Sam, Wonderful to see this all coming to life already ! As we at the organ museum are going to be returning both instruments to how they left the Compton Works, in 1938 and 1952 respectively, all of the extras that were added after the instruments moved to Leeds in 1965 aren't going to be returned, however due to their history in their own right, deserve to live on - and i'm so pleased we could agree for them to come to you. In the photograph, for your eagle eyed viewers - the console on the right of the two "Tub" consoles, is the Parkway Hotel Leeds, the very first british electronic organ, the Compton organ company had prior to this, been building "Melotone" units, that were added to their cinema pipe organs to add to the specification, but these were a handful of stops meant to add another tonal colour, not complete the whole instrument. The "Theatrone" was the next step in this technology, with the rotating electrostatic generators to produce the tone, this used the first generation of tone generators - of which there are very few remaining, of the three sets Lucien managed to collect, we will construct one "good" set in order to return the organ to how it left the Compton works. The second of the two, is the organ that was purchased by the Broadstairs corporation in 1952, to be used as a mobile organ for the council. However, most often used on the band stand from what I gather - this used the later 347 metal generator racks, as we've discussed before, another item you will be getting ! On one hand, it is a shame they were altered to such a degree in their last home, however on the other - they likely would not have survived otherwise, it is our intention to restore them to their original form. A note on the percussions you were talking about ! The Chrysoglott (Pronounced Criz-o-glott) is a series of soft hammers, that strike large metal bars - usually, a vibraphone but with the motor turned off ! So, i'm not actually sure why he had them as seperate devices in this case !? And the Glockenspiel is as it says on the tin. All of the "relays" you describe are Kimber Allen Pulldown Magnets, off the shelf from a company in Kent that are still to this day producing organ components just as they have done forever, a real old fashioned firm, and certainly worth a visit ! Also, the blue speakers (Why that shade of blue !?) that have Rotafon in what I know to be wheelybin letters ... Those are all, infact, Leslie speakers ! He just called them Rotafon to stick with the Compton names for things, despite them being very very different, i'm so glad you will be able to use these, too ! I really should get my act together and get our own youtube channel up and running, considering the amount of projects we have going on at the moment, Jamie keeps suggesting it but this has been somewhat of an encouragement ! Best Carl & Jamie - East Midlands Organ Museum
Nice one Carl and Jamie! Thanks for the info and help. Yeah! Vids are always good even if just one take phone vids. Always good to document for whoever is interested in watching! See you guys soon!!
I apologize Sam, I must admit, when you first mentioned your desire to open a museum, I wasn’t fully convinced of its chance of success. I am humbled, and must concede, you have proved me wrong. Joans organ wouldn’t have been saved if it wasn’t for you. Congratulations on your venture and I bow to your vision and applaud your good fortune.
now remember! my relationship with words is very tenuous (no idea dont ask, words and things dont match up, more sounds, materials and other tangible things make sense, ye olde grammar nonsense and writing is just nonsense :D). i tend to say a lot of words and mean other things. but atleast you get the gist haha. for reference here are some of my mess ups below :- xylophone i mean glockenspiel im a donut. thingamagoop - Still meant thingamagoop
Help me program 13 in the piano by number system... its a A note... i cant blast it high enough... i 5hink you can... just dont explode your soul trying to ram it higher!
@@JesseBadut14 Quite right ! Usually they are the same thing, just it becomes the Vibraphone when you switch on the motor for the rotating baffles. However for some reason in this case, Mr Stockdale had one of each !
mike tghanks. my only experience with stepper motors have been reveryberant in their enclosure so i went away from it, but you recon thats the way forwards? im hoping for it to get quite quick too beyond in the video, would stepper still be the way?
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER Trinamic drivers work absolute magic on steppers - They use 64-256 analogue levels between each step. Would easily do the speeds you were doing & more and be completely silent.
@@mikeselectricstuff ok great news, ill get hold of some and report my findings! cheers. any suggestion on a good trinamic driver? or any one of the world wide web
If this were a 3d printer i’d said trinamic 2209 and an ldo motor. But that’s kind of the standard answer for that usecase, not detailed knowledge. Actually you might even borrow one from your Lulzbot to test it.
Humble suggestion: the vibraphone is one of the only instruments where you can play a note and then decide when to stop it later. You can do this electronically with piano and organ too, but I think it'd be pretty cool to have a mute for every key that can either be activated via a midi off message or even a separate midi channel.
the trolley under the vibraphone is typical of orchestral mallet instruments of that era, and even now to some extent. I remember pushing the xylophone from the band room to the gymnasium for an in-school concert and the legs of the trolley folded under itself. We had to make some modifications to repair it. I would recommend building a sturdy base for your vibraphone :)
Well well well, how interesting. Back in 2020 I was offered this whole setup along with some tape recorders, the organ was way too big for me and everything had been hand painted over, was a shame really. The main musical side of things was housed in a very cramp room, whilst the driving electronics was in a shed opposite. I did purchase most the recorders as I collect Leevers Rich equipment, and it seemed a shame that the organ might end up in landfill, but its great to see it actually survived.
I mean, obviously you need to show Martin and his Wintergatan off now by playing his Marble Machine music better than himself... Please, I really want to hear that!! 🤩
@@Juttutin I mean with his recent obsession with "tight" music the logical conclusion will be to have the thing be a Midi instrument sans marbles in the end... (I've more or less stopped watching the videos since he started worrying about 1ms delays in note times)
Yeah same, his machine was looking so good and better then the first but it was the first that brought all the attention for being.. what it is.@@SomeMorganSomewhere
A critical differentiator between the vibraphone and a glockenspiel is that damper that you kind of glossed over. That's a major part about the vibraphone sound - you can engage the damper to silence a chord when moving to a different chord, to prevent dissonance. Without it, you basically have a glockenspiel. I would suggest adding a solenoid programmed to respond to the sustain pedal CC, that actuates the damper, but in reverse - so when you press the sustain pedal, it damps the vibraphone, like an actual one does.
On the pipe organ side of these, you would quite often have an individual damper felt per note, with a seperate stop key that would activate a larger pneumatic to lift them all up at once, quite useful ! Some even had a "Half blow" feature, able to cut the wind in half, in order to soften things down even further.
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER Yeah, the damper should be a simple MIDI on/off; should be easy to do for a chap of your talents, Sam LOL! And having at one time gigged with a vibes player for a few years, yes you DO need to be able to program the damper as well. 😉
That test section in the 14:00 area sounded like a 1960s dream sequence. Very pretty. For some vibraphone inspiration look up Lionel Hampton. He played vibes with all the jazz greats of the mid 20th century.
Those diodes in parallel with the relay coils are likely flyback diodes to prevent negative voltage spikes as a result of suddenly disconnecting an energized inductor. I'd suggest reconnecting them in the opposite orientation so they aren't shorting your arduino GPIO but allow energy stored in the coils to be released.
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER heh I was going to comment on the good reason for keeping the diodes, but I was beaten to it and I see you have it covered anyway! The ULN2803 is a dream chip for driving anything solenoidal (if that's even a word :-) )
@ 12:33 - you have a brushless in place (the servo). You need a good quality DC *brushed* commutator motor, with pretty strong shaft support bearings (the side load on the servo from the rubber belt was what was causing the bulk of the noise). A decent, high-current H-bridge shield for a UNO R3 or some such should drive it, with a current capability of about 2 - 2.5x the peak current draw of the motor. Strangely, the motor you took off looked like a modified London bus wiper motor (probably Lucas) which would have done the job fine. Why not try that? You also need to watch the belt tension. Alternatively, use *two* brushless servos driving the shafts directly via flexible couplings (take the pulley wheels off), one for each set of tremolo butterflies, which will not have any side loads and can be synchronised for position to keep each bank of butterflies in phase. Great project!
Thanks for the info! Excuse my knowledge if wrong but I'm pretty sure servos, well the cheap ones I had are almost certainly brushed motors. I meant brushless purely from the point of a lower end kick but also high rpm with low noise. I want it to rev up and down via the digital input quickly and quietly but no need for torque. The first thing I tried was a brushed motor I had but for whatever reason it wasn't working so I switched to servo. I tend to work with what I have on the day. Especially when needing to finish projects for videos (like this) in 2-3 days postage becomes risky so I rely on what's in the drawers. As for the motor on the vibraphone it was a 230v geared motor so I'm assuming bus wipers used 12 or 24volt supply it's possibly not? I don't think it would do what I'm hoping I want to get up to atleast 300rpm on the shafts and slow as 20rpm I don't think that would Have done it. Also how bodgey it was and also the weight and mismatch of voltages. Trying to keep the whole room at the standard of 12v and 1 power input per machine. Anyway thanks for the thoughts! Think I'm going stepper motor. Cheerz.
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER FWIW, the vast majority of the noise caused by servo motors is the internal gearing mechanism, because the tiny DC motors in there run best at high speeds, but results in low torque. The noise has basically nothing to do with the brushes or DC, so don't write those off. The setup is actually quite inefficient because you first have the internal servo gearing that reduces speed and increases torque(with resulting power losses), and then your external belt-driven system that then re-increases speed. I suspect the steppers will also be noticeably noisy despite fancy drivers, just because still at their core they are discrete, almost digital, devices and will have cogging noise effects. Hopefully I'm wrong!
When you said 'I'm going to cut these wires, i had visions of keyboard warriors typing 'YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING SAM!' 😁😁😁 Absolutely brilliant piece of work Sam. Hope you get the motor sorted soon!
You should have seen the nest of wiring that was tacked on to these instruments in their last home .. Oh my goodness, anything Sam does is an improvement, believe me !
Consider adding a vintage Kurzweil 2500R to your modular synthesizer, this is a truly amazing machine, maybe the best synthesizer ever made! Like i said, i know someone that made many very very very good tracks, just using a K2000R + Yamaha 03D mixer, he also toured with this setup in clubs. You'll never look back and amaze the audience!
Basically any stepper motor with a silent driver should work well to spin that vibraphone thing. Those have very precise low-speed control, plenty of torque and are easy to get.
Greetings from Australia, You maniac! As someone who has saved a few older toneweheelers' and early transitor beasts as well as church organ ranks from landfill let me just say you are fecking insanely groovy. :) Let me know if you ever venture over here. I need to see your magnificence live. It's all about preservation, my fabulous friend!
Go for a sensored brushless motor with a E speed controller (like rc stuff). The hall effect sensors allow complete control of the motor speed without notchiness.
The diodes on the relays are for flyback voltage suppression as the coil is de-energized, it does make the coils polorized so they need + and - right , but you need them somewhere in the circuit, maybe the new drivers have them. Fascinating work.
Brushless motors still make some noise. They aren't to noisy below maybe 10%, but they get louder after that. I just uploaded a video to my channel of the sounds they make if you'd like to reference.
I learned my lesson properly with Joan's organ and I say cut those wires with great abandon! The vibes sound amazing. Can't wait to hear the rest of the instruments!
I love these midi controlled instruments! I'm imagining a whole room of them with mics everywhere that you can use with a computer like a live vst plugin.
Aaaah the magic smoke, electrical aftershave for those that dabble. Came back to say how lovely that sounds, maybe look on one for the RC car websites for a servo. They ain't cheap mind.
Great episode ! Loved the intro and outro music. The vibraphone sounds great ! brushless motor will be doing less noise but you will still hear it a bit at high rates : maybe put a small sound isolation box around it. The idea to rotate the vibrant bars at audio rate to create a ring modulation is very good, but if you try and do so, other acoustic phenomenon may occur. I'm looking forward to see ho it turns out in the next videos !
I was a bit concerned when you said you were cutting the diodes off the relays. Diodes across relays are generally there as protection against back-emf when the coil is de-energised.
Honestly, maybe the way to go is a NEMA 17 stepper motor with a TMC2208 driver. Perfect low to mid speed controll, enough torque, nearly silent operation (provided you use a silent stepper driver like the TMC2208 or similar) and easy to control via arduino with the AccelStepper library or something similar...
Unfortunately I've tried this type of arrangement, and it's great up to a certain speed before it starts vibrating due to the resonance of the motor and the drive frequency itself, since it has to commutate the coils at higher and higher speeds. It's too bad, but you're stuck at lower frequencies.
May be good idea to use rear window washer motor, with its worm gearbox from some small car. Probably it will need to be modified for rotary movement from swaping directions one. When you add there some grease it could be pretty silent. Like german u-boot were😉 Or its possible to buy ready to use, small chinese mechanisms. They silent too, and motors are small. You can choose how may revolutions per min you need.
Not sure how big they are but you could try finding a cordless drill on marketplace that someone no-longer needs and use the brushless motor from one of them.
That's really cool. Never saw a vibraphone up close. Not that it would make for easy automation, but while you sort out the servo, you might still be able to play the vibrato with a foot pedal and flywheel, like an old sewing machine. Could work for near-term recordings. Definitely has the low-speed control. 😅👍
Vibes have such a wonderful sound. So exited for the next phase of this project! These electromecanical instruments are so cool! Can't wait to see whats next!!!
If nobody has mentioned it, perhaps ssomething like the RMD-X series motors could work. Theyre 3 phase with built in foc capable controller and encoder, so they can work at low speed and you can control without an esc.
A couple of thoughts could you run a motor for each bank, as the belt gearing looks around 1:2, this should let you run smaller motors faster, without the need for the gearing on the motor which makes it more noisy. Also would having the vanes able to stop in open or closed be an advantage as that would give 2 distinctive sounds as well as the vibraphone. Great work as ever D
Please play some good old classical fairground marches through that organ! Look up the Ruth model 36 organ, they sound fantastic playing classical stuff :)
Hi Sam. I think the best will be asynchronous motor with control circuit you use in leslie in gameboy machine. But instead of using potentiometer, use optocoupler with LDR ;)
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I would recommend a tape / cassette player motor. They are bloody silent !
That servo has pitch to it! Could you work out by ear the midi value that takes it to the speed for each note and map those? You could play a melody with the whine of the motor
One note, those diodes are for flyback voltage-spike protection. Now, while the ULN2803 of the solenoid board you have got its own set of protection diodes internally, it is worth noting that not all transistor-array chips got these for people looking into designing their own driver boards. It's a very common beginners mistake to have motor and/or solenoid driver transistors blow due to lack of protection, and I see the engineers behind the vibraphone got around this by just using solenoids with the diode already built-in.
i would think any brushless motor with a good ESC out of any reasonable sized quadcopter would work, will have the same servo motor interface, and should be almost silent, but you need to replace the big wheel with a much (much) smaller one.
I watched a series by a guy trying to set up a fancy vibraphone once, took him years and still never got it working. Something to do with troublesome metal balls 😄
If you could find a way to measure and therefor sync the BPM of the vibro effect with the MIDI controller that could be really cool. Like how there's midi controlled delay and tremolo and such guitar pedals. Route through a variable foot pedal, set interesting fast and slow speeds to toggle between like a Leslie.
I use Rev neo 550 brushless motors for robotics and controlled the controllers with pwm with an Arduino. They are pretty fast, I didn't know if they'd be able to go slow enough consisteny for this application. And even brushless motors have a spin up whine at higher speeds.
If you're planning to run the shafts up at audio speeds you're probably going to want to switch to using a timing belt so they don't go out of sync (or maybe not I suppose, could potentially be interesting...) you'll also need to probably install a better bearing solution for the shafts.
5:43 I’m sorry I know it’s stereotyping but, “ A LAUT A COPA” 😂 I’m glad you’re back on the organ fabrication/restoration vibe all of your content is 💯
Have you ever considered putting magnets into the keys of the church organ, then putting coils under each one so that the keys will spookily play themselves ... maybe for Halloween?
yes. sadly its a big modification job. and would likely take the console too far away from its provinence. but who knows! maybe a sleaker less intrusive means will rear its funky head.
A very rare thing to see, especially on organs - however not something that doesn't already exist ! Moving keys on self playing instruments was as Sam has described in other videos, a very American thing. Not popular over here as it can harm repetition, however that being said, Kimball - the pipe organ builder in the states, and later electronic organ builder, produced a series of electronic organs that could play rolls, and these - had moving keys ! Very fun, but so rare in the UK, we've never been able to find one for our own museum. th-cam.com/video/s9S4wzEfwpk/w-d-xo.html
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTERgiven the current rate of progress, in five years there might be some slightly used but obsolete fully dextrous robotic android arms floating around. Not sure that's the right kind of (not) obsolete you're going for tho...
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTEROk, how bout this. No permanent modification, not even a temporary one, just one you can use when you want it to play on its own. Make a wooden frame that rests on top of the claviature. That frame consists of an MDF board and two uprights that are its legs, but also go up as well (so in profile from the front, it would like a wide H). At the tip of each of the keys, on the MDF board, one hole is to be drilled, and one tube is to be glued in place. This tube sticks (again) both up and down from the MDF, and i'd say it should be one of those plastic electric conduits, but... it ultimately is tied to the coils you'd potentially use (be they hand would or already existing items, which is up to you). Now, you'd need wooden dowels to go through each of the tubes, and they should fit loosely inside and rest on top of the keys, protruding out of the tubes' ends up top. By how much, to be determined. The tips of these "sticks" should have cue tips (from billiards). That's a soft (easily replaced) surface that won't mar or damage the keys in any way. Next would be to add a C channel piece of metal up top (this has two purposes, it weighs the whole contraption down so it doesn't vibrate off and it's also robust enough for its intended purpose). Nothing too heavy tho, and of course, something you can bend. If you can't bend something like that, then it can also be accomplished from a plate of metal with angle iron on its sides. I'd say that the plate could be 1 mm sheet and the angles 2 mm metal one. On this plate, you'd need to drill holes above the sticks and stick springs to the sticks that only just keep the sticks off the surface of the keys. Then... we come to the relatively complicated part and actually where the project would start on account of the fact that you either have these coils already or have to make them to wind them, to suit existing tube you can find. The coils would stick over the tubes (at different height intervals if the tubes are too close proximity) and they would energize using a piece of metal tube that's either slipped over the sticks (which affects the pull power of those springs mentioned above) or the sticks are cut in half and stuck into the metal tubes. Each time you activate a coil, it pulls down the metal, which is tied to the stick which then pushes the key through its cue tip. In theory, you can have this move with quite a bit of accuracy when playing. In practice, a prototype should be build to test out just how much acting force you need on that spring, which is the key component of the whole affair. Visually, it wouldn't be too heavy on the eye, it reminiscences of the organ tubes in a way and it's also silent. So it won't detract from the organ with noisy activation mechanisms. If you tune that spring force perfectly, it won't affect the keys in any way as (potentially) a motor would (rolling key presser as some retrofitted pianos have). Just a thought.
I envy you - you have time, money, energy and connections for doing such marvelous projects. Please midify it and connect with your church organs. Beautiful piece!
It is midi there is an issue to play it with the organ coming up! Indeed I have time (it's always stretched working 8 morning till usually 10 at night but yes haha) money yes indeed! When times are good and videos are doing well I do have spare money to spend on things. Energy is always a challenge! I wish it was unlimited haha. Nice one.
12:52 a week after you start learning about synths everthing is a synth. My cheap electric guitar has been promoted to six voice analog ocillator user interface
For the vibraphone motor remember with a brushless motor you want one with sensors otherwite it will not be able to go to low speeds. Don't cheap out on the motor.
I really have to arrange to come over the bridge and see your museum one day, I might even have a couple of items for you at some stage 😊 well done, your videos are an inspiration to us collectors of yesteryears technology 😊
Sam,
Wonderful to see this all coming to life already ! As we at the organ museum are going to be returning both instruments to how they left the Compton Works, in 1938 and 1952 respectively, all of the extras that were added after the instruments moved to Leeds in 1965 aren't going to be returned, however due to their history in their own right, deserve to live on - and i'm so pleased we could agree for them to come to you.
In the photograph, for your eagle eyed viewers - the console on the right of the two "Tub" consoles, is the Parkway Hotel Leeds, the very first british electronic organ, the Compton organ company had prior to this, been building "Melotone" units, that were added to their cinema pipe organs to add to the specification, but these were a handful of stops meant to add another tonal colour, not complete the whole instrument. The "Theatrone" was the next step in this technology, with the rotating electrostatic generators to produce the tone, this used the first generation of tone generators - of which there are very few remaining, of the three sets Lucien managed to collect, we will construct one "good" set in order to return the organ to how it left the Compton works.
The second of the two, is the organ that was purchased by the Broadstairs corporation in 1952, to be used as a mobile organ for the council. However, most often used on the band stand from what I gather - this used the later 347 metal generator racks, as we've discussed before, another item you will be getting !
On one hand, it is a shame they were altered to such a degree in their last home, however on the other - they likely would not have survived otherwise, it is our intention to restore them to their original form.
A note on the percussions you were talking about ! The Chrysoglott (Pronounced Criz-o-glott) is a series of soft hammers, that strike large metal bars - usually, a vibraphone but with the motor turned off ! So, i'm not actually sure why he had them as seperate devices in this case !? And the Glockenspiel is as it says on the tin. All of the "relays" you describe are Kimber Allen Pulldown Magnets, off the shelf from a company in Kent that are still to this day producing organ components just as they have done forever, a real old fashioned firm, and certainly worth a visit !
Also, the blue speakers (Why that shade of blue !?) that have Rotafon in what I know to be wheelybin letters ... Those are all, infact, Leslie speakers ! He just called them Rotafon to stick with the Compton names for things, despite them being very very different, i'm so glad you will be able to use these, too !
I really should get my act together and get our own youtube channel up and running, considering the amount of projects we have going on at the moment, Jamie keeps suggesting it but this has been somewhat of an encouragement !
Best
Carl & Jamie - East Midlands Organ Museum
Nice one Carl and Jamie! Thanks for the info and help. Yeah! Vids are always good even if just one take phone vids. Always good to document for whoever is interested in watching! See you guys soon!!
A lot of words
I thought those looked suspiciously like Leslie cabinets, only with the delightful blue color. Thanks to all who preserve musical history like this.
Thanks for the detailed comment!
I would watch your channel.
I apologize Sam, I must admit, when you first mentioned your desire to open a museum, I wasn’t fully convinced of its chance of success. I am humbled, and must concede, you have proved me wrong. Joans organ wouldn’t have been saved if it wasn’t for you. Congratulations on your venture and I bow to your vision and applaud your good fortune.
If you can get there, go there. It’sa good day out
Given his recent short, I imagine this means a lot to Sam. Kudos.
Brilliant idea LONG before Joan's Organ !!!!!!
@@andywatts8654 I live in Canada.
@@mastercylinder1939 that's a poor excuse. I live in NZ and I'm going in August. 😛
Lol the notification said "Another Massive Organ..." and I was like "ookay, that's what they all say"
Ayyy...
Thats all I came here for ☺
🤣🤣
Who can resist a massive organ when it’s offered 😂
and then I read about a vibranium phone
🤣😁
now remember! my relationship with words is very tenuous (no idea dont ask, words and things dont match up, more sounds, materials and other tangible things make sense, ye olde grammar nonsense and writing is just nonsense :D). i tend to say a lot of words and mean other things. but atleast you get the gist haha. for reference here are some of my mess ups below :-
xylophone i mean glockenspiel im a donut.
thingamagoop - Still meant thingamagoop
Let me guess... its a 1 off piece lol 😂
Or in this case 1110 lol 😂🎉
Help me program 13 in the piano by number system... its a A note... i cant blast it high enough... i 5hink you can... just dont explode your soul trying to ram it higher!
Don't worry! We understand. (PS. An organ vibraphone is called a Chrysoglott)
@@JesseBadut14 Quite right ! Usually they are the same thing, just it becomes the Vibraphone when you switch on the motor for the rotating baffles. However for some reason in this case, Mr Stockdale had one of each !
A stepper motor with a Trinamic driver would be ideal for this - execllent low-speed control and silent.
mike tghanks. my only experience with stepper motors have been reveryberant in their enclosure so i went away from it, but you recon thats the way forwards? im hoping for it to get quite quick too beyond in the video, would stepper still be the way?
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER Trinamic drivers work absolute magic on steppers - They use 64-256 analogue levels between each step. Would easily do the speeds you were doing & more and be completely silent.
@@mikeselectricstuff ok great news, ill get hold of some and report my findings! cheers. any suggestion on a good trinamic driver? or any one of the world wide web
If this were a 3d printer i’d said trinamic 2209 and an ldo motor. But that’s kind of the standard answer for that usecase, not detailed knowledge. Actually you might even borrow one from your Lulzbot to test it.
Cool, something to check out when building CNC machines!
Dang that sounds beautiful!
Love how the organ remains 'Joans organ', hopefully it'll be joined by Luciens Vibrophone
Humble suggestion: the vibraphone is one of the only instruments where you can play a note and then decide when to stop it later. You can do this electronically with piano and organ too, but I think it'd be pretty cool to have a mute for every key that can either be activated via a midi off message or even a separate midi channel.
Surely the note decays slowly, like guitar which you can also choose to stop, or instead any wind instrument that stops when you stop blowing!
Lol the mouth noises during time lapse are great
I love that the hymn numbers are all off-by-one
I figured out the first 3, is the last one supposed to be 8008 (early Intel CPU)?
@@rick420buzz 👍
@@rick420buzz If you want to keep this sfw , then yeah ;)
@@rick420buzz Yeah, yeah. XD
Oh wow an Easter Egg that passed me by!
the trolley under the vibraphone is typical of orchestral mallet instruments of that era, and even now to some extent. I remember pushing the xylophone from the band room to the gymnasium for an in-school concert and the legs of the trolley folded under itself. We had to make some modifications to repair it. I would recommend building a sturdy base for your vibraphone :)
I love that name… my condolences.
With all of the stuff that was connected to the Compton consoles by Mr. Stockdale, it looks like something Bloody Stupid Johnson would come up with!🤣
Oh my fracking word. The world is lucky to have you, man. Saving our history one organ at a time!
Edit. That sounds amazing. Well done mate.
Well well well, how interesting. Back in 2020 I was offered this whole setup along with some tape recorders, the organ was way too big for me and everything had been hand painted over, was a shame really. The main musical side of things was housed in a very cramp room, whilst the driving electronics was in a shed opposite. I did purchase most the recorders as I collect Leevers Rich equipment, and it seemed a shame that the organ might end up in landfill, but its great to see it actually survived.
I mean, obviously you need to show Martin and his Wintergatan off now by playing his Marble Machine music better than himself... Please, I really want to hear that!! 🤩
The battle of Marbles vs Midi ...
@@Juttutin I mean with his recent obsession with "tight" music the logical conclusion will be to have the thing be a Midi instrument sans marbles in the end... (I've more or less stopped watching the videos since he started worrying about 1ms delays in note times)
Yeah same, his machine was looking so good and better then the first but it was the first that brought all the attention for being.. what it is.@@SomeMorganSomewhere
Yep, I agree with all of the above.
A critical differentiator between the vibraphone and a glockenspiel is that damper that you kind of glossed over. That's a major part about the vibraphone sound - you can engage the damper to silence a chord when moving to a different chord, to prevent dissonance. Without it, you basically have a glockenspiel. I would suggest adding a solenoid programmed to respond to the sustain pedal CC, that actuates the damper, but in reverse - so when you press the sustain pedal, it damps the vibraphone, like an actual one does.
Yeah it's cool but the dissonance is lovely too :D
It has a solenoid on that. I didn't mention is cus not as interesting as the wobblies
On the pipe organ side of these, you would quite often have an individual damper felt per note, with a seperate stop key that would activate a larger pneumatic to lift them all up at once, quite useful ! Some even had a "Half blow" feature, able to cut the wind in half, in order to soften things down even further.
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER Yeah, the damper should be a simple MIDI on/off; should be easy to do for a chap of your talents, Sam LOL! And having at one time gigged with a vibes player for a few years, yes you DO need to be able to program the damper as well. 😉
@@caddelworth it is wired in, i used it in middle of vid. just edited out the bit talking about it
That test section in the 14:00 area sounded like a 1960s dream sequence. Very pretty. For some vibraphone inspiration look up Lionel Hampton. He played vibes with all the jazz greats of the mid 20th century.
I would have loved to hear the entire ensemble of instruments. The vibraphone sounds lovely on it's own.
I am continuously amazed by the stuff you manage to acquire. ^____^
Those diodes in parallel with the relay coils are likely flyback diodes to prevent negative voltage spikes as a result of suddenly disconnecting an energized inductor. I'd suggest reconnecting them in the opposite orientation so they aren't shorting your arduino GPIO but allow energy stored in the coils to be released.
No need uln2803's have built in protection diodes
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER heh I was going to comment on the good reason for keeping the diodes, but I was beaten to it and I see you have it covered anyway! The ULN2803 is a dream chip for driving anything solenoidal (if that's even a word :-) )
@@davechisholm9670 "Solenoidal"? Are you sure that's not something to see a doctor about? 🤣
Grab an old sewing machine motor, if you pick one up with all its wiring you'll also have a ready built speed control and they can be really quiet.
@ 12:33 - you have a brushless in place (the servo). You need a good quality DC *brushed* commutator motor, with pretty strong shaft support bearings (the side load on the servo from the rubber belt was what was causing the bulk of the noise). A decent, high-current H-bridge shield for a UNO R3 or some such should drive it, with a current capability of about 2 - 2.5x the peak current draw of the motor.
Strangely, the motor you took off looked like a modified London bus wiper motor (probably Lucas) which would have done the job fine. Why not try that? You also need to watch the belt tension.
Alternatively, use *two* brushless servos driving the shafts directly via flexible couplings (take the pulley wheels off), one for each set of tremolo butterflies, which will not have any side loads and can be synchronised for position to keep each bank of butterflies in phase. Great project!
Thanks for the info! Excuse my knowledge if wrong but I'm pretty sure servos, well the cheap ones I had are almost certainly brushed motors. I meant brushless purely from the point of a lower end kick but also high rpm with low noise. I want it to rev up and down via the digital input quickly and quietly but no need for torque. The first thing I tried was a brushed motor I had but for whatever reason it wasn't working so I switched to servo. I tend to work with what I have on the day. Especially when needing to finish projects for videos (like this) in 2-3 days postage becomes risky so I rely on what's in the drawers. As for the motor on the vibraphone it was a 230v geared motor so I'm assuming bus wipers used 12 or 24volt supply it's possibly not? I don't think it would do what I'm hoping I want to get up to atleast 300rpm on the shafts and slow as 20rpm I don't think that would
Have done it. Also how bodgey it was and also the weight and mismatch of voltages. Trying to keep the whole room at the standard of 12v and 1 power input per machine. Anyway thanks for the thoughts! Think I'm going stepper motor. Cheerz.
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER FWIW, the vast majority of the noise caused by servo motors is the internal gearing mechanism, because the tiny DC motors in there run best at high speeds, but results in low torque. The noise has basically nothing to do with the brushes or DC, so don't write those off.
The setup is actually quite inefficient because you first have the internal servo gearing that reduces speed and increases torque(with resulting power losses), and then your external belt-driven system that then re-increases speed.
I suspect the steppers will also be noticeably noisy despite fancy drivers, just because still at their core they are discrete, almost digital, devices and will have cogging noise effects. Hopefully I'm wrong!
Beautiful. I'm sure I'm not the only one who instantly wondered how this would sound playing Wintergatan's Marble Machine song!
When you said 'I'm going to cut these wires, i had visions of keyboard warriors typing 'YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING SAM!' 😁😁😁 Absolutely brilliant piece of work Sam. Hope you get the motor sorted soon!
You should have seen the nest of wiring that was tacked on to these instruments in their last home .. Oh my goodness, anything Sam does is an improvement, believe me !
I love it that he briefly showed how he treated the previous organ 😁
Love the number choices…. 69, 420, 42 (HHGTTG), Boob, and Leet…. All minus 1 😂
i love that one pipe to the left where the string wiggles when it blows
Sam every video you release is so damn inspiring!
Consider adding a vintage Kurzweil 2500R to your modular synthesizer, this is a truly amazing machine, maybe the best synthesizer ever made!
Like i said, i know someone that made many very very very good tracks, just using a K2000R + Yamaha 03D mixer, he also toured with this setup in clubs.
You'll never look back and amaze the audience!
the sound of this thing is absolutely magical and pretty. i expected it to sound more harsh but somehow its so damn perfect.
Sounds magical with that controller. I would love one of these!!!
Basically any stepper motor with a silent driver should work well to spin that vibraphone thing. Those have very precise low-speed control, plenty of torque and are easy to get.
Greetings from Australia, You maniac! As someone who has saved a few older toneweheelers' and early transitor beasts as well as church organ ranks from landfill let me just say you are fecking insanely groovy. :) Let me know if you ever venture over here. I need to see your magnificence live. It's all about preservation, my fabulous friend!
Nice!
That's very cool! Thanks for showing us! I love theater organs and their electromechanical whatnots / accessories!
Go for a sensored brushless motor with a E speed controller (like rc stuff). The hall effect sensors allow complete control of the motor speed without notchiness.
The diodes on the relays are for flyback voltage suppression as the coil is de-energized, it does make the coils polorized so they need + and - right , but you need them somewhere in the circuit, maybe the new drivers have them. Fascinating work.
The drivers I use have them
Brushless motors still make some noise. They aren't to noisy below maybe 10%, but they get louder after that. I just uploaded a video to my channel of the sounds they make if you'd like to reference.
Wow. What a great find. I saw one of your performances recently, on TH-cam. You are just awesome for putting these videos together. Thanks.
I learned my lesson properly with Joan's organ and I say cut those wires with great abandon! The vibes sound amazing. Can't wait to hear the rest of the instruments!
Sony 1982 - The CFS-C7 CHORDMACHINE
You should give it a look see. I feel like it could make for some wonderful Look Mum No Computer future content!
Such a wonderful dreamy sound. A shame that servo is so loud though, cant wait to hear it with the brushless motor.
I love these midi controlled instruments! I'm imagining a whole room of them with mics everywhere that you can use with a computer like a live vst plugin.
Has a magical sound to it.
Aaaah the magic smoke, electrical aftershave for those that dabble. Came back to say how lovely that sounds, maybe look on one for the RC car websites for a servo. They ain't cheap mind.
when replacing motor you could also add a position-encoder-magnet-thingy, to allow absolute control over the modulation...
But you do have absolute control. Position isn't critical
What a beautiful sound that makes
Great episode ! Loved the intro and outro music. The vibraphone sounds great !
brushless motor will be doing less noise but you will still hear it a bit at high rates : maybe put a small sound isolation box around it.
The idea to rotate the vibrant bars at audio rate to create a ring modulation is very good, but if you try and do so, other acoustic phenomenon may occur.
I'm looking forward to see ho it turns out in the next videos !
That sounds really nice, love the museum because otherwise I would have no idea any of this even existed.
You should be able to easily find a good silent operating stepper motor. and they also can go fairly quick!
I was a bit concerned when you said you were cutting the diodes off the relays. Diodes across relays are generally there as protection against back-emf when the coil is de-energised.
What a beautiful instrument.
Honestly, maybe the way to go is a NEMA 17 stepper motor with a TMC2208 driver. Perfect low to mid speed controll, enough torque, nearly silent operation (provided you use a silent stepper driver like the TMC2208 or similar) and easy to control via arduino with the AccelStepper library or something similar...
Unfortunately I've tried this type of arrangement, and it's great up to a certain speed before it starts vibrating due to the resonance of the motor and the drive frequency itself, since it has to commutate the coils at higher and higher speeds. It's too bad, but you're stuck at lower frequencies.
Such a lovely sparkly sound.
May be good idea to use rear window washer motor, with its worm gearbox from some small car. Probably it will need to be modified for rotary movement from swaping directions one. When you add there some grease it could be pretty silent. Like german u-boot were😉
Or its possible to buy ready to use, small chinese mechanisms. They silent too, and motors are small. You can choose how may revolutions per min you need.
Not sure how big they are but you could try finding a cordless drill on marketplace that someone no-longer needs and use the brushless motor from one of them.
That's really cool. Never saw a vibraphone up close. Not that it would make for easy automation, but while you sort out the servo, you might still be able to play the vibrato with a foot pedal and flywheel, like an old sewing machine. Could work for near-term recordings. Definitely has the low-speed control. 😅👍
Great to see the organ again!
Oustanding as always. That sound is phenomenal, & to say the least, jaw dropping how you got there
Sam, im so proud of your existance as human. Greets from México.
So amazing and magical seeing this come together
I think you might need to weigh oversize the servo motor for the xylophone portion for not to be overworked to get it to be quieter
a rather pleasant and magical sound too it.
It sounds like an effect that would be used for entering a "dream sequence". Very nice.
Vibes have such a wonderful sound. So exited for the next phase of this project! These electromecanical instruments are so cool! Can't wait to see whats next!!!
If nobody has mentioned it, perhaps ssomething like the RMD-X series motors could work. Theyre 3 phase with built in foc capable controller and encoder, so they can work at low speed and you can control without an esc.
Stepper motor with a Trinamic TMC2208 or TMC2209 driver can be made virtually whisper quiet.
Sagenhaft!👏🤩
You could try a bigger weel so the current motor can rotate at lower speeds.
what a score to get all those amazing instruments!!! they couldn't have gone to a better home i think.
A couple of thoughts could you run a motor for each bank, as the belt gearing looks around 1:2, this should let you run smaller motors faster, without the need for the gearing on the motor which makes it more noisy.
Also would having the vanes able to stop in open or closed be an advantage as that would give 2 distinctive sounds as well as the vibraphone.
Great work as ever
D
Please play some good old classical fairground marches through that organ!
Look up the Ruth model 36 organ, they sound fantastic playing classical stuff :)
Hi Sam. I think the best will be asynchronous motor with control circuit you use in leslie in gameboy machine. But instead of using potentiometer, use optocoupler with LDR ;)
I would recommend a tape / cassette player motor. They are bloody silent !
That servo has pitch to it! Could you work out by ear the midi value that takes it to the speed for each note and map those? You could play a melody with the whine of the motor
One note, those diodes are for flyback voltage-spike protection. Now, while the ULN2803 of the solenoid board you have got its own set of protection diodes internally, it is worth noting that not all transistor-array chips got these for people looking into designing their own driver boards. It's a very common beginners mistake to have motor and/or solenoid driver transistors blow due to lack of protection, and I see the engineers behind the vibraphone got around this by just using solenoids with the diode already built-in.
I'm pretty sure most people know about adding protection diodes. But indeed. Cheers!
6:36 *correction* the actual big difference between a vibraphone and a xylophone is that a xylophone is made of wood: xylos means wood in Greek.
tomato tomato
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER I'am honored to have an answer from the man himself, I'll put it in my collection ;)
amazing , this is a bit of a dream instrument ... My midi controlled music box will be arriving in the mail soon ... love it !
i would think any brushless motor with a good ESC out of any reasonable sized quadcopter would work, will have the same servo motor interface, and should be almost silent, but you need to replace the big wheel with a much (much) smaller one.
I watched a series by a guy trying to set up a fancy vibraphone once, took him years and still never got it working. Something to do with troublesome metal balls 😄
Drone Motor maybe? Motorsynth comes to mind
maybe the old clunky motor was quieter, anyways very amazing, the sound and what you do aswell!
You could use a so called "flexible shaft" to isolate the noisy bugger.
It sounds lovely.Would it be possible to make it so you can play the vibraphone, the glockenspiel and the third thingy with the same keyboard?
Yep. Anything like that would be possible.
If you could find a way to measure and therefor sync the BPM of the vibro effect with the MIDI controller that could be really cool. Like how there's midi controlled delay and tremolo and such guitar pedals. Route through a variable foot pedal, set interesting fast and slow speeds to toggle between like a Leslie.
Omg..what you take on, and you're music is fantastic 🫨🤯
I use Rev neo 550 brushless motors for robotics and controlled the controllers with pwm with an Arduino. They are pretty fast, I didn't know if they'd be able to go slow enough consisteny for this application. And even brushless motors have a spin up whine at higher speeds.
If you're planning to run the shafts up at audio speeds you're probably going to want to switch to using a timing belt so they don't go out of sync (or maybe not I suppose, could potentially be interesting...) you'll also need to probably install a better bearing solution for the shafts.
It'll be fine as is but cheers 👍
5:43 I’m sorry I know it’s stereotyping but, “ A LAUT A COPA” 😂
I’m glad you’re back on the organ fabrication/restoration vibe all of your content is 💯
Have you ever considered putting magnets into the keys of the church organ, then putting coils under each one so that the keys will spookily play themselves ... maybe for Halloween?
yes. sadly its a big modification job. and would likely take the console too far away from its provinence. but who knows! maybe a sleaker less intrusive means will rear its funky head.
A very rare thing to see, especially on organs - however not something that doesn't already exist ! Moving keys on self playing instruments was as Sam has described in other videos, a very American thing. Not popular over here as it can harm repetition, however that being said, Kimball - the pipe organ builder in the states, and later electronic organ builder, produced a series of electronic organs that could play rolls, and these - had moving keys ! Very fun, but so rare in the UK, we've never been able to find one for our own museum. th-cam.com/video/s9S4wzEfwpk/w-d-xo.html
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTERgiven the current rate of progress, in five years there might be some slightly used but obsolete fully dextrous robotic android arms floating around. Not sure that's the right kind of (not) obsolete you're going for tho...
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTEROk, how bout this. No permanent modification, not even a temporary one, just one you can use when you want it to play on its own.
Make a wooden frame that rests on top of the claviature. That frame consists of an MDF board and two uprights that are its legs, but also go up as well (so in profile from the front, it would like a wide H).
At the tip of each of the keys, on the MDF board, one hole is to be drilled, and one tube is to be glued in place. This tube sticks (again) both up and down from the MDF, and i'd say it should be one of those plastic electric conduits, but... it ultimately is tied to the coils you'd potentially use (be they hand would or already existing items, which is up to you).
Now, you'd need wooden dowels to go through each of the tubes, and they should fit loosely inside and rest on top of the keys, protruding out of the tubes' ends up top. By how much, to be determined. The tips of these "sticks" should have cue tips (from billiards). That's a soft (easily replaced) surface that won't mar or damage the keys in any way.
Next would be to add a C channel piece of metal up top (this has two purposes, it weighs the whole contraption down so it doesn't vibrate off and it's also robust enough for its intended purpose). Nothing too heavy tho, and of course, something you can bend. If you can't bend something like that, then it can also be accomplished from a plate of metal with angle iron on its sides. I'd say that the plate could be 1 mm sheet and the angles 2 mm metal one. On this plate, you'd need to drill holes above the sticks and stick springs to the sticks that only just keep the sticks off the surface of the keys.
Then... we come to the relatively complicated part and actually where the project would start on account of the fact that you either have these coils already or have to make them to wind them, to suit existing tube you can find. The coils would stick over the tubes (at different height intervals if the tubes are too close proximity) and they would energize using a piece of metal tube that's either slipped over the sticks (which affects the pull power of those springs mentioned above) or the sticks are cut in half and stuck into the metal tubes.
Each time you activate a coil, it pulls down the metal, which is tied to the stick which then pushes the key through its cue tip. In theory, you can have this move with quite a bit of accuracy when playing. In practice, a prototype should be build to test out just how much acting force you need on that spring, which is the key component of the whole affair.
Visually, it wouldn't be too heavy on the eye, it reminiscences of the organ tubes in a way and it's also silent. So it won't detract from the organ with noisy activation mechanisms. If you tune that spring force perfectly, it won't affect the keys in any way as (potentially) a motor would (rolling key presser as some retrofitted pianos have).
Just a thought.
I envy you - you have time, money, energy and connections for doing such marvelous projects. Please midify it and connect with your church organs. Beautiful piece!
It is midi there is an issue to play it with the organ coming up! Indeed I have time (it's always stretched working 8 morning till usually 10 at night but yes haha) money yes indeed! When times are good and videos are doing well I do have spare money to spend on things. Energy is always a challenge! I wish it was unlimited haha. Nice one.
Such asmr. Much wow.
Use a stepper motor. Cheap and common, precise rpm control.
that thing sounds amazing!
12:52 a week after you start learning about synths everthing is a synth. My cheap electric guitar has been promoted to six voice analog ocillator user interface
Should build a speaker box with a bunch of small speakers and flaps/valves over the speaker for the ultimate vibrato.
Sam, AWESOME work as ever. You are a barking mad (meant as a massive compliment) Electro Mechanical Engineer. 🙂😎🤓❤
I's use regular 3d printer stepper motor with a quiet driver TMC-something
For the vibraphone motor remember with a brushless motor you want one with sensors otherwite it will not be able to go to low speeds. Don't cheap out on the motor.
I really have to arrange to come over the bridge and see your museum one day, I might even have a couple of items for you at some stage 😊 well done, your videos are an inspiration to us collectors of yesteryears technology 😊