Voyager Old School: pitch wheel acting weird

[stiiiiiiive]

Hey Mooguys.

As my pitch wheel was a little bit loose, I decided to have a look into the left hand controller block. It seemed that the nut that ties the pitch wheel potentiometer to the plate (and then to the spring and wheel) had to be tightened.
So I unplugged the pitch wheel connector and unscrewed the plate's 2 nuts. As I was a bit skeptical about removong the whole stuff, in particular the screw at the wheel center, I used thin pliers to give a little rotation: that was enough.

Remounted the whole system, re-plugged the wheel. Remounter the LFH block. Hura!

Switched on. Played. Pitch-wheeled. Huh? No effect unless I go halfway down, then the pitch jumps 6 whole tones up.
A few more tests revealed that the keyboard pitch is correct when the connector is unplugged, but it's too low by 6-7 whole tones when plugged.

The modulation wheel and aftertouch work well. The release and glide switches as well.

Any idea before I get in touch with Moog tech support?

[stiiiiiiive]

OK guys, I've continued...

As I remembered the pitches reached by manipulating the pitch wheel were curiously matching with my "too high" and "too low" pitches, I thought the potentiometer was kind of too tightened, like I was able to reach only the min and max values. So I decided to open it again.

The culprit is this very screw in the middle of the wheel: it allows to calibrate (in a way I'm not sure to understand) the wheel action. I found a setting where the wheel makes the pitch go a 5th up and a bit more down. It was OK!

But the screw also acts on the general keyboard pitch following. And now I'm not alright haha.

I'll try to fine-tune this with a guitar tuner...

[stiiiiiiive]

MmmOK.

That was it. Only problem is the screw is hard to accurately manipulate. Here is what I've done:

1- As an init step:
- let the Voyager reach its cruse teperature
- OSC1 only ON
- FINE TUNE knob at center
- OSC1 octave at lowest setting.
- Keyboard mode set to ON and press the leftmost F key.

2- Set the screw until I have a F matching on my guitar tuner in stroboscope mode hehe (yeah... I' have no oscilloscope... yet)

3- Pass through the upper OSC1 octave settings and higher F keys to check: the F goes sharp.
-> Adjust as finely as possible so that it matches on the tuner.

4- Go back to rightmost F key and lowest octave setting: check and repaeat steps 2 through 4 if needed.

As a result, I cannot be as fine as my guitar tuner. But to my ear -which is not so bad- I can achieve something more than acceptable. A large L-shaped screw driver may be moreaccurate.
I guess I bring her to the calibration some day.

A question remains. There are several precision trim pots in the LHC block, which one is sitting next to a connector. I did not dare adjust the one next to the connector I'm interested in. Any experience/advice is welcome.

[thealien666]

You are, of course, aware of the jumper that selects the range of the pitch bend wheel inside the Old School ? (it shouldn't matter since you didn't touch it, but you can select between three ranges with this jumper: by default it is set to +/- 7 semitones, and you can choose +/- 2 semitones or +/- 12 semitones instead, as shown in the document link below)

http://www.moogmusic.com/sites/default/ ... 0Range.pdf

BTW, the pitch bend wheel should affect all three OSC equally. If your lower F key and your highest F key are not matched, the pitch bend wheel has nothing to do with that but rather an internal calibration of the stretch tuning is probably required.

For the pitch bend wheel center position adjustment, all that is required is that when it is in the notch position (center), the pitch of any key is in tune with an external reference (or tuner). For example, you should get an A440 sounding when playing the highest A on the keyboard with the octave switch set to 16'.

[stiiiiiiive]

Alain, I knew you would be amongst the first Mooguys to chime in.. I even hoped it

You are, of course, aware of the jumper that selects the range of the pitch bend wheel inside the Old School ? (it shouldn't matter since you didn't touch it, but you can select between three ranges with this jumper: by default it is set to +/- 7 semitones, and you can choose +/- 2 semitones or +/- 12 semitones instead, as shown in the document link below)

http://www.moogmusic.com/sites/default/ ... 0Range.pdf

Now that you tell me... Non, I did not have that in mind. Thanks for the heads up, I'll have a look, maybe try some variation.

BTW, the pitch bend wheel should affect all three OSC equally. If your lower F key and your highest F key are not matched, the pitch bend wheel has nothing to do with that but rather an internal calibration of the stretch tuning is probably required.

I did all my tests with OSC1 only since my guitar tuner would prefer that I guess. But I played a bit after that and it seems ok.

For the pitch bend wheel center position adjustment, all that is required is that when it is in the notch position (center), the pitch of any key is in tune with an external reference (or tuner). For example, you should get an A440 sounding when playing the highest A on the keyboard with the octave switch set to 16'.

I would have though with you but the screw of interest does modify the scaling overthe keyboard. As said before, I only heard it with OSC1 but it seems more that logical to me that all three oscillators were affected the same.

Only remains the use for this trim pot I didn't dare touch.

Thanks for your insight; now I'm back to the initial situation* and I'm heavier in knowledge

(*) for the record: the loosy pitch wheel resulted in some rugging somewhere. To solve that, I just bent the bottom plate aginst which the spring hits. That was all I needed... but I'm glad I learnt!