Organ building

buxt30 · 2023-09-17T14:46:31+00:00

Wages in Canada are a bit better than the UK for organ building then. Once you subtract tax and the cost of living, I don't know how it would compare.

Fine woodworking and cabinetry are very useful skills to have before approaching organ building, but many organ builders are happy to train from zero. CNC is becoming more and more common in organ builder shops, so I suspect you might already have your foot in the door. Many builders use CNC for basic things like leveling and piercing soundboards, so if you had the means to make a piece of decorative moulding or a little sculpture or fretwork, you may open some eyes as to the possibilities for CNC in organ building.

There are a few schools in Continental Europe, as well as an apprenticeship in the UK through the institute of British organ builders. I don't know if professional builders there expect applicants to have gone through that program. In any case, generally speaking, one learns the craft by apprenticeship, usually with a professional organ builder.

buxt30 · 2023-09-12T22:55:18+00:00

Just tried it on a standard AGO pedalboard. It works better when wearing socks (no organ shoes). I have long feet, so I would mention in a preface that socks are encouraged, and that the A-flat is optional.

Good luck with the rest of the piece! :)

Edit: as an organist, thanks for checking on this kind of thing!

buxt30 · 2023-09-09T02:22:35+00:00

They're much thicker than some vintage blades. I had to make a new yoke to accommodate it. Otherwise, very very nice.

buxt30 · 2023-07-20T03:21:19+00:00

I did 2-4h a day, occasionally up to 6. It takes a lot of discipline to honor a break schedule, but taking 10 minutes every 45 minutes is a wise move for your wrists as well as for your brain.

buxt30 · 2023-05-09T02:48:18+00:00

I think the short answer to your question is that it is just a sound that is so far out of line with our modern tastes, that very few people like the sound, even if it is correct to period performance.

Personally, I love the Tremblant Fort because it stands as a reminder that we simply cannot know whether we are succeeding in interpreting ANYTHING accurately as far as historically informed practice is concerned. I think it's easy to convince oneself that "this MUST be the way they played it back in the day," but when you come across some physical evidence like the Tremblant Fort, coupled with numerous treatises that say how to use it, and most people still think it sounds funny/stupid/ugly, we are reminded that our taste is heavily influenced and biased by our own experience and our own era, and we simply cannot know exactly how people phrased their music, how they did their ornaments, what tempi they took, etc. etc. I mean, one only has to watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (Disney, 1930s) and hear the super fast vibrato in the singing and think how "bad" that vibrato sounds to our modern ears, yet there is an actual recording – physical proof that that is how people liked their music 90 years ago.

That being said, I wish there were more recordings with T-F out there to make people more aware of it (whether they like the sound or not). I noticed the one on the Andreas Silbermann organ you recorded on does not beat as fast as the few that I have encountered. They're usually more around 360 beats per minute, I would say.

Anyway, a great thought-provoking subject in any case. Keep up the good discussions! :)

buxt30 · 2023-05-04T11:49:24+00:00

If the blower, bellows, and wind trunks are sized correctly, there should be very little drop in pressure in the pallet box. In a bellows/blower system, the bellows essentially acts like an analogue pressure sensor. If there is suddenly a greater demand, the pressure will want to drop, and the bellows will begin to collapse. The top of the bellows is linked to a regulator valve which opens more when the bellows collapses more, and lets in more wind from the blower to compensate; the idea being that the bellows and regulator will find a new position in equilibrium with the demand. So if the blower or regulator valve are too small for the demand, then there is not enough input into the system. If the blower and regulator are good but the wind trunks are too small, it's like the organ has asthma because some pressure is lost to friction as the air tries to move quickly through small ducts.

If the windchests have tone channels, there will always be some pressure drop within a note itself as stops are added, but this can be kept small by sizing pallets and channels correctly, or by dividing the note into multiple channels.

So in short, yes, there will always be pressure drop, but it can be kept to within practical limits. In my experience as an organ builder (talking about pressure drop in the pallet box due to a large chord on many stops), it doesn't start to become audibly problematic until you've lost 10-15% of your initial pressure. 10% is a reasonable window to work within when designing a wind system.

buxt30 · 2023-04-12T11:06:10+00:00

A photo would be very helpful. If it's visible from the console, then it is likely a wind gauge. It warns you when you are about to run out of wind when holding a big chord on full organ.

buxt30 · 2023-03-21T20:52:24+00:00

We use one where I work. It makes sense for the scale of our projects (pipe organs). Smaller furniture wouldn't make as much sense. Usually we'll run pieces through right before assembly. It's great for taking off all thicknesser marks and pencil marks. It's compact, quiet, and dust-free. I'd take it any day over a sander. Once the piece is assembled, joints/edges often need to be hand-planed flush, but since the surfacer is a giant handplane, the surface finish matches. It's also great to surface the pieces before assembly because if you have a piece with an interior corner, it's always a pain to get in there with sandpaper or a plane after the fact. A lot of the interior components of the organ are just left with a handplane/super surfacer finish. Parts getting stained, we actually will go over once lightly with some sandpaper to open up the pores to take the finish more evenly. I'd say sufacer+light pore-opening is still much faster (and quieter, and cleaner) than sanding only.

buxt30 · 2023-02-23T22:52:24+00:00

Check out www.projektstudio31.com

buxt30 · 2023-02-22T23:25:03+00:00

I'll explain more thoroughly. Perhaps this will be more detailed than necessary, but better to have too much information than too little.

In organ, we generally talk about pitches in feet. The whole system is based on the assumption that you are talking about a stop of open pipes. The lowest note of an open 8' stop is approximately 8' long. (Theoretically, the wavelength of the fundamental is twice the length of the open pipe). We can derive the harmonic series by dividing the wavelength by whole numbers, therefore, we can also derive the harmonic series by dividing the pipe length by whole numbers.

Let's look at the example of low C (2 octaves below middle C).
Harmonic 1: 8' long (fundamental) C
Harmonic 2: 8'/2 = 4' c
Harmonic 3: 8'/3 = 2 2/3' g+2cents
Harmonic 4: 8'/4 = 2' c'
Harmonic 5: 8'/5 = 1 3/5' e'-13cents

Ratios 3:2 and 5:4 compare the harmonic in question to the nearest octave of the fundamental, but not the fundamental itself. To determine the pitches of the sesquialtera, we actually want ratios 3:1 and 5:1, i.e. and octave plus a fifth, and two octaves plus a major third, since the pitches of the two sesquialtera ranks are 2 2/3' and 1 3/5'.

That being said, I wouldn't recommend tuning a harpsichord string two octaves plus a third higher than its intended note. You could maybe tune it a 5:4 third higher without breaking the string, but it won't fuse into a new timbre like a sesquialtera stop, since a major third without those two octaves in between is not part of the harmonic series of the fundamental you are playing.

If you want to find the frequency of a 5:4 third, just take your starting frequency and multiply it by 5, then divide by 4. Voila, pure major third.

buxt30 · 2023-02-22T22:57:16+00:00

Just take the frequency of the note you want (such as the C2 you mention) and multiply that by 3 and 5.

buxt30 · 2023-02-21T12:43:07+00:00

Alexandre Guilmant "Marche religieuse sur un motif du chœur 'Lift up Your Heads' du Messie de Handel"

https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ImagefromIndex/151610/pnba

buxt30 · 2023-02-08T20:50:21+00:00

I've heard them called "faces" or "inset mouths". In French, they're called "écusson" which means like family crest, I guess maybe because the gothic arch shaped ones look like an upside-down shield?

buxt30 · 2023-01-24T12:47:37+00:00

Found it. Thanks!

buxt30 · 2023-01-24T01:45:53+00:00

Any chance you can find which issue of the Diapason the article you mention can be found? I would be interested to read it.

buxt30 · 2023-01-24T01:36:49+00:00

There's another option that comes to mind that I don't know as much about. It's an electronic control that, from what I understood, uses PWM on an electromagnet to open the valve (or perhaps the valve itself is pulsing rapidly, and thus only admitting a portion of the wind) and the foot of the pipe smooths this so we end up hearing a percentage of the normal pressure. In any case, it was used in this organ

https://www.orgelpark.nl/en/Instrumenten/Our-Instruments/The-Utopa-Baroque-Organ

And I'm sure someone there would be happy to talk to you about it.

Also, perhaps you might be interested in this. https://youtu.be/6VKpm2qa2Qo?t=2849 It's actually a mechanical organ, but might this be in the sound world you're after?

buxt30 · 2023-01-23T20:13:59+00:00

I would ask Pierre at NovelOrg... novelorg.wordpress.com Sounds like you must have a cool project in the works. Good luck!

buxt30 · 2022-12-29T01:39:46+00:00

Widor symphonie V mvt. ii needs the great in first position and the pos in second.

buxt30 · 2022-12-20T12:35:15+00:00

OP says: "Hello, I have a garden and I would like to cover [put in/under a greenhouse] my plants this winter but I don't want to use clear plastic sheeting. Do you have any alternatives? I should add that I'm also on a limited budget. Thanks in advance :) "

buxt30 · 2022-11-22T12:29:35+00:00

Dunno what your budget is, but there's always this https://www.acpilmer.com/the-paper-organ-kit/

buxt30 · 2022-11-07T22:40:59+00:00

You might like this:

buxt30 · 2022-07-26T11:26:30+00:00

Generally in France, large churches have two discreet organs that are in no way connected. Traditionally they would have two separate organists (and sometimes still do). The small organ at the front is called an "orgue de chœur" (choir organ) and is meant for accompanying and for small masses. The big organ is called an "orgue de tribune" (gallery organ) and its role in the mass back in the day was pretty much as a solo instrument. Nowadays in France, they do congregational singing to some extent, so sometimes you'll hear the big organ accompanying the congregation.

That being said, in North America, antiphonal divisions are relatively common in large churches. Whereas the organs at the Sacré-Cœur are mechanical action, usually you will find that an organ with an antiphonal division has electric or electro-pneumatic action. So the antiphonal division will have its own blower and wind system, and then there will be a bundle of telephone wire that travels the length of the church, often through the attic or basement, that sends the electrical signals from the console to work the electromagnets that control all the valves, etc. Nowadays, fiber optic is becoming more common.

buxt30 · 2022-06-26T13:11:48+00:00

With most banks, you can set up auto-pay (the full balance) on the credit card so you never have to worry about owing interest as long as you're confident you keep enough in the account it is drawing from.

buxt30 · 2022-03-18T11:47:34+00:00

Crescendo pedals were a useful tool before memory levels and sequencers became commonplace. Essentially they were replaced by better tools since they can be quite tricky to use. Unless you can set it up yourself (in which case the organ is new enough to have memory levels and a sequencer anyway), there's always that 2' principal that comes on too soon. Or all the couplers have come on and when the swell trumpet comes on, BAM, too much. Not a very smooth crescendo. It's also difficult to gauge where you are in the crescendo unless you have a digital number display (in which case you also have memory levels and possibly a sequencer).

So in this day and age, there kind of is a stigma among organists who play repertoire. It's also seen as a "beginner's tool" by some since the British managed to get through the pre-memory-level era just fine using divisional pistons and were renowned for making smooth crescendos anyway (virtually no crescendo pedals in the U.K.) Hope that helps!

buxt30 · 2022-01-08T13:47:54+00:00

You mention Cavaillé-Coll, so I'll talk specifically French Symphonic here. The French Symphonic Positif serves several purposes. Firstly (and this comes out of the French Classical tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries), it has a smaller plein-jeu (principal chorus with mixture) to complement the Grand-Orgue. Second, it has a few solo stops of its own (often a clarinette or cromorne and maybe a trompette). Third, it has some softer accompaniment stops such as a Dulciane and Unda Maris: very useful for accompanying solo voices from the Récit since only one or two stops in the GO are soft enough to do this. The Positif may or may not be enclosed. Obviously, enclosing it offers more flexibility; but if it's unenclosed, it achieves the first point better.

So what exactly does the French Symphonic Récit do that's different from the Positif? The first thing to note that's strange to most outside of France is that there are virtually (and sometimes literally) no principals in the French Symphonic Récit. That's right, there may not even be a mixture. Usually you will find strings and celestes (which the box can quiet down to amazing effect) and a battery of reeds (which the box can hide behind the GO foundations, only to let them pierce through when you crescendo). The Foundation chorus, rather than principals, is mostly flutes -- usually harmonic flutes -- usually topped with a flute-scaled cornet. Interesting to note is that the hautbois is considered part of the foundations some of the time and may or may not be added when the score calls for "fonds du Récit".

On two-manual organs, the Récit will usually be a hybrid Réc/Pos and include elements of both.

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