tuning taurus 3 from right to left

hi, i’m a lefty and it’s really hard to play the taurus 3 pedal board as it’s made for a right handed, so i would like to know if it’s possible to change it for a lefty like me? all i need to know is how to tune it the other way around.

thanks :smiley:

Surely you mean left-footed? :slight_smile:

Try turning the Taurus 3 so its rear is facing you and reaching over with your leg.

Yeah, I don’t see why one couldn’t use the volume wheel as the cutoff wheel.

Do you want the logo to read GOOM?

I’ve never seen an organ with its keyboards or footboard tuned in reverse… except the keyboard of the ARP2600 that could inverse its pitch CV output… :mrgreen:

What you want to do is, open up the Taurus pedals, take the contact board out from the pedals, and flip it around. :wink:

Joe Zawinul of Weather Report would use it to play the melody to “Black Market” - that’s how he came up with the melody:

Zawinul has spoken often of the inverted keyboard that he played on “Black Market.” It was made possible by a feature on the ARP 2600 that allowed inverting the keyboard voltage so that the upper portion of the keyboard played the lower sounds and vice versa. Len Lyons, in a 1977 Keyboard magazine interview, asked Zawinul why he experimented with it:

Because it was a challenge for me to play in a mirrored system. It’s good for the mind. If you improvise on chords, for example, you’ve got to transpose, and your mind has to be very, very fast. I was recording one day at home on the inverted setup, and that’s when the song “Black Market” was put together. After listening to it, I played the melodies on the straight keyboard, and it didn’t sound as good as it did the mirrored way. Then I had to write the melody down and relearn it on the inverted keyboard, because at first it was improvised. On-stage, I play the first melody of the song with the right hand on the inverted keyboard, and the left hand accompanies on the Rhodes until after the first six notes into the bridge. Then the right hand plays the contrapuntal chord voicings on the polyphonic [Oberheim] synthesizer. The left hand continues the melody where the right hand stopped, putting a chord or two on the Rhodes into the spaces. It takes a little while to get used to thinking in the mirrored system. Only C and F# are the same as on the straight keyboard. B becomes C#, Bb becomes D, A becomes Eb, and so on. I also play chords on the bridge of “Black Market” on the Oberheim. The chord is going upwards and the melody is going downwards–in contrary motion. It’s beautiful to challenge yourself visually. It makes you play new things. [KB77b]

Zawinul explained to Conrad Silvert that “when you change keys and play it with the left hand, it’s very difficult. But it changes the rhythmic and melodic feeling of the music, like a mirror image. it’s almost like going into the fourth dimension, like being on both sides of that wall simultaneously.”

(this is from the site “Weather Report: The Annotated Discography

So if you do manage to flip the tuning, make sure you don’t slip into the fourth dimension, unless that’s what you plan to do!

Nice story :slight_smile:

use a mirror, big one, and sit with your back to the t3, in front of the mirror.
that should do the trick