Dale Ramsey Music

More and more elements of a complete installation are taking place. This project is far from “plug and play”. There is a great amount of hands on/head scratching/fixing up and setting-up that goes on.  And there have been several detours and complications. Here are the most recent ones.

I mentioned last post that the swell shoe worked backwards. This means that when the position of the shoe is toe-down, the volume should be high; heal-down volume low. It works the reverse of that. After a series of email conversations with the manufacturer, it was finally deduced that the units had been wired backwards. Need to reverse the black and red wires. Great. Now I am becoming an electronics repair guy!! The cable is hardwired to the shoe, and on the other end is a connector that is also hardwired. So, how does one reverse the wires? The units maker, Classic Midi Works, has given advise and I have received ideas from others, but nothing has worked out properly. Classic wants me to simply turn the plug around and force it onto the connectors. That scares me, because the connector is designed to go only one way to be properly oriented. Some one said, use a skill knife to shave off the allignment grooves and then reverse the orientation of the pins. Hey! I’ve spent not an insignificant amount of money on this thing. Am I supposed to start whacking away at parts of it to make it work as it’s supposed to? I feel some need to protect my investment. I’m not happy! The problem is not solved, either.

Well, another issue has been happily resolved. The duo monitors had to be calibrated. Earlier, the touch element worked, but poorly. One touched the screen, but the location registered was somewhere other than where contact was made. This did not surprise me. I had an old Palm Pilot that had the same problem. One easily ran a calibration program and all was well. Sure enough, my monitors had such a program on its installation distk. I ran it. Great. One monitor was now calibrated. However, getting the 2nd monitor to do so was not happening. Emailed the manufacturer. There was no mention of a duo-monitor set-up software in the manual or on the CD disk. They however, quickly sent me a different installation and calibration program for folks with duo-monitors. (would have been nice to have known that from the outset). But, all is well and the monitors are happily calibrated.

Now, it’s time to get into the bowls of the Hauptwerk software and set up the organ the way I want it. There are many layers of depth one can play with. I am anxious to get the crescendo pedal working and the combination buttons on the keyboards going. That will go a long way to making the instrument practical and usable, as in the ability to play actual music. Here I’ll be dealing with MIDI a lot. I’m still way behind the learning curve on MIDI, so it will be interesting and challenging. But, I’m confident that I’ll get it all going. Forward!