All Love

Pulled out my personal copy of Paul Ayres' Toccata on "All You Need Is Love" this morning and tried to sight read it.  No can do!  Still can't sight read it after all these years of letting it sit on my music bookshelf.  Very surprising how that works!

So I went to YouTube to see if anyone had recorded a good rendition and remind myself how it is supposed to sound, and sure enough, Randall Mullins has a recording of him playing it on his Hauptwerk Milan Digital Father Willis organ.   It brings chills and is well worth a listen if you haven't heard it and a re-listen if you have.

I find it fascinating how pop music of one age becomes the 'serious' music of another, with occasionally detours thru Muzak.  This has happened since before the time of Mozart I suspect.  What do you think of this trend?

As a side note, I'm impressed that he went to the trouble and was able to get permission from both Paul and Sony to record this.  That's the way it is supposed to work.

Swell Pedal Potentiometer

OrganQuest is alive!   Been a bit quiet for what, a few years?  What happened?  Well life happened and continues to happen, but that's no excuse so here we are again.

The two analog organs are still in the garage.  Well one is.  The other is now mostly MIDI-fied. As I think I wrote earlier, I ran into a few tricky spots, the last of which was my attempt to install the oh so important swell controlling variable resistor.  

Most electronic organs use a rotary resistor, but the range of motion is not really compatible with most commercially available rotary resistors.  And if you choose to use a linear resistor as I did, things get even more interesting.

I tend to obsess about details, so it was easy to get bogged down in prototype building.  The ideal solution will probably eventually turn out to be use of a 3D printer to create the desired support for the linear 10k potentiometer, but that means money and/or time.  In the meantime, there are some more straightforward solutions. Here's one way to do it:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/52179600@N06/8895491765/in/album-72157633819682339/

or even simpler:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/7973276@N04/15263468498/in/album-72157648420143055/

You will note that some of these contraptions tend to require a bit of 'elbow room', which I am trying to minimize.  I also am trying to recycle the original Rodgers Swell pedal mechanisms, so obviously things got complicated fast.  Stay tuned for progress and feel free to post your suggestions.