Nice rack!

updated: 06 April 2007

Nice rack!

Here is the current (April 2007) incarnation of my gig rack. As you can see, there's not much in it anymore. My current gig rig is based around the Nord Electro 73, which I've written about elsewehere. This is a great instrument, but its internal acoustic piano leaves much to be desired. Still, for really small gigs the Nord is enough to squeak by on. For larger gigs, I'll add this rack, which basically does three things for me:

It gets me a decent piano sound.
It gives me a way to mic the Leslie and feed that into my keyboard monitor amp.
It gives me a way to send mono and stereo keyboard mixes to the house.

For years I had used the Rane SM-82, used by keyboard players everywhere. I'm a big fan of Rane gear, and several years ago I switched their MLM-82, which you don't see so much, but it provides four mic preamp channels. This allows me to mic the Leslie and run it through the mixer, and provide a single keyboard mix to the house for situations where there are a limited number of channels available. I can even provide a stereo mix with this setup. All this, plus four line inputs, all in a single rack space. It's just a great little mixer.

Within the rack, all of the internal signal routing is balanced where possible; everywhere else I have adhered religiously to the Rane interconnection bible. So I get a very low noise floor, and no hums and buzzes.

This mixer isn't perfect though, and I did face a few challenges making it work for how I wanted to use it. First of all, the newer versions of this mixer allow you to hard pan the mic inputs left, right, or center. They're hard-wired to center on this older version; however I performed simple mod to pan the upper Leslie mic channels.

The second challenge with this mixer is that it only has one pair of outputs. I needed to split the outputs to the amp and a DI, and add a pad and a ground lift. For, this I decided to "roll my own" and built a wacky box which serves as a signal splitter, direct box, and patchbay.

Furman Rack Rider power module: There's also a Furman Plug-Lock inside to handle all those pesky wall-warts.
Generalmusic Realpiano My piano module du jour. The neverending piano module quest is documented elsewhere; suffice it to say that at the moment, the RealPiano is my gigging piano sound of choice. I'm experiencing some occasional quirky behavior, but it has an amazingly realistic and expressive piano sound
Kurzweil Micro Piano: Yesterday's piano module du jour. It's nice also.
Rane MLM-82: The brains of the operation. Four mic inputs plus four stereo line inputs.
The funky patch panel from left to right: aux in, MIDI THRU, MIDI IN, power out jack for the Voce and Roland, three Leslie mic in, attenuation switch, ground lift switch, two XLR direct outs

Inside the rack (not visible in the photo) I have a MIDI Solutions Event Processor. This programmable device allows you to remap MIDI events and do all sorts of advanced MIDI filtering. I use this device to filter out MIDI events I don't want sent to the piano modules. I have two reasons for wanting to do this. First, I have had the GEM Realpiano crash on me on a number of occasions, and it emits the most gawdawful screech when this happens. It's really unpleasant, but it seems to happen mostly when I'm doing organ stuff, palm glisses, smears, that kind of thing. So I want a way to filter out MIDI events when I'm not actually playing the piano. Secondly. it would be nice to seamlessly switch between the Nord's internal sounds and the rack piano sounds without having to stop and dick around with the rack volume controls.

The Event processor accomplishes both of these tasks for me. In my case, the internal aoustic piano sound on my Nord is associated with button number 4. When you press this button, the acoustic piano patch is activated internally, and the Nord sends out program change #3. The Event Filter is set up so that it filters out everything until it sees Program Change #3, and then it passes note on, note off, sustain, and volume. If another program change is seen, these events are filtered out again. This allows me to switch between the Nord's internal sounds, and the rack's piano sounds, all from the front panel of the Nord. Very nice. If you're willing to invest the time to kearn how to program in, the MIDI Event Processor is a very handy device.