Lighted Music desk for my Hauptwerk Console

I was able to finish the last major piece of construction on the organ today, the building of the lighted music desk.  I had considered a number of things for lighting, including using some LED structures I had built about 8-9 years ago for garden lighting.  I determined that they weren't bright enough in aggregate, and they got too hot.  While they worked for garden lighting, for this application they aren't so great.

 


I have been monitoring LED shipments into the home stores.  Generally, my opinion is that LEDs will change the nature of architectural lighting fundamentally, so that structures and the way that lighting is done will be very different from what we are used to now.  We're already seeing this in automotive lighting, where industrial design cues are now informed by LED lighting, and would have been impossible with standard incandescent or fluorescent lights.  There's a great "new" product (it isn't really that new, just now relatively inexpensive and available at the home stores) now on the shelves at Home Depot.  After considering a lot of options, I decided to use this.

 I have a plethora of 12V power supplies around, and even if it weren't there, I could pull 20W off of the PC power supply without an issue.  This product has 12 feet at 25W, or about 2W/foot.  I'm using almost 8 feet, 4 feet on the top to light the music and 4 feet on the bottom to light the keyboards.
 

 I used the hardware that was shipped with the old music desk and built a new wooden structure.  While I could have better matched the wood on the rest of the console, at the request of my wife, I was only to use wood I had available in my shop.  So a left over piece of 3/4 birch plywood for the bottom vertical part of the rack and a nice piece of old pine from some ancient bookshelves for the horizontal section sufficed.

 I routed a thin groove on the top and on bottom of the horizontal section and placed the LED strips therein.  Then the strings were wired together using my trusty soldering iron.

Mounting the desk provides a lot more space for music, and I've eliminated the requirement for the overhead lamp.  And so the project is finished.  I'm sure there will be tweaks in positioning of the stop tabs and the like, but I'm pretty pleased with the instrument now.

I had considered building a music desk which incorporated the two touchscreen monitors.  Theoretically, one could have music displayed on the monitors.  However I'm so much more comfortable with paper at this point, and annotations are much easier.