Mike Raiford wrote:

> Not bad. A couple encoding errors toward the end, though.

Those encoding errors don't exist in the file I have on my harddrive. I 
watched it end-to-end to check. I can only imagine that either a few 
packets got lost during uploading (how??), or YouTube itself did 
something wrong when transcoding the video. (I uploaded it as an H.264 
AVI. I have no idea what YouTube transcodes it to.)

> I have tons of questions about the organ. You mentioned stops, once ... 
> how do stops relate to the keys on the keyboard?
> 
> I know the consoles to the left and right of the keyboards have to do 
> with selecting timbre of the organ, but what do the knobs below the 
> keyboards do?

Well now...

The organ contains several different kinds of pipes - long thin ones, 
short fat ones, metal ones, wooden ones, some with reeds, some with 
fipples. That all sound different.

The pipes are grouped into "ranks". Each rank (usually) contains a pipe 
for each key on the keyboard. (On the organ *I* played, a few of the 
ranks are incomplete, so some keys actually don't produce a note.)

The "stops" are what connects the keyboards to the ranks. With all the 
stops closed, the keys make no sound at all. If you open a particular 
stop (by pulling the "drawknobs" to the left and right of the 
keyboards), then pressing a key causes the corresponding pipe in that 
rank to speak. It's like selecting a sound preset on an electronic keyboard.

However, you can open *several* stops at once. This causes several pipes 
to play the same note when you press any given key. (Actually, this 
organ also has a "mixture" stop which causes several pipes tuned to 
different pitches to speak when you press a single note. Personally, I 
don't care for the effect too much.)

Now then, the ranks are grouped together into "divisions". And each 
keyboard controls a different division. The organ I played is about the 
smallest kind you can get: two manuals and a peddleboard. (I.e., a set 
of keys that you're ment to play with your feet.)

This particular organ is so small that the peddle division has only 1 
rank ("Bordon"). And half the notes don't work properly. And the peddle 
action is pretty busted.

The two manuals control the "Great division" ( = lower keyboard) and the 
"Swell division" ( = upper keyboard). Each of these divisions has a 
seperate set of ranks/stops.

Modern organs have the keys connected to the pipes electronically. 
However, the 151 year-old organ I'm playing uses metal connecting rods. 
This results in the keys being seriously heavy to play! But if you look 
closely, you can see the keys of the Swell manual actually move when I 
play the keys of the Great manual. (BUT NOT THE OTHER WAY ROUND!) This 
is because I have engaged a special drawknob called a "coupler". And the 
next effect, obviously, is that now even more pipes play when I hit a key.

In this recording, I have the organ configured almost to "full organ". 
(Full organ = every rank plays when you hit a key. Actually I don't have 
*all* the stops open, so not quite. But nearly!)

The *other* thing the coupler does is make the keys even heavier - since 
  am now providing mechanical force through my fingers to oeprate two 
sets of rods! (The action probably needs cleaning and oiling.)

I can also connect the peddles to the Great manual with another coupler. 
However, when I did this, I discovered that some of the keys start to 
jam in the on-position. This organ really needs some serious TLC! But 
you can see that by this method, I could actually use the peddles to 
play pipes from a rank not in the peddle division.

On really large organs, you can swap the connections between keyboards 
and divisions around, transpose up/down an octave, and do all kinds of 
other crazy stuff. It's a really complicated machine! But this is only a 
small organ in a local village church, so its capabilities are far more 
limited.

The "knobs below the keyboards" (which this particular organ doesn't 
have) are called "thumb pistons". (You also get "toe pistons", which you 
push with your feet. See the Widor Toccata at the Newark Basilica for 
this and some generally good close-ups of a large organ being operated.) 
These select predefined combinations of settings.

On mechanical organs, these are predefined by the organ designer. On 
modern electric organs, they are computer-programmable. If you find a 
close-up shot of the Grand Organ at the Royal Albert Hall for example, 
there's a *disk drive* slot on the console to load/save stop settings! o_O

Does that answer your questions?

(Heee... I sound like an expert! Wikipedia FTW!!)

Post a reply to this message