who here loves playing or listening to organs?

Post Reply New Topic

Fellow organ lovers, rejoice.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TwfsHgA6U[/youtube]

lol That was funny!

I'm a step closer to possible starting on an organ project. I decided to have a little fun today and make ride my bicycle to the church. While I was there I sampled the Yamaha drum kit in the youth room, after which I very quickly sampled our 3-octave handbell set. The handbells are now on my Synclavier, so I imagine the organ will be next on my list. The chapel organ is an old Allen, which has all the "standard" sounds PLUS computer "punch-cards" for additional stops. That one will be easier to get.

The REAL prize, though, is our main sanctuary pipe organ. I JUST discovered that the console has MIDI installed, which is cool because I can hook my laptop up to it, put it on "autopilot," and crawl around the organ room with a portable recorder and a microphone. That's really a two-man job, which is why I'm saving it for last.

since many theatrical wurlitzers doing duty in pizza palaces have MIDI installations, maybe you could make your sanctuary organ sound something more close to a wurlitzer? you might even be able to add percussion sounds to it. i always preferred the acoustics in church to the sounds of the pizza palace [too much ambient noise] or most old movie theatres [too damped]- churches, for the most part, have a nice ambient liveness that really makes an organ come alive.

Well, yeah. That's something our music minister has in mind, actually. But to be honest, I find that approach to be too "contrived"-sounding. For example, right now I'm at a worship leadership/music conference and the main auditorium has one of the BIG Allens that has the MIDI option. It's very cool, but the sounds are very GM. At our church, we do have a Korg T1 synth, which is a very cool synth following in the footsteps of the M1 and has some very interesting potential if it's Midi'd up to the organ. What I would rather do is get an old sampler like an Akai S2000 (which I happen to own) or an EMU ESI32 or some such and load, like, the drum kit in the youth room on it. We also have some timpani on loan from a local school, so that could also go on the sampler and would sound MUCH more like a theater-organ than cheesy, lo-fi, cheap-sounding timbres of other synths, ESPECIALLY the GM ones.

I'm just picky like that. I have a real passion for sound design! I'd love nothing more than to hold a condenser mic right against a pipe and get that first, good "chiff" blast of air right on the diaphragm, play it into the Synclav, and then REsample it to NNXT. Ah, if only summer could last forever!! ! But hey, I do have that 3-octave handbell set now, so it would be really cool to MIDI up the organ to the handbells!! ! I think the chimes on our organ have fallen prey to rats, so it would be a nice substitute...

good luck in finding parts for it. my local organ repair place had several forlorn hammonds in such a fix.

I absolutely adore the Leslie Organ amps. They have a horn driver fitted to a belt system that spins faster or slower to create the rotary Doppler effect. So really any keyboard that creates an organ sound played through that amp is fine with me. I'm just amazed at such tech.

You need to skip the video to about 2:30 to see it work.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5azHLwUmZ0[/youtube]

in BS&T's song "spinning wheel," the engineers put vocalist david clayton-thomas' voice through a leslie, for part of the song.

the leslie speaker was the first artificial means to simulate the chorusing of organ pipes.

mr. hammond really was non-plussed by the leslie speaker and resisted as long as possible its pairing with his organs.

fats waller was an early adopter of the hammond tonewheel organ, having one installed in his new jersey home in the late 30s.
jesse crawford was the first artist hammond hired to plug its organs, and by crawford's own admission hammond kept him in groceries for many years. however, at his many field demonstrations of the hammond organ, many in the audience clamored for crawford to "play the big one [pipe organ]!"

for those of us who like organ recordings, it seems nowadays that the only places to find a lot of 'em are in the used record bins, like in goodwill or such. a lot of used record places are going belly-up and just dumping their remaindered stock either in the goodwill stores or in the landfills. 'tis a pity.

i was combing through a big garbage pile in the woods behind my tincan, when i found records moldering in the damp and grime. very sad. organ records.

I was just listening to one... I think. Either that, or a synth or mellotron.

There isn't really any instrument I don't like listening to, so yeah I like organs. I don't have many organ recordings in specific, but I like it's use in rock. I'm just now trying to figure out the different types of organs (and synths).

i know next to nothing about synths, but of organs i can tell you there are 3 basic categories-

*]"home" electronic organs, even though many are used in professional music venues. the hammond is the most common of these organs used in public. then there are the baldwins and conns and thomases and schobers and such. fats waller was one of the first people to buy a hammond for personal home use. george wright used a conn 650 theatre [home electronic] organ as a practice organ.

*liturgical pipe organs used in church or classical music venues, also called clasical organs.

*theatrical pipe organs, like what used to be common in old palace-style movie theatres, which were originally used to provide musical accompaniment to silent movies. think Wurlitzer- these organs differ from liturgical organs in that they use stop tabs rather than draw knobs, which are color-coded for diferent families of pipe and sound effect. theatrical organs also have chromatic percussions [like xylophones and glockenspiels] and non-chromatic percussions [drums, cymbals etc.] and "toy counter" sound effects such as bird whistles, thunder, sirens, ah-ooga horns, etc.] originally used to emulate on-screen action of the silent movie. theatre organs also use much higher levels of wind chest pressure, for greater volume and expression.

click this link for more info on organs-
wiki organ article

the interesting thing about mellotrons is that they were the original sampling keyboards, in that various tape loops inside the unit contained actual instrument sounds [such as flutes or horns] which were keyed by the player in emulation of the actual instrument.

Is the large organ at the Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar, CA. You can see it in this video, around 3 minutes in (its the one playing Phantom of the Opera)...You can't really see all of its internals, but the organ itself takes up the entire side of the 3 or 4 story building its housed in.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i18p6m72mU[/youtube]