be using them at a gig in two weeks time.

Cheers,

Doug

[waldflote8]

Hi, good luck with that, certainly good to keep it in hardware like that. I have PC boot up times plus the other potential issues of using a PC for live music,.. noise, crashing,.. been ok. so far though touch wood. I was reading about the MIDI cpu today and looks really interesting, need to look into the sysex details though. Here are the pics I couldn't post earlier. Makes a nice place to put my POD too....cheers...

[irvined]

Hi,

That looks really nice, much better finish than mine!

We used my new pedals in rehearsal last night and they worked fine without any issues.

Re boot times of your PC, I use Linux on all my PCs and I've been looking at using a Raspberry PI for some music related stuff. I use PIs at work and for the money they are fantastic. You can run them off a battery and they will run most Linux based applications. Boot times are quite quick, o.k. they don't have a fantastic ammount of power but for a specific job I think they may be a winner and only £28 a pop!

Cheers,

Doug

[waldflote8]

Thanks,..Glad to hear they worked well. I run an SSD in the pedalboard and the OS is pretty bare so it boots reasonably fast, just fears of the thing crashing from previous experiences of mixing puters and music live..I go back to an Atari which was down more than it was up,... probably unreasonable these days. I'm very interested in the PI and watching them closely, but no LINUX experience and as mine is VST plugin based, would need to be able to support that,.. probably is something there but I have a finger in so many 'PIs' at the mo. I'd really need to spend some time investigating The PI looks as if it will be great for MIDI stuff, or even direct synthesis. great product altogether..Not the best pic, but you can see the old DDR2 MB, PSU etc. MIDI scanner on the right. Upside down board is an old Audigy 2 soundcard on a riser.