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Contrabombarde

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Posts posted by Contrabombarde

  1. The"box" is at its simplest merely a MIDI to USB converter cable such as Roland/Edirol UM1 costing around £20. A cheap laptop should allow you to play Grand Orgue or j-organ freeware or Hauptwerk if you want to pay for better sound. Plug keyboard into laptop via MIDI to USB adaptor, configure the software and away you go. For a multikeyboard professional setup you would want something fancier though.

    I once literally had to do it on the fly when our church's electronic organ conked out in the afternoon of the Nine Lessons and Carols, installing HW onto a spare laptop and plugging the church's sound system into the laptop headphone socket.. Everyone comnented on how much better the organ sounded tgan usual!

  2. On 24/11/2020 at 16:33, innate said:

    Can anyone that has a home organ tell me how high the lowest manual is from the floor? Many thanks.

    Off the floor can be whatever you want and depends on the thickness or height of the pedalboard - by definition a straight flat will be lower than the edges of a concave radiating.

    I assume you meant between top of middle D on lowest keyboard to top of middle D on pedalboard (middle D of the one being directly over middle D of the other).

    Some of the history books give a figure of 29 1/2 inches which even with my short legs feels way too crunched up. I settled for 30 inches or 76cm. But the beauty of designing and building your own organ is that you can design it around your body. I sat at and measured a dozen four manual consoles before building my own, at which point I had a pretty good idea of what I would find comfortable. The result is that my Fatar manuals are slightly closer together both in height and front to back than they were designed to be, and they are all parallel rather than sloping away from me. That made fitting thumb pistons slightly tricker (probably the hardest part of any DIY organ console build!) but means that even with my short arms I can reach and play the Solo with great ease and comfort.

    It would be fascinating to know more about the height of the first organist of the magnificent Binns at St Mary's Shrewsbury. You virtually need stilts to play it - I normally play in socks but can't reach the pedals unless I wear thick soled shoes. When I measured the console the gap to the Choir was over 33 inches!

  3. I expect most of us could only dream at the thought of a home practice pipe organ. I know very few people who have done that and I do wonder about the logistics - not just the upfront cost (especially if new) but the cost of transporting and assembly if you every moved house, not to mention whether you would need to strengthen your floor to take the weight, or soundproof the house to avoid upsetting your neighbours. Then of course there's the maintenance. Small redundant church organs are quite plentiful - for instance on the BIOS website - but tend to be much taller than the typical living room so unless you already live in a converted church they probably wouldn't suit your needs even if it was being given away.

    Two (or even three) manual and pedal harmoniums can be very grand affairs and occasionally come up for sale but there must be a vanishingly small number of people who can advise on or repair them. And that's aside from the difficulty of getting through the average door (tip - always measure your doorframe at multiple points - I took delivery of my first home electronic organ and the frame was a couple of mm narrower in the middle than at the top or bottom which was the difference between getting it in the house and leaving it outside!) I guess at the time they were built and electronic organs didn't exist, they were for professional organists what an electronic organ is now, if you can't afford a pipe organ.

    As this is a forum for the pipe organ discussion of instruments that generate their sound electronically is understandably frowned upon. However, I wouldn't discount them for domestic use given they have value as a teaching and practice instrument. I had a student who in his mid teens built his own three manual virtual organ (second hand pedalboard, keyboards surgically excised from 61 note controller keyboards). He's now at university doing organ performance studies so it doesn't seem to have harmed him in any way. I teach at my home on my own four manual, self built Hauptwerk console, which again uses a second hand bench and pedals plus Fatar keyboards (which are of much higher quality than the typical electronic "organ"). Both he and I learnt a great deal about organ design by having to think through console ergonomics, placement of manuals, pedals, pistons, music desk etc.

    When learning a new piece of music I can practice on the sound of an organ of the period the music was written for which affords a much better understanding from the start of the effect the composer would have been expecting. For home practice and indeed to an extent for teaching, I have come to think that the virtual pipe organ (VPO) route is well worth exploring. Assuming you already have a computer (ideally with a touch sensitive screen), a basic three manual console could be built for only a few hundred pounds, or you could use a second hand console to generate MIDI which would control the computer program. Hauptwerk does have a licence cost but there are a number of free alternatives including j-organ and Grande orgue which have a smaller (and arguably somewhat lower sound quality) range of sample sets.

     

  4. Does anyone know of an equivalent Android facial recognition app that could turn pages?

    I've completely moved away from paper scores now. For recitals I use a 13 inch Hanspree tablet and Bluetooth foot pedal page turner (around £50 on Amazon) that is just beautiful. It works flawlessly and allows my page turner to click from a couple of metres away forwards or backwards. Its battery lasts around 50 hours of playtime before needing a recharge. It avoids the need to physically touch the screen, which very rarely can result in in disaster if you accidentally swipe the piece away or cause it to resize.

    I seem to recall that a "Tablet page turn" piston was added to the Kings College Cambridge console during its most recent rebuild.

    At home my (Hauptwerk) organ has a 26 inch central monitor which I use as a music desk, mounted behind a thin protective Perspex screen for the rare occasions that I still use sheet music. Mostly I display two page fullscreen music pdfs, mostly from IMSLP, using Foxit (which I like because it can be set to open by default to fullscreen mode and is highly customisable as well as being freeware). I have a thumb piston and a duplicate toe piston for page advance, and one of each for page back. It is very easy to annotate pdf documents with registrations, fingerings and pedalings.

    Here's the really clever thing. If I print the music as a pdf file duplicating each page, when I open the score and click the page advance, each double page spread moves over by one page so the right hand page becomes the new left hand page, and the next page goes onto the right. Tricky pageturns become a thing of the past, difficult passages that spill over a page simply cross over onto the facing page. True it means I have to advance the page turn every page rather than every two pages, but when practising difficult passages it completely overcomes the difficulty of inconvenient page turns. And all at the cost of an extra megabyte or so of hard drive space.

    A recent Klais organ was notable for having touchscreen monitors as the stop jambs, but I would suggest that a very sensible addition to consider adding to any new pipe (or digital) organ console design should be a large monitor in place of or behind the music desk like my example below.

    Salisbury2.jpg

  5. My only experience with the Manchester Bridgewater Marcussen was in a stand off between Wayne Marshall and a full orchestra playing the Jongen Symphonie Concertante. I certainly didn't get the impression the organ was struggling to keep its head above water, despite the organ seemingly having a reputation for being on the softer side. I preferred it to the Birmingham Klais sound which is very confident but I find a little brash.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  6. There have been many invaluable discussions over the nearly fifteen years that I have been a regular contributor. I don't know how feasible it is to "lift and shift" the contents across to another (preferably free) website or to to merge them with an existing site (I am also on Organ Matters and contribute, albeit less frequently though mostly because this forum seems to be busier). I would personally be willing to pay a contribution for one off costs and if a Mod wants to gather interest in members I am happy to be approached.

    It would be a travesty to lose the knowledge shared over the years here; would BIOS or RCO have any interest in archiving the material and making it freely searchable, even if we contributors move over to another existing website such as those mentioned?

    A decision may need to be taken quickly and without warning; the sooner we can archive existing content the better.

    Once again I would like to thank John Mander for the foresight in setting this wonderful discussion medium up in the first place.

  7. I would have to echo my personal sadness here too. I doubt I will ever be counted amongst the rare numbers of people privileged enough to be able to sign the contract for a new or even rebuilt or restored pipe organ, much of my early wonder at the instrument came about through exposure to the work of Manders, including the organs of Adlington Hall, St Paul's Cathedral and Birmingham Town Hall. I used to joke that I hoped someone had kept the blueprints for St Ignatius Loyola since the first thing I would do if I ever won the Euromillions would be to order an exact copy for myself. I hope and expect the legacy of Manders will be around for a few hundred years yet, just as some of the organs they have restored are centuries old. They, and those who preceded them have only been their custodians for a few blinks of an eye in those organs' lifetimes.

    We are at a rare moment of global crisis with all sorts of hidden consequences we could not have envisaged only six months ago. At present there is no end date in sight for restarting church worship and concerts in the way we were used to, and with many of the institutions that are the custodians of pipe organs facing financial ruin through the loss of income, the next few months, possibly the next few years could be perilous times for some of the businesses who work with them and supply them. My heart goes out to those who are being badly affected while we battle what is proving to be probably the most serious global health crisis for over a century. And I do wonder whether there is any more we as organists and organ lovers could do to support one another and especially to support those in the professional organ playing and organ building trades whose lives and livelihoods have been turned upside down as a result of the pandemic.

     

  8. In view of the Government's announcement today that with immediate effect people are urged to wear face coverings in all enclosed spaces including churches, and that this will become mandatory from next weekend, it's good to see that one organ is already taking this seriously.

    rdkMroDW.jpg

    (Disclaimer - no-one is seriously recommending the use of masks on organ pipes as protection against coronavirus but I couldn't resist sharing the image. COVID-19 is a serious global health problem that we all need to work together and support one another on.)

  9. Some photographs of the damage from the Diocesan website here.

    Choir organ seems intact minus what appears to have been its detached console:
    20200718_101903.jpg

    Remains of main organ:
    20200718_101735.jpg

    Authorities said to be investigating arson as fires broke out in three separate locations including both organs and a church volunteer who was responsible for locking up is reportedly being investigated.

  10. Guidance in England issued this week is perhaps more helpful here:

    "You are advised only to play musical instruments that are not blown into. Organs can be played for faith practices, as well as general maintenance, but should be cleaned thoroughly before and after use."

    The emphasis being a reminder that surfaces that are touched by potentially contaminated hands can lead to others becoming infected. Organs are of course complicated in that respect and whoever advised them to be thoroughly cleaned before and after use must appreciate that means all keys, stops (including the back of each drawstop up to the shank), pistons, blower switch and even the music desk hooks. Alternatively at least wait three days before anyone else plays, though we don't know for certain how long the virus lasts on hard surfaces. And what do organ builders recommend to clean and disinfect surfaces with?

    Lest this seem paranoid overkill there was recently reported the case of a women who flew back from the USA to her home in China took a lift on a single occasion to get to her apartment to go into quarantine and stayed there for her period of quarantine, totally symptom free. As more and more people in the apartment block fell ill suspicion fell on her and her movements and over seventy people were eventually found to have caught coronavirus just through her one use of that lift.

    There is growing concern that the coronavirus may linger suspended in air rather than just in cough droplets. Singing, shouting and playing wind instruments are therefore cautioned against, and indeed there have been some serious outbreaks in church choirs around the world due to the forced expiration of virus-laden air amongst people in close proximity to one another. The rules banning choirs and church singing at present are certainly based on scientific facts around increased risk. This also explains the increasing focus on wearing face coverings in enclosed spaces since as the evidence for the virus being airborne  grows, the case for searing something that interrupts airborne transmission becomes more compelling.

    Moving and disturbing air has been advised against specifically in health and care settings. Even on hot days hospitals and care homes should not be using fans because of the risk of stirring up air and potentially transmitting the coronavirus. I wonder therefore if that is what is driving the Welsh advice since the organ blower is effectively a giant fan with theoretical potential to blow air around the building. However that has to be viewed in context; poorly ventilated crowded indoor spaces create the conditions for coronavirus to be transmitted. Health and Safety Executive guidance reiterates the advice that buildings need to be well ventilated using for example ceiling fans, and stagnant air should be avoided to reduce the risk of transmission of coronavirus. An organ blower might filter the air as it comes into the air intake, and might source the air from outside the church. How many litres of air does an organ blower shift per minute?

    This of course is where a sensible risk assessment is required. Organs do contain fans that move air. But they are often  a long way from congregations and may even be halfway up the wall of a church on a gallery somewhere. Congregations often include elderly people who are particularly susceptible to the virus. Fortunately in most areas of the UK the number of new cases is currently going down - whether that will continue or whether we will see another big increase during the winter is anybody's guess right now though. And if the risk of there being someone in the congregation who is unknowingly infected, but they are self-distancing from everyone else and not singing, there is little prospect of the organ spreading their infection. On the basis of our current understanding (which is changing all the time) therefore I would be more concerned about ensuring that the keys and other touchpoints of the console were clean and not liable to transmit virus from an asymptomatic organist to another player; the likelihood of an infected person being in church and sitting right next to the blower air intake of the typical church organ is probably pretty low. However I would not want to attend any church service in a densely packed building with a low ceiling and poor ventilation right now and if such a church has an organ right next to the congregation I wouldn't want to categorically dismiss the remote possibility it could contribute to spread of virus via the air it disturbed if members of the congregation were carrying it. I would be astonished however if the wind from a pipe organ ever does get implicated in the spread of coronavirus.

    So where does this leave us? Above all we must follow sensible precautions around social distancing, handwashing or decontamination on entry to a church building, we should consider the possibility of contamination on touchpoints on the organ console depending on how often it is played and by whom; and we should strictly not going anywhere if we have symptoms of new cough, fever, change of taste or smell - in other words the possibility of a COVID-19 infection. These measures are both to protect others as well as to be protected from others. And worth remembering that if we do have a significant rise in cases in an area we amy all be required to go back to a stricter lockdown in which case noone will be going into the church for a while in which case all the above is moot.

  11. Some good news at last - Government guidance issued last Friday now states that organists are now permitted to go into churches to practice the organ (provided we maintain appropriate social distancing and comply with all the other precautions). Obviously that means no page turners or registrants and still no lessons unless taught remotely via Zoom or Skype etc. Furthermore it has to be assumed that hard surfaces such as keys, stops and pistons could potentially be contaminated by someone who was playing whilst infectious,  and remain so for possibly 72 hours. So if other people are hoping to play later in the week, a safe way needs to be established to decontaminate (bleach is probably not going to do wood or ivory much good, but wiping with dilute household detergent should be a reasonable compromise). We are in uncharted territory with this pandemic and a very careful and gradual release from lockdown is imperative to minimise the risk of rebounds.

    There is growing evidence that singing or shouting is an effective way of transmitting the virus to other people, so I'm afraid it looks like choirs will remain silent or practice "virtually" for some while to come.

     

    From this week's guidance:

    4. Guidance for individual prayer within a place of worship

    Principles
    ...
    Activities such as singing and/or playing instruments should be avoided, with the exception of organists who are able to use buildings for practice with appropriate social distancing.

  12. Not sure about the logic of having a swimming pool on the roof but there is certainly precedent for baptismal pools at ground level.

    I once got into a spot of bother at a large evangelical Anglican church where I'd been asked to accompany a service as the regular organist was away that Sunday. Arriving moments before the start of the service due to delays on the Underground I was confronted by a large organ at the front of the church and lots of wires, plugs, sockets and switches in the vicinity of the organ but no obvious blower switch. By this point the vicar had come to the front of the church and had begun to announce the opening hymn. I started to panic. Flicking every switch and socked I could see, I eventually noticed the blower switch hidden away in one corner of the console. The organ burst into life and I saved the day, though I couldn't help wonder why the thing sounded so noisy when I wasn't playing.

    Halfway through the service a kindly churchwarden came alongside me. "I don't suppose you would have any idea why the baptimsal pool pump is running when the pool is empty, do you?" he enquired.

  13. Oh do be more ambitious! Three manuals? Check. 16 foot pedal? Check. May I present this example:

    https://www.npor.org.uk/NPORView.html?RI=N01165

    I played it many moons ago on an organ crawl and most impressive it was, not least for being able to pack an eight stop three manual into a case seemingly no bigger than many two manual 8482 practice instruments.

    Or even more ambitious, https://www.npor.org.uk/NPORView.html?RI=N04526

    More ambitious still, and with a resultant 32 foot in the pedals, https://www.npor.org.uk/NPORView.html?RI=N04594#PhotoSection

  14. Thanks for the Messian clip - that surely has to be one of the finest performances of La Nativite ever made, and not even on an organ! Hearing Dieu parmi nous played so convincingly on an accordian is beyond phenomenal.

  15. Interesting question. Here's the original case:

    https://www.orgelbau-krawinkel.com/organ-projects/organ-relocation/organ-st-bartholomaeus-gackenbach.php

    This is what it looks like after it was relocated from the UK to Germany and converted into a four manual instrument:

    http://orgel-gackenbach.de/die_orgeln/

    That case has clearly been put on steroids but doesn't look big enough for three 32 foot stops. But no mention of "cheating" on the disposition list:

    https://www.orgelbau-krawinkel.com/organ-projects/organ-relocation/organ-st-bartholomaeus-gackenbach.php

    The church also boasts a two manual Cavaille-Coll style instrument on its west balcony - lucky them!

     

  16. Please correct me if I am uninformed but I thought that the livestreaming offered by Youtube and Facebook etc is essentially one way and hence not interactive? If you are broadcasting to several hundred people from a single location that's entirely appropriate. Our church service this morning consisted of about fifty families all watching one another on our laptop screens (over 100 people "attending") with the vicar having the ability to put the words of the hymns and the readings on everyone's screen to the side of the many user "windows" (for want of a better description). Although Zoom allows the "meeting organiser" to mute or unmute everyone else, in practice he didn't and it was up to individuals to mute themselves if not actively contributing because at various points in the service different people would read, I would accompany hymns, and all from our various living rooms. From the point of view of needing to conduct a service in which different people contribute from a variety of locations as opposed to being broadcast entirely from one location it met our needs very well; it would just be even better if we could improve the audio quality of live music.

    Whilst we've never worshipped in this way before as a church family, it was a profound experience.

     

  17. My church must be one of many to be attempting its first livestreamed service tomorrow morning and I will be accompanying hymns from the relative safety of my living room. We are using the free version of Zoom with a Windows 10 laptop and I did a test run this morning with the vicar. I have a grand piano and organ in the living room; although the organ is digital and runs Hauptwerk I see no reason why it shouldn't sound any different to a pipe organ when recorded with a simple microphone and livestreamed.

    In the practice run this morning the piano worked fine but the organ apparently kept cutting in and out and was unusable. I later tried recording both instruments using the Windows video camera feature and found something probably similar - despite playing on a constant registration the sound kept dipping in and out.

    I have adjusted the Zoom audio settings with every available combination and level of filtering background noise etc including disabling filters altogether. However I cannot find any way of 1having constant audio levels when playing the organ. Yet the piano sounds fine and it looks like the hymns will have to be on that tomorrow instead. I have tried both the built in microphone and an external USB microphone but not found any improvement.

    If anyone can suggest how to make organ music more acceptable in Zoom I've love to know what you are doing differently.

     

  18. OK in fairness, the organ was controlled by two stop-tab consoles, one five manuals, the other seven. The five manual is currently disconnected and was an exhibit in the lobby when I visited a few years ago. My understanding from what was described (correct me if I'm wrong) was that the five manual was intended to be completely "straight" and reflected the entirety of the organ without duplication or transmission through extension, whereas the seven manual was the whole shebang. Not sure what the point of extension is in such an organ, but with over 30,000 pipes under its control the five manual console without the extensions is still pretty big as organs go!

  19. On 25/02/2020 at 13:02, Niccolo Morandi said:

    The question about when is an organ to big is something that has interested me for a long time and in places like America I feel that there does seem to be a bit of an obsession for Melbourne town hall size instruments. A couple of examples that spring to mind is an Austin organ located at St. Lutheran Church in Hanover Pennsylvania, and the Ruffatti organ at Coral Ridge Presbyterian church in Fort Lauderdale Florida.

    Looking at the specification of the Austin organ of St Lutheran I must confess that I do wonder if it is really necessary for an organ to have over 200 ranks. While with the organ at Coral Ridge I am curious as to what the reason was behind adding digital stops to such a massive instrument was.

    As for my opinion of both the Wanamaker and Midmer Losh organs I do feel that yes I don't think it is necessary for these organs to be as big as they are but I do still appreciate both these instruments. I feel that they were both intended to hold the title of being the largest organs or musical instruments in the world but at the same time I think care was still taken to make them more than just show piece.

    Whilst we're on the subject of 32 foot stops, the Austin has over 14,000 pipes, yet its only non-digital 32 rank is a (presumably) stopped Bourdon! It has four digital 32 foot flues and a 32 foot digital reed. You'd have thought it they wanted a proper 32 foot sound they could have swapped a few smaller ranks for 32 foot length pipes surely?

    As for Wanamaker and Atlantic City, I believe there was some friendly rivalry and of course they are only about 50 miles apart. Presumably this is long past as many of the team who look after the Wanamaker organ are also leading the Atlantic City restoration. Tonally they had quite different inspirations - Dupre amongst others advised the Wanamaker which is a much more "symphonic" instrument, whilst Senator Richards took a surprisingly classical inspiration for his choruses. If I had to choose one to play all day I think it would have to be the Wanamaker which just seems and sounds much more musical, but I'm glad the Atlantic City organ exists even if it is something of an organic monument to biting off more than one could reasonably chew. Senator Richards had huge problems just getting builders to tender for it - some of those who did respond deliberately put in impossibly high quotes as they didn't want the reputational risk of being involved in the project, and for a while he pursued Willis III fresh from his Liverpool Cathedral magnum opus, but to no avail. The range of pipework and materials - including some pipes built of papier maché - and the huge dynamic range that comes from such a wide range of wind pressures, the challenge of designing a console with seven reachable manuals, the world's loudest and longest organ pipes...it's a veritable textbook of organ building all right, just not one that's readily transferable to more modest buildings.

  20. On 11/02/2020 at 05:31, Niccolo Morandi said:

    I just remembered a couple of videos of the Boardwalk organ which I thought would be worth sharing which are of the 32' principle and the 64' Diaphone.

     

     

    Thanks for the link. I'm fortunate enough to have actually heard that pipe speak in the flesh (and seen it in the remarkably informative and popular tour inside the Atlantic City organ) and can best describe it as the sound I would expect a helicopter would make if one was landing in the hall. Or several helicopters, as the hall is big enough for an entire squadron to fly around it.

     

    It was heartening to read in the latest Organist's Review of the progress being made to restore it to full working order, it truly is a remarkable beast. I couldn't help but feel when I heard it four years ago that it was rather overblown and overscaled, though out of necessity given the size of the room. That might just have been the registrations available and working at the time. As it's a short drive from there to Philadelphia I also heard the Wanamaker in concert and of the two I'd take that in a heartbeat with its luscious strings and delicate beauty. The store has fallen on hard times over the years and whilst the central hall is several floors high, all but the lowest of the galleries are glazed in as most of the building is now offices rather than a giant department store. This must surely have changed the sound considerably (and possibly for the better I wonder - can anyone recall how it sounded when it played throughout all floors)?

  21. Considering the space and expense of the bottom octave of an Open Wood 32 I'm surprised this strategy hasn't been more widely adopted. Whilst the scaling of the two, three or however many more notes that share the same pipe would be increasingly wide as you go up the octave, is that effect any worse than the difference in scale that comes from playing middle C or treble C on an orchestral flute say? After all the flute is effectively a single pipe with a large number of valves!

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