My friend Sean got a great deal on a MalletKAT Pro MIDI Marimba, a full-size instrument with two extra expanders that increase the range by two octaves! It’s a massive instrument and playing it can be quite a daunting task. It took me about 20 minutes to get it working with my Behringer Toro analog synth, check out my demo on the left. Notice this is a little bigger than a full 88-key piano-type keyboard.
Since Sean is a rock drummer, he really not going to be using a full-sized, five octave marimba with his drum kit–I can’t convince him to play any Frank Zappa–yet. He needs two octaves at the most, exactly what the expander boards are. Neil Peart, the late drummer from Rush famously used a two octave MalletKAT for years.
My idea was to take the expander boards and MIDI-fy them myself. Right now they need to be plugged into the main KAT (MIDI marimba) with a non-standard, 7-pin cable, so you can’t use them independently of the main KAT. I’m assuming this cable carries power, MIDI data and some other kind of signal, so it wouldn’t be easy to tap into this cable and extract the MIDI signal. Maybe an Arduino MIDI project could do this or if I had any more Cygnus MIDI Adapters, I could try converting it. I’ll check my junk drawer.
I took the back off one of the units and studied the circuit board and was able to map out how the individual notes are connected to the microchip controllers. Below is a pinout of the boards, showing how I believe the pin headers are arranged. I’ll have to test this with a multimeter before I do anything else.
