How to make several SimpleTeslas play single song June 18, 2015

It is great to have possibility to play a song on several Tesla Coils at once! Most of melodies are polyphonic and sounds a bit awkward when played in monophonic mode. The harmony of streamers contributes a lot to the show. Possibilities are endless, and now SimpleTesla supports that.

 Download BlueMidi1.0

At first, your PC should have bluetooth support. Most laptops already have it, most PCs don’t. Luckily, you can buy USB dongle to add bluetooth support.

After your bluetooth hardware and drivers are installed, you can establish connection with your coils. To do that, click right mouse button on blue bluetooth icon in tray and select “Add a Device” menu.

Windows will detect your coil. Select it and type your PIN code.  By default PIN is 1234. Repeat this procedure for all of your coils.

Now you need midi loopback driver. I recommend to use loopMidi. This piece of software creates virtual midi wires between bluemidi and your midi playback software. When this driver is installed, just press + to add desired number of midi wires (one per coil).

Now, you are ready to run bluemidi. Select COM port associated with your coil and MIDI port you want to connect your coil to. When COM port is selected, bluemidi will try to connect to your coil and this can take a while. You can test connection with “Bang” button.

Now it’s time to run your MIDI playback software. There are lot of options available, but I prefer Steinberg’s Nuendo.

Create new project by clicking File->New Project->Empty and save it. Click track panel with right mouse button and add new MIDI Track:

Remove MIDI input port and set MIDI out port to your coil’s port.

Now we are ready to play a track. Load MIDI file by clicking File->Import->Midi file, answer “No” to prompt on creating new project from MIDI file. You will see lots of tracks:

Let’s play guitar track. Drag guitar track to MIDI 01 track you created previously. That’s it. Just press space and your coil will play music. You can repeat this steps to add more coils.

This guide may seem to be complicated but once you’ll have everything set up, it will be very easy to play another song.

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