A typical expression shoe in a pipe organ consists of a rolling tapered contact sheet that closes a circuit with up to ten contact points for the swell shades. When no contact is made, the shades are open (Swell pedal fully engaged). As the organist releases the expression shoe, the enclosure shades begin to close as each contact is made. This simple resistor array circuit translates the action of the expression shoe into a resistance between 10K-ohms (enclosure open) and 2K-ohms (enclosure closed). This allows the integration of a standard expression shoe into a MIDI encoder with out having to add an actual potentiometer or other physical modification.