The Portable Pipe Organ Sound
Playing a cathedral or concert hall pipe organ is a unique experience. These are the largest instruments in the world and it can be a thrilling experience controlling such an instrument. Nowadays one can get a similar pipe organ sound outside the concert hall using samples or synthesizer music keyboards that can imitate the sound and feel of a pipe organ.
The best way to get a realistic pipe organ’s sound electronically is done by sampling pipes and combinations of pipes of a real pipe organ. The space the organ is in is also an important part of the sound. Very few portable music keyboards, such as the Nord C2, actually have built-in authentic pipe organ sounds. There are high quality sample libraries (Vienna Instruments Vienna Konzerthaus Organ and Peter Ewer’s Symphonic Organ Samples to name a few), some of famous pipe organs, that can be played through a computer with a music keyboard connected via MIDI. In addition, you can even find MIDI pedal-boards that can be combined with one, two, or more keyboards (that would serve as manuals of an organ console) to get an authentic feel of playing a pipe organ. All of these options require a good set of speakers, particularly to reproduce the low frequency pedal stops.
The idea for a portable alternative to the pipe organ is not new and started in the 1930s with the advent of the Hammond organ. This keyboard instrument uses mechanical tone wheels, producing various waveforms, to create a distinctive sound that imitates a pipe organ’s combination of stops. It has been used mostly in jazz, rock, and blues music. The Hammond organ was an attempt to create a pipe organ sound electronically from scratch (without sampling a real organ) but ended up creating a unique music keyboard instrument. Nowadays synthesizer keyboards and samples have also been created to imitate the Hammond organs’s sound electronically, just as with the pipe organ.
Synthesizers and samples have made the sound of the Hammond and pipe organs accessible to keyboard players who wish to recreate the experience of playing these instruments at home or on the road. Although perhaps not as impactful as experiencing the real thing, with the right speaker system and a complete keyboard manual and pedal-board setup, one can have a satisfactory organ-playing experience anywhere.
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