Universal Midi Keyboard Interface Part 1

34 UNIVERSAL MIDI KEYBOARD INTERFACE by D. Doepfer The feature par excellence of the MIDI-compatible keyboard controller described in this article is its ability to be used with practically any existing keyboard, whether salvaged from a discarded musical instrument, or still in function in a piano, organ, or non-MIDI synthesizer. Soon after the publication of the Port- able MIDI keyboard (Ref. 1), numerous readers asked us to give further details on the use of the Type E510 MIDI controller in conjunction with full-size keyboards of five and more octaves. This month we meet these requests with the description of a universal MIDI controller board, once again based on the E510, intended for use with many types of musical keyboard. The maximum number of keys sup- ported by the present design is no fewer than 96, covering 8 octaves. The controller provides the velocity parameter, and sup- ports one-octave transposition as well as instantaneous split-point programming to achieve data di...