What do you do when a regular Ensoniq Mirage just doesn't fit in with your stylish decore? Why turn it into a coffee table, of course. Hey, it can also be used as a piano bench too. Seriously though, this is the story of two Ensoniq Mirage keyboards that belonged to me. One worked perfectly fine, the other had a bad chip and couldn't read the keyboard properly anymore. So for the longest time the one that worked fine pulled duty as my MIDI controller keyboard and the other one stood on it's end and basically became a great big sampler module. Then one day the flood waters came. My geekroom studio is down in my basement, right below the kitchen. One day the kitchen plumbing developed a leak and water came pouring down into the basement right ontop of my keyboards. Foolishly none of my keyboards were covered. I now leave a clear plastic shower curtain covering them whenever they're not in use but it was a lesson hard learned because the water, although sparing all my other gear, trashed my fully functional Mirage. Everything works fine on it except it won't respond to MIDI signals anymore. Well two semi-functional Mirage keyboards were put together to make one fully functional Mirage keyboard and life continued on as usual. Shortly after the incident I bought myself an Edirol MIDI controller keyboard. I'd been wanting to get a proper controller for quite some time anyways. So with the Edirol taking over MIDI controller duties in the geekroom I didn't need a full keyboard Mirage anymore. Originally I had planned to buy a rack box and stick the guts of both Mirages into rack mount cases. Unfortunately the motherboard of the keyboard Mirage models is too damned big to fit in a rackmount case. No problem, I'll just build my own case to put it in, it'll still be smaller than the full keyboard version and space is of a premium in my geekroom. So I took apart the fully functional Mirage and used parts of it to fix the then fully dead Mirage so that it could at least be played live from the keyboard this way I can at least use it as a live instrument. Granted Ensoniq Mirages are miserable instruments to tour with. You're constantly opening them up to reseat the curtis analogue filters. When I used to gig with my Mirage I'd just leave the top of it unscrewed and the keyboard held in with heavy duty velcro. Then the first thing I'd do when I got to the gig was flip open the top, lift up the keyboard, and push down on all the socketed chips. Once that was done it'd be no problems. Anyways, back to my story. So like I said, I yanked parts to make one playable instrument and the other instrument became a MIDI module. I hacked the machine apart into four pieces, motherboard section, powersupply section, disk drive section, and control panel then I built a wooden case to hold it all together. As a lark I added mounts for screw on legs to the bottom of the case. I'm not going to use it as a table, at least not right now. It'll sit in my keyboard rig behind the Edirol like this: The wood for this case is actually these 100 year old cedar planks that have been sitting in my attic. I've still got a bunch of them left. They're true-wood 1"x6" cedar and used to be the floor joists for the original tongue and groove floor up there. The attic floor was replaced some time ago with newer wood but the old wood was just left up there. I was pretty pissed off when I moved into the house and saw that mess sitting up in my attic but now it's a blessing because even though most of the wood was trash a good deal of it was salvagable. I never throw away wood as long as there's a chance it could be used for something still. It's in pretty rough shape but when the nails are pulled and it's sanded down and refinished it has a nice rustic antique look to it. It's great for slap-together projects like this. Here's another shot of it in the rig, a little closer. You can see my Moog MG-1 above it. My next project for the Mirages will be to see if I can't get the non-MIDI responsive one working again. I think it might be the opto-isolator that's blown. They're cheap enough that I'll just go and buy one and see if it does the trick. I hope it's not one of the microcontrollers because then I'm pretty much screwed unless somebody else is getting rid of a busted Mirage (which is how I got this one on the first place). After that I want to build real-time controls for the analogue filters on the Mirage. It shouldn't be too difficult a hack. I think what I might do is pull the filters out and build them into modular boxes, then I can take the control feeds from the Mirage and plug them into the modules and have the Mirage control the filters or I can plug an external envelope generator or real-time control into the filters and have it control them.