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My chamber organ
pwhodges:
A couple of weekends ago my choir gave a concert which required a chamber organ. As we were performing at "baroque" pitch (meaning about a semitone below modern pitch, though actually it varied lots in different places) the fine organ in the church wouldn't do. Hiring a chamber organ at low pitch looked expensive, so I built one using a sampler program specifically for pipe organs, called Hauptwerk, which can transpose the samples to any desired pitch. Here it is in use in Oxford during the rehearsal:
A Dell laptop and MOTU Traveler interface are under the music stand, and a snake takes the signals to an eight-channel volume control on top of three Quad 405 amplifiers stacked behind the four ex-BBC LS5/9 speakers (which were tilted up for the concert). Organ samplers gain realism when the sounds for different pipes are divided among as many speakers as practical, which is why I used four. You can also just see two black speakers, also LS5/9s, behind the choir which had a mono feed to help the singers hear. Rather than give the laptop extra work making the mono mix, I sent the four speaker feeds to ADAT outputs, and looped these back into the ADAT inputs (digital, so no loss); then I used the interface's CueMix program (which operates in the box) to feed the analogue outputs - four with one to one speaker channels, and two with the mono mix of all four channels (and also the last two with a stereo feed for headphone listening while setting up). The sample set used was the positive division of a very old Czech organ in Smecno, near Prague. It was voiced bright in Hauptwerk to compensate for the somewhat unsuitable speakers (they don't have as much treble dispersion as would be ideal in this usage), and tuned down to A=415. The conductor chose it decisively in comparison with several alternatives. It turned out that the organist has a four-manual Hauptwerk system at home, so he wasn't worried about using a substitute for a pipe organ, which had concerned me. Those to whom I've spoken were pleased with the result.
Some more photos (taken at home):
With the top moved across while setting up:
Stop selection buttons, interface, and computer:
Wiring of stop selection button switches and LEDs to one of the MIDI boards, which I get from a vendor in Poland:
Paul
Lupercal:
If you hadn't have told us where those people in the picture were from...I would've guessed Oxford anyway!
But wow, yeah that is a lot of work. I mean I wish I knew what half of it meant but seriously, that is some ingenuity right there. I'm sure the choir are pleased to have you with them!
I'm curious to know how you came across the program specifically built for pipe organs...
pwhodges:
Well, I already have this three manual and pedal organ console arrangement in my study... Photos in a day or two, perhaps.
I can't recall how I came across Hauptwerk, but it was/is written by an Englishman in Birmingham. I've had a copy since the beta for v1 about eight years ago (it's now at v4). It's used both for practice organs, and as a way of archiving the sound of historic organs. I have sample sets of Salisbury and Hereford Cathedral organs, a couple of baroque French organs, several Czech and Hungarian organs (including one which has samples of before and after a recent restoration); also several harpsichords and a steam calliope!
Some reasons a special sampler is required are:
(1) Polyphony - for a large organ recorded with a long acoustic and played fast, polyphony levels of around 10,000 may easily be required. You can't achieve this streaming off disk - all the samples need to be in memory. To play the largest available sample sets requires at least 32GB of memory and eight or twelve cores! My home machine has 16GB and a four-core Xeon which handles polyphony of about 5,000.
(2) Wind effects - the program models the effect that playing one pipe has on the wind supply to another... I'll leave it at that. Also the tonal effects of swell shutters and tremulants are accurately modelled.
(3) Retuning - the samples are resampled in real time (remember that polyphony?) to enable different temperaments and pitches to be applied to the original samples.
Melodic:
dude, fucking hero work
pwhodges:
OK, so here's my home console. The photos are nine months old, but nothing has changed since then except that the wood has been stained. I have also acquired buttons to go between the manuals and touch screens to display and control the stops - but these are still in their packing.
General views:
Here are the pedals, and swell pedals (which can be mounted in two positions):
The keyboards hinge open to get at the contacts and wiring for maintenance:
The top keyboard has a wire to each key:
Whereas the others have 8x8 diode-matrix wiring:
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