Some time ago, we got an interesting request from one of our long-time Power Music users.  Kevin Bowyer is a world famous organist and now an author with six novels under his belt (find out more). He uses Power Music on a number of organs and turned the pages by tapping the touchscreen. He recently has got an impressive new 4 manual organ installed in his house.

His problem is that his arms are too short!!

The distance to the touchscreen is 35 inches so he was looking for an alternative page turner – obviously not a foot pedal as his feet are very busy on the organ pedals!

So after a bit of research we have found a company that produces a USB button which works perfectly with Power Music and hundreds of other apps.

Watch a video about the USB button:

The USB button is fully programmable.  You can store from a single keystroke to 48 characters at a time.

For use with Power Music page turning, simply program it with “Page Down”. If you had two buttons you could program the other with “Page Up” to turn back the pages.  Other uses in Power Music would be to start an audio/backing track – program the button with “A” and when in fullscreen mode press the button to start the track. Or, program it with “M” or “T” and it starts the metronome when pressed. You could even program it with “Right Cursor (arrow)” to move to the next song in a playlist. All these will work in conjunction with any foot pedal for page turning.  I am sure there are other shortcuts you could use!

For use in other apps the possibilities are endless.  Logging into websites, custom macros for frequently used actions etc…

The colours are also programmable or you could just turn off the LED light.  There is one colour for “not pressed” and another for “pressed”.  Different function could be coded with different colours.

You can use as many of them on your PC as you have USB ports and if you want you can plug them into a USB hub.

The USB button in use on Kevin’s new four manual organ:

All-in-all a fascinating little device with so many possible uses!

You can buy them now, on the Power Music Store

If you have any questions or ideas for the USB button, post them in the Comment section.