Hello MW! Thanks for posting this link. I enjoyed greatly reading about eh Father Willis organ. It seems to be a very clever instrument. The organ I played only had a coupler pedal for pedal to the manual. What else is there to do? :-) But I found if you couple them - only tried it once for fun -, that the respective keys on the manual get depressed as well as the pedal. Glad you liked the pieces. I'll try to be better next year. I was a loowed to keep the keys for the church and the organ, so maybe I can record some more organ over they year, if I get to borrough my friend's Zoom again. :-) Kindly yours Julien -------- Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles) ======== FIND MY WEB-PROJECT AT: ======== http://ltsb.sourceforge.net the Linux TextBased Studio guide ======= AND MY PERSONAL PAGES AT: ======= http://www.juliencoder.de

On 27/12/10 14:04, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: Agreed. The organ I learnt on is a 1908 English model, with two manuals and around 20 stops. With all stops, great- coupler, swell-great coupler, and swell-great octave coupler engaged, it was almost too stiff to play a large chord. By the end of a hymn, my forearms would be burning. A quick calculation shows that a large final chord might engage over 200 pipes. The organ was fully mechanical, with the keys pulling strings that flowed over a series of pulleys to work the valves that opened the pipes. This action was supposed to be balanced with counterweights to make it light, but the weights hadn't been adjusted for a long time. The age of the organ meant that the strings, pulleys and wooden joints were stiffer than they once were, so the action of the keys was very heavy. Playing hymns was hard, playing fast scales in Bach was much harder. Many of the air pipes in the organ were made of leather, which also began to split with age. Some of the reeds on reeded stops cracked, so the clarinet and oboe stops would buzz instead of speaking normally. Unfortunately, in 2008 the church was faced with a multi-hundred-thousand-pound overhaul bill for the organ. They didn't have much money and decided to donate the organ to a church in France after 100 years of use, and raised a much lower sum to cover the cost of a digital organ. It's a nice digital organ and it sounds quite realistic, not to mention being much more reliable. It's perfectly acceptable for church use, and has many more stops, but it's not the same as a real antique instrument. I realise this is all a bit OT for a Linux mailing list but maybe somebody will find it interesting :) Cheers, Jonathan -- ---------------------------- Jonathan Gazeley Systems Support Specialist ResNet | Wireless & VPN Team Information Services University of Bristol ----------------------------

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 7:49 AM, Jonathan Gazeley <jonathan.gazeley(a)bristol.ac.uk> wrote: not entirely off-topic: there is a company not too far from where i live that is specifically in the business of selling systems to such churches that (a) sample the entire organ as best as can be achieved given its condition (b) replace it with their own custom sample playback engine (originally written by another relatively well known linux audio developer) loaded with the samples. the whole thing runs on linux. i don't know their name or how good their work is, but its certainly an interesting idea.

Hello Ken! I wouldn't be to sure about the age of that organ. The church is a modern building and so is - I suspect - the organ. Still nice to sit there and play it. :-) Warm regards Julien -------- Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles) ======== FIND MY WEB-PROJECT AT: ======== http://ltsb.sourceforge.net the Linux TextBased Studio guide ======= AND MY PERSONAL PAGES AT: ======= http://www.juliencoder.de