New Street Organ
Hi there All I have finally got some recordings of my 'new' organ - De Bedrieger onto my website. A 72 key no less. There is still some work to be done, as there are no biphones yet. However given time I am sure some will materialise. The organ is MIDI driven, but as it is for my own amusement, I wasn't going mad with book music. Any comments - good, bad, or indifferent would be appreciated. The recordings are at http://www.griffithsorgans.co.uk Cheers Peter Griffiths

Hello Peter, the new organ sounds cracking! Any pictures?? Regards Robert Washington :org:

I am intrigued by the choice of name - is this a real organ or is it completely midi generated sound?

I think Peter is having a little joke with us :-) This is definitely synthesized to my ears. However - the sound samples used are very good. One give-away perhaps is that there is no echo/reverb and no blower noise in the background ? I can't wait for Peter's reply :-) Stephen

Hi there all Well, you are all far too clever! De Bedrieger is a Virtual Street Organ. I actually wanted to see how close I was to the real thing. And I thought this would be a good way to find out - as well as having a bit of a chuckle. The sound samples were taken from my own pipework, and were recorded on a laptop at 24 bit sampling using a top quality microphone and a Creative Live USB sound card. The samples are then put through Vienna Soundfont Studio, which uses the samples to make a MIDI set of instruments. This is then played through Creative's Sound Font system using Cakewalk. I sampled three violin pipes to make up the violin melody ranks and two cello pipes to make up the cello counter melody and cello melody. One trombone pipe made up the full octave of trombones. Three bourdon pipes for the Bourdon Celeste Two bass pipes for each octave of bass. Two accompaniment pipes for each octave of accompaniment. Drums were me hitting the appropriate drum/cymbal/block. Using Vienna editor is quite complex. Each note sample is about .25 second in length. The start of the pipes speech is played, up to a set loop point, when it will then loop continuously until the note is switched off. There are many controls to alter pitch, volume, attack, decay, to name but a few. Each sample can succesfully make up quite a few notes, with each batch of notes being able to be tuned seperately. Thus the bourdon register is made up correctly of two ranks of note/pipes, with the tuning of one rank a few cents higher than the other. Now here is the interesting bit. Anyone who has tuned a mechanical organ will have found out that when an organ is tuned absolutely perfectly, it sounds dead. It is the slight imperfections in the speech and tuning of the pipework that gives the organ it's best sound. I am talking SLIGHT tuning imperfections here. It works exactly the same with sound samples. I made up the violins with 3 ranks of violins and one rank of cello. I put it all together and it sounded awful. I had to alter the tuning a couple of cents out with each rank of pipes and make the changeover points of each sample different to get the 'ring' of violins. I then had to alter the timing of the pipes 'speech' in every sample to get a better sound. The violin sound is still not perfect, but there are a few more things I will alter to try and get the most realistic sound. If you were to record every pipe in each rank and use one sample for every note, you would get it right, but that would use up a lot of memory on the computer. Interesting though isn't it ! Cheers Peter Griffiths

So no pictures then!!!! Robert Washington :lol:

Obviously not, unless Peter posts a picture of himself sitting at his computer! Anna

Richie Poor at http://infamousstudios.tripod.com/ has some nice virtual W165 tunes. He also has two rolls worth of sound files on http://wurlitzer-rolls.com/ Personally, I have a virtual W146 on my other computer (no tunes online at the moment.) I use the soundfont that came with my soundcard, with no additional sampling. It's all just a matter of figuring out which patch most closely matches the desired pipe rank. For the Wurlitzer style violins I use "piccolo", for flutes it's "ocarina." For trumpets, "oboe" sounds good for that Wurlitzer trademark "honk." "Bassoon" is the only choice for trombones. Bass Drum is a "timpani" low G and the other percussion are standard Ch. 10. For bells I use "Tinkle bell" rather than glockenspiel, It gives a stronger sound.

A very impressive simulation! The pipes sound great. Were the drums also the result of the same kind of sampling? If not, that might comlete the effect. As Nick picked up, they sound less real than the pipes. It would be really cool to have a set of sound fonts for different organs! Cheers, Roger

Hi there Roger I have a German Organ sound font nearly finished as well. It is meant to sound like a Ruth organ, and it is nearly there now. The drums were sampled by me, but the trouble is that the real drums in an organ are not hit quite the same each time dependant on air pressure in the action etc. The sampled sounds come out the same each time, and can sound rather like a machine gun in the case of the snare drum. It is another thing to work on! As you say, it would be very interesting to get a soundfont bank of a number of mechanical organs. It would be quite some project. Cheers Peter Griffiths